The Mechanics of Men (Week 8)

I do not remember why I initially felt that David Tomas Martinez’s The Mechanics of Men poem was potentially about how male gender roles are forced on boys against their will. The narrator came off to me as a rather sensitive person whose interests are traditionally considered feminine. However, he does express interest in traditionally masculine activities. Upon rereading it, I found that my first interpretation felt almost entirely off base. If anything, the narrator seems to embrace masculinity wholeheartedly, even if he’s not the most apt at masculine activity. “I have never been the most mechanically inclined of men. Wrenches, screwdrivers, or shovels have never made nice with me.” I think I might have come to my initial interpretation because I noticed a reference to the Biblical Esau and Jacob. Esau and Jacob were twin brothers, and while Esau was a manly hunter who was favored by their father Isaac, Jacob was the softer brother and more of an intellectual bookworm who their mother Rebekah favored. Perhaps the allusion to the brothers is what prompted me to think about the narrator as a boy being forced to conform to the role of a man. It escaped my attention that the narrator does not directly compare himself to Jacob, but rather, considers himself an inverse of Esau. “And I am not mad for being the second favorite son, Esau turned inside out. Can’t regret saying that summer, I was, in fact, already, a bigger and better man than my father because I understood more.” Still, his lines at the end about how he looks up to his brother and “favored my brother’s way of living, of skating in the park and smoking weed while I studied and wondered for us all,” might lend some credence to my first interpretation. How does the narrator feel about himself and his placement in gender roles, I wonder?