Cynthia Dewi Oka's Blog, page 2

Chasing Silences, Chasing Beginnings

I am bad at Beginnings.  Really bad.  As in I will have three pages of blacked-out lines at the end of a twenty minute prompt.

The beginning is the part of the poem, the essay, the letter that I almost always fail to write organically or by the first attempt.  I brood over it for days, weeks, before attempting a first draft and then write, erase and rewrite it over and over again, trying to create the the most precise primary (primeval?) condition of possibility so the rest of the language act would unfold in an essential, authentic manner.  Or at least that’s what I tell myself when the process feels particularly torturous, which it often does; the truth is, like any control freak worth their salt,  I want to get the scaffolding “just right” before launching myself into the ether.  There is no such thing as skipping The Beginning; if The Beginning does not happen, nothing else does.

Imagine being in a subway car, in a big city at rush hour, when all the passengers are pushed up against each other in that horrible, funky, grumbling, non-consenting, purely necessary intimacy; breathing the exhalations of strangers and observing their crumbs of ear wax between stations because there is no space to turn away (or the view is worse if you do); feeling all of the day’s small hatreds leak and mingle in the air, and becoming profoundly aware of the borders of your own body, the way fat gives, the aches that don’t resist and instead deepen into themselves; being jostled by so many different fields of pressure that the overriding sensation is one of  fullness to bursting and simultaneously knowing yourself to be perfectly, flawlessly alone by the irrevocable fact that soon, you will have to fight and push aside all of these tired, pissed-off, grimy motherfuckers to get to the other side of the car, where the doors are, so you can step out at the next stop…

That is how I experience the thought of beginning to write.

One explanation for this difficulty is the myriad ways that I have been othered by broad historical/political/economic forces: immigrant, woman of color, teen mom, poor person, so on and so forth.  I am a voice, a subjectivity that is out-of-context, out-of-place, out-of-alignment, like shorthand notes written in pen on the margins of a library book: one is not sure if the note-taker is trying to communicate with another reader or if this is simply a tactic their shuttered (shattered) consciousness needs to confront the seemingly infallible, sneering world of the properly printed text.  Certainly, these labels have shaped the the terrains within which I imagine and think about myself.  Put another way, however, they are the lenses through which I am alienated from myself and look in upon myself with the eyes of a cold, patronizing, suspicious collective consciousness (the nation, history, popular culture, ideology, etc.).

But a more honest explanation would include how elemental criticism was in the formation of my idea of self; “No’s” and “Don’t's” and “You are wrong’s” were used to control, manage and produce my identity since before I can remember.  At any given time, there is a multitude of disembodied voices in my head muttering scathing judgments from various perspectives about every single thing I do or am thinking of doing.  So The Beginning, for me, is like a clearing of throat of all the things, all the ways, that what I am about to say are in fact, already their own negations.  Since becoming an adult, I’ve basically patterned my life with relationships that replicate this basic condition of perpetual (perceived) criticism because they are familiar and they make sense.  After church and the regime of paternal and relentless verbal terror I endured at home, I plunged headfirst into academia, the “Anti-” brands of activism, mistrustful and controlling romances, and friendships that I keep at arm’s length because I never really learned to just “kick it” with people – we (in  my subconscious) are either comrades taking the world apart with our fury and disbelief, or subjects of each other’s fury and disbelief, which then makes being together totally unbearable.  It has nothing to do with being a masochist, mind you; for someone raised on a diet of fire and brimstone, there is nothing quite as satisfying as inflicting criticism so barbaric in its thoroughness (“round up every last baby!”) and stamina (“if the horse looks dead, shoot it in the head!”), that the opponent loses the will to even try to defend himself.

But precisely because this withering, destructive tendency towards my environment and myself is so powerful, it produces its own nemesis: the impulse towards silence, which Susan Sontag in her book Styles of Radical Will (1969) has described as “a metaphor for a cleansed, non-interfering vision, appropriate to artworks that are…unviolable in their essential integrity by human scrutiny.”  When I suspend the social determinants of my choices (because ironically while they contextualize the oppressed individual within the larger political and economic machine, thus potentially easing the burden of guilt or shame for perceived failures, it is only through a sense of individuated agency that one begins to believe in the possibility of steering a course through, rather be drowned by, the sea of history), when I consider those actions and behaviors I truly feel are mine – not because I was necessarily their origin, but because I feel left with them – I can see that silence has saved me by keeping me sane, acting less as a muzzle than as a leash.  But maintaining the potency of silence as a balm, a salve for the soul that is hellbent on abuse, has meant self-sabotage in almost every aspect of my life where communication is required.

Take my first love, for instance, which wasn’t even poetry. I had been in advanced art classes since I was very young, but even though he himself was a talented painter, my father did not approve one bit.  He wanted me to go into law or medicine – something with money and prestige.  In my senior year of high school,  he was dying of cancer and we were barely on speaking terms.  I was putting together my portfolio to apply to prestigious art institutes and I just started “forgetting” to take my birth control pills. Voila, I was pregnant before the fall semester ended: no art school, no bohemian artist’s life, I was saved from a conflict with the central figure in my life that might have destroyed my desire to create at all.  I embraced the silence of shame, fear and sheer fatigue, and for years I stopped questioning, thinking, living through art.  Yet in doing so, I was also defying my father with the ultimate form of creation, the most banal kind: bringing and raising a life in the world as an unwed adolescent.

There is a purism, an agnostic dignity, to the space evacuated by speech: a solitude that is not peace or safety but a basic ceasefire to the awkward, grasping, chaotic bids to take “one’s place” in the bloodthirsty arena of language.  As an immigrant child, what I did was beyond taboo. The fact that I love my son more than I can comprehend does not negate the fact that my ill-timed pregnancy was very much an act of self-silencing.  Of self-banishment.  Nowadays, I often pull a disappearing act on friends and loved ones (which no one seems to appreciate) when I feel perilously balanced between a state of silence and a state of war.  This is when I know a beginning is trying to make its way through my life – a new thought, direction, poem – and either it will be beaten to death by my armies of internalized critics or turn to mist in my ever-growing purgatory of the unspeakable.  There is the third possibility of course that it might actually materialize into a small, burning life on the page, but I have not figured out the math to ensure that particular outcome.  I am David, my poem is the slingshot, everything else is Goliath, and I do not know if God isn’t basically my idea (and fear?) of the magnum opus – totally silent and immune to discovery.

In a 2012 interview with the Paris Review, playwright Tony Kushner, amongst many brilliant revelations (you really should read it) made this dazzlingly simple yet hard-earned statement about his struggle with procrastination, “The smartest shrinks I’ve had don’t think there’s a clean separation between the salutary and the unsalutary parts of it. And they tell me I’m probably not going to be able to change it. Like sexual taste, your work ethic is formed deep within, and it’s comprised by all sorts of impulses.”  Procrastination is not my problem.  If anything I jump the gun, because I am so anxious that I might try a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand times, and never get to the beginning.  Or worse, that I would get there too late, when I’ve lost my faith in it.  I’ve buried countless poems because their beginnings couldn’t make it out of my body long enough to draw breath.  I’ve always thought of this as my weakness, my failing as a poet, that which might one day take away my capacity to work with language.  I’ve never thought of it as my work ethic, that part of creation that is not hoodoo, muse-magic and miracles, but the distillation of my effort and raw life into a habit.  This stuttering and erasing and false starts and withdrawals, this pigheaded scratching at the wall, this is my contribution to the process of making something exist that didn’t exist before.  How entirely un-glorious and redemptive!

As artists, I think we owe it to ourselves to try to understand what it is that makes us create and destroy our creations.  The hero and villain, the angel and demon, might be one and the same.  Not for the new year, but for life, it seems, beginnings must be wrested from the mouths of silence, from the teeth of war.

Poem for Prisoner #46664

In the dimness before the night shift, half-dressed

on a spit-stained bed, I cut my finger on the page describing

the milk you left to sour on the window ledge;

 

a small obeisance to the human part that wants, needs

to say, “I prefer this, not that,” as you stroll silently through

someone else’s furniture, planting bombs in apartheid

 

then risking all of it for a taste of the man who is still sweat,

hurt, a galaxy of longing – the man and not the lion.

The baby sucks my breast dry and in the void,

 

dogs bark.  I think of the choices fathers and husbands make

in places where their families live hunted, hungry,

rabid with fear; where the rich and government are

 

synonymous with natural disasters – nothing you can do

about ‘em but buckle down and mourn the dead – I think

of the ways men disappear, into wages, drink, sometimes if

 

they fight, into symbols.  Then our memories of them must be

less important than their sacrifice.  I think about the choices

mothers and wives have, to birth and to bury, to be left

 

behind, to piece lives out of split threads and absences,

to follow, to burn.  Every time I stand in my bones and feel

lost, a stranger; every time I shield my face in the dark

 

I know it is because my ancestors chose to run.  To leave

no trace on the windowsills we passed through.  Madiba,

if it were not for you, this cut reddening the words

 

in the dumb light, I might have never learned to say, Fear,

I am not a lamb on your altar. You do not own me.  This here

I touch with my body, I make holy with language;

 

this here, everything, this we who will not be moved.

 

Dear Wanda Coleman: A Tribute

STANDOFF IN EAST HOLLYWOOD 

mother madness i am hiding in the broom closet

i have unraveled the noose of your giving

and am holding your son captive

i will not come to the door

-Wanda Coleman

~

I read you, pinned to the metal wall of the tram.  I read you, over leaden waters and through the furious brick – which is the only way the city lives, as a kind of blood – inside me.

I read you like the blaze on a reefer’s tip at the end of a 16-hour workday – kid in bed, finally – smoke pouring out of my bones onto the page.  The termites are awake too, gnawing at the wood behind the paint, the flesh behind the skin.

I read you like holy grail.  With this sense of quest and sacrifice, and yes, too, plunder, for this secret, this heritage that shows up like a hooded benediction in your details, and the voluptuous space beyond detail – what I believe you know of power.

(Is the poem its mirage? Its field of operation? Its source?)

“i can’t give it up or give up on it it’s my birthplace it’s my pride my price having paid my dues forevah paying dues hopin’ to collect what’s due me

my wings”

I read you – laboring, giving birth to your selves in alleys, bus stops, the unemployment office; I read you, hungry, hunted, thrown out, and see the wreckage of which my own language is born.  I read you out of the desperation that sits like coal dust on my ribs, through the teeth-grinding immanence of what it means to light up and simultaneously delete the I.

(The years of hard living blur into one another like rancid milk hushing the stink of mold in a roach-infested kitchen. The landlord’s five-year-old daughter is screaming like a banshee again and I’m scared my kid is going to wake up.  Because I can’t stop it, like I can’t stop the 1st of every month, or the women that stream into my office with their broken faces.  Is that Law and Order again on TV?

“how many times been here? how many times comin’ back?” )

Dear Wanda, sometimes I wonder if mercy and recovery are myths we live by to absolve ourselves of the ashes of our fury.  The bridges and bodies we have burnt.  The damages we return to again and again, because we can’t be sure where we are in this crazy world and they are the only landmarks that look back at us.  Some days, I really believe I am done with destruction.  Some days all I want to do is sing.  But you must know how I feel, to forget the tune, to try to reinvent the words with nails and planks, with crushed shells found at the wrack line.

(What if we could learn to speak like angels?)

I read you – livid, cussin’, sensual, the lines of razor careening in and out of my brain, on whose flashing width I glimpse my own face.

I get so tired sometimes of trying to make out of our punishments, forgiveness.  Out of our crimes, something woolen to warm our children.  To make sense of that trajectory, you understand?  To be someone with the capacity to solve problems I did not create, but participate in, because I can’t afford my own jet and there is no other way to get from here, being this canyon in my heart, to there, being its echo.

“i’m sorry i didn’t remember that that that / that that that was so important to you / wanda you’re ALWAYS on the attack / wanda wanda wanda i wonder / why ain’t you dead”

Dear Wanda, they should have made you Poet Laureate of more than the city of angels.

Dear Wanda, I’m stayin’ mad for you and me.  Not to blame or to kill, but to sanctify by fire.

I see you.  It’s my stop.  Time to walk these streets – like a woman’s torn nylons splayed between buildings with suspicious windows – breathing the polluted morning like a prayer.

For Wanda Coleman, poet, novelist, playwright (1946-2013). 

~

*Author’s note: the opening poem and lines in quotation are excerpted from Wanda Coleman’s poems in Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems & Stories, 1968-1986. 

To Come Back For the Dead, You Need

truck.   gasoline.   shovel.

above-the-knee.   rubber.   boots.

body.   bags.   bodies.

 

muscle.   mask.   sweat.   pay.

soap.   sleep.   cellphone.   wind.

hole.   flashlight.   fingertips.

 

identity cards.  missing eyes.

babies.   maggots.   almost-mothers.

breathe.   control the dosage.

 

heart-coffin.   heart-nail.   lung-

water.   metaphor : battery.

touch.   this is the only way

 

through the hours.

deranged.   decomposed.   dis-

believing daylight

 

for the body collectors in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, Tacloban, Philippines.

Carving Ashes: an Inter-Review with Hari Alluri

Hari Alluri is a poet and community facilitator who immigrated to South Vancouver, Coast Salish Territory at the age of 12 and believes in craft and movement. With work in several anthologies, his poetry has appeared in Cutthroat, Kartika, Kweli, Lumina and other literary magazines.  He is a former reader for Generations Literary Magazine, editorial collective member for Stay Solid: A Radical Handbook for Youth and editor of Proma Tagore’s poetry collection Language is Not the Only Thing that Breaks. An alum of the VONA / Voices, Port Townsend and Las Dos Brujas Writers Workshops, he has a BA in Sociology with a Diploma in Intercultural Education and Training from UVic, and is currently pursuing his MFA at San Diego State University. His most recent collaborations are with Cinder Block, Los Migrantes, Poetry International Community Outreach, RAIN Zine and SafeTeen.  Hari’s first book, Carving Ashes, is published by CiCAC Press.

I met Hari in 2007 when I joined the migrant justice group, No One is Illegal, in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories.  I hadn’t come out as a poet yet at that time, but I knew and admired him then as a spoken word artist of the urban underbelly, a reflection of those parts of the city whose vitality was often glossed over, erased and distorted by the gentrifying white literati.  He would show up at rallies, cigarette hanging off the corner of his lips and coffee-stained notebook in his back pocket, and within seconds of gripping the megaphone, have the crowd chanting like thunder, our bodies pumping against the perpetual chill, as though in resistance, we had become the sun.  Fast-forward a few years and Hari and I found a shared writing community in the Voices of Our Nations (VONA) Writing Workshops for Writers of Color (www.voicesatvona.org).  Our friendship grew, fed by and feeding our mutual hunger for poetry, eventually becoming a genuine sister-brother relationship.  In parallel, our first books also flourished in a sibling-like relationship to each other; we were often each other’s first workshop for the latest drafts of our manuscripts.

I share this origin story of our books and our relationships to complicate the common belief that the most “objective” assessment of our work must come from a “dispasssionate” third party who doesn’t know us at all.  I am aware of two types of useful “reviews” of our work.  The first is someone (an editor or a critic) reviewing our work in the context of the broader scene of literature and publishing – which is very white, male, middle-class, profit-oriented, academic, etc. and with an extremely narrow range of permissible people-of-color voices.  That reading allows us to get a sense of how our work will be or is being received in the cultural spaces it is entering (if it can enter at all).  The second is a fellow crafts-person reviewing our work in the context of our development as an artist of language.  For me, this is the most important reading because it is the one that offers us a true gauge of where we need to grow, from the perspective of one who has an understanding of a) what we are trying to do, b) what we are capable of doing, and c) our technical and personal limitations at a given time.  This kind of relationship requires trust and individual responsibility to be able to hear criticism and move on it.  As each other’s first readers, Hari and I were often merciless with the manuscripts because each knew the other could handle it.

If I had to describe it one sentence, Carving Ashes is an emotionally-charged journey into the fault-lines of masculinity, cultural identity, language and place.  But since this is not a soundbite, consider these lines:

“…i’d rather name / the cracks in the pavement after those / who died on their jagged calligraphy / but i can never remember.  introductions / the only things that fill me with terror.”  (from harboring the docks)

“anything not to show the pitiless stare behind the counter / that you spent the previous night in your own bed / alone, trying in vain to love a horn riff that, elsewhere, / in more beautiful ears, wounded you to the floor; / …you, who is afraid of this place, / where you’ve bled the most, will become your home…” (from jackal’s discord: kayode ni)

“longer than all the dravidian words / i never lived: indentured, asylum. / others too familiar: separation, / displacement. and those are my sinews, / …my left wrist welcomes / your bodies like water / to this place mine never quite reached”  (from some wear bodies)

Hari has a gift for revelation through the most specific, intimate details of an event, a memory, a vision.  He works in gestures, in shifts, like fingers kneading soil, shifting grains bit by bit and then suddenly, there is a hill, a rupture in the surface calling the reader to descend.  Like the best poets, he does not merely pose questions or provide solutions to the very real problems that many of his poems illuminate; he offers a human response, with all the liability and fragility that entails.  He moves toward repair not with the showmanship of a magician, but with the subtle turns of logic and perception of the trickster; for instance in the “knowing a growl / can be music / out of order yearning to know / the bare neck is the safest place” (from walk slow).

The figure of the trickster in fact, serves as a mythic bridge for the poet trying to find his voice in a strange land, a parallel to Adrienne Rich’s line, “the meaning searching for the word.”  Hari explains, “Jackal is an ancient trickster figure I first encountered as a child in the Panchatantra stories — a series of primarily animist embedded myths that originate between Persian and South Asian Cultures.  After immigration they lived in my bedroom closet behind the super hero comics I started collecting…Jackal found his way into my manuscript almost by accident.  I was doing a week-long intensive / intent sieve with  Sevé Torres.  We had exchanged lists of images based on a sensory exercise designed to bring the conceptual into the sensory. When I sat down to work on the list  Sevé gave me, I needed a way to move from his voice and experience into mine.  Jackal provided that pathway.”

Something which remains un-mapped in the craft of writing, is how to navigate the multiple voices that inhabit writers like us – writers who are not descendants of immigrants, but are immigrants and who spent more than a decade of our formative years in countries of the global South (Nigeria and Indonesia, respectively).  There are actually different versions of ourselves living and growing simultaneously, and our minds and languages often fail to align them with each other.  We often feel at once overflowing and incomplete.  Hari captures this tension in the huge range of aesthetics that compose this collection, bringing together a brilliant amalgam of forms – short, severe, long, sprawling, compact, unraveled – and vernaculars – slang, pidgin, Tagalog, Hindi, lofty, bare –  I love how he honors each poem with its own special, unmistakable body.

With the figure of the Jackal, Hari offers us one strategy for integrating this multiplicity in our poetry while bringing it into conversation with the soulful figures of the places we’ve ended up in, so that they can continue to live and converse, instead of being banished into a box in the recesses of our consciousness.  He says, ”One of the things that became interesting to think about for me was, what happens when we as migrants bring mythic figures to a land so wonderfully steeped in similar figures, for example, coyote has some resonances with jackal.  And on Coast Salish territory where we both resided and in the neighboring territories, raven is so important.  Jackal really gave shape to my project and, as a man who constantly talks shit at himself, jackal became a sort of wiser voice to talk shit at myself through, relentless, merciless and generous.”

Through the eyes of Jackal, Hari both affirms and critiques subtle moments of masculinity that rarely appear in popularized versions of brown-maleness as thug, terrorist, disposable good.  Poems like director’s notes for memory block script, which through the perspective of a camera illuminates police brutality against young brown men; open at the shallow end, a snapshot of irreverence against the gods (or fate, between the lines); and on the job worker’s manual, which pays homage to the brotherhood and solidarity that makes even backbreaking labor a source of grace, deliver neither postures of masculine bravado or victimization, but the vulnerability, tenderness and fierce longing to see their own light, beneath: “instead of the barrel on K-KATT’s tongue shaped like pain SKINNY will / always see his jaw shake salty metallic taste disdain / wishing he brought a knife to a gunfight” (from director’s notes).

In other poems that address relationships with women, however, such as insinuate and how to thank the poetess on stage for irrupting the world into your body, Hari gives image to the slippages and debts that we incur in intimate relationships constrained by hetero-patriarchal norms; gives voice to the ways we are ruptured within and from each other because those norms are the only way we know to give form to ourselves.  But the groundbreaking moment comes in these lines about his grandmother: “i love you, / lola. there is so much / i wanted you to teach me. / the journal contains / no entry / about the relief he felt / when she turned away / embarrassed, / let up her grip, and / his cousin insisted on / being the one to wipe her.”  (from time: jackal’s labyrinth).   ”I’m starting, “Hari says, “from the broken-ness of masculinity, gesturing towards moments in which there might even be a beauty that happens.  I hope there’s a movement inside the poems toward some form of reckoning that takes personal stories and moves them beyond autobiography into intervention.”

Among his major influences for this book, Hari cites Yusef Komunyakaa, Matthew Shenoda, Chris Abani, Wayde Compton and Ross Laird; but he credits Gil Scott-Heron, Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield and “the LONG list of hip hop artists I grew up on, the ancient myths of my ancestors and the land I grew up on (Nigeria), and the VOICES of growing up, that is, Nigerian, South Asian, Filipino, South Vancouver,” as the reasons he started writing.  ”On my 33rd birthday,” he tells me, “I was turning to page 33 in all the poetry books on my shelf looking for the theme for that year of my life. I wrote down quite a few, from those mentioned above, from Mahmoud Darwish, from folk Vietnamese poems, Spanish poems my room-mate had, Rumi too.  And my co-worker had a different Rumi book…so i asked for what was on page 33 and BOOM.  Inside this new love, die.  That became the foundation for the process and for Carving Ashes.  So, when I look at Carving Ashes now, and how I looked at it throughout was, am I doing this? and wherever I fail in the book is probably where I allowed myself to live and where I succeed is where I  died.”

To read Carving Ashes is take off your shoes and kneel in the most profaned spaces of your life, with your only lifeline the belief that what is there, if you dare to look without turning away, will sanctify you.  If you do not believe in repair, in forgiveness, in confronting what would otherwise cause your disappearance, this book is not for you.  If you do not believe that you can break and live, that light falls through fracture, this book is not for you.  If you do not believe “a mirror is the same as the forge” (from pickled roots the night before the fire), this book is not for you.  If you, like me, believe, then get a copy to ride with you on the bus, shit-talk with you on the corner, bless your eyes with a deeper, kinder vision of the places within you that have never been home, that are home.

To order your copy of Carving Ashes, go to  http://harialluri.wordpress.com

Bigger Than My Anger

Last night I watched a documentary, The Bitter Buddha, about comedian Eddie Pepitone.  The film crew shadows him in the weeks leading up to one of the biggest shows of his career and interviews other comedians like Patton Oswalt and Sarah Silverman about their perceptions of Eddie and his work.  Some call him the comic’s comic, expressing confusion over his relative lack of notoriety in spite of his 30 years of experience in stand-up.  Others believe he’s made the best of what he was given.  Everyone, including Eddie, agrees that he is “a man at war with himself.”  He draws on a vast reserve of anger in his performances, which almost always incorporates extended periods of yelling into the audience, emanating a profound resentment that is at once rooted in his personal sense of failure and political, as he takes on different characters like the drunk, the disillusioned husband, the exploited worker, standing out in his comedy as the everyday poor-man who is both sick of and resigned to his fate of being perpetually ground down and spat out.

Eddie traces his rage – “the voices in his head” which nowadays he calms by feeding squirrels at the park – to his childhood.  His mother suffered from manic depression and his father tried to overcompensate for her absence by becoming a tyrannical disciplinarian.  Eddie is almost always yelling but he also seems to be perpetually on the brink of tears; the way he works and carries himself reminds me of a boiling pot of water with the lid on, dancing precariously on the upward pressure of steam and froth brimming over.  So he meditates high atop the Hollywood hills, spends almost every minute on the road screaming expletives at other drivers and is a vegan who eats ice cream. He’s also an avid Tweeter; in one of his most memorable sketches, he talks about how “it’s really the little things that count…you might have been diagnosed with something growing in your ass, but you look at your stupid phone and someone re-tweeted what you wrote this morning, and you think, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll go into remission.’”

I appreciated the film as a study of someone whose past and personal flaws and contradictions seem always to be on the brink of devouring him alive.  He’s 52, yet hard living has aged him so that next to his father who is decades older, they look like brothers barely a few years apart.  As Eddie puts it himself, “My comedy is my only legacy.  Is that sad?”  He fascinates me.  For one, he represents and is living what might be the artist’s greatest fear: to strive so hard and come up so far behind, and to have absolutely nothing else to fall back on.  The fear that grips someone who chooses to live out their calling, and to mold that calling into craft, is not the fear of someone who is chasing a career or a job.  When an artist perceives herself to have failed, it’s not just her pride, dignity or livelihood at stake, but her sense of justification for existing.  What if we don’t matter? What if the truth is no one really wants to hear what we have wrought so painstakingly and painfully into language from the crucibles of our lives?  Questions that sometimes disguise themselves as doubts over whether or not we are good enough to fuck with the road less taken.  (This is especially true, I think, in a capitalist economy that is constantly churning art and artists into commodities for mass consumption.  The motherfucking game is set up such that to get in the door, you have to be something unique, but once you’re in, you’ve got to standardize – if like me you believe that true art is particular and true art makes the artist, this means you are expected to constantly destroy that which is creating you in the first place, hence why so many artists go crazy or just stop making real shit, I suspect.) But witnessing a hustle like Eddie’s kind of makes your breath drop suddenly inside you, heavily, ponderously.  ”There is absolutely no one like him,” Patton Oswalt says of him.  It takes a steelier courage, and an immense love for the craft, as well, I believe, to keep creating as yourself in the face of so much disdain or worse, indifference.  Because Eddie Pepitone doesn’t suck.  He is very good at what he does, but his brand of comedy does not offer you comfort or escapism or good company; he takes you to the inferno of loneliness and self-doubt and despair, and asks you to laugh with him.

But more to the point, Eddie’s anger is so pure and chaotic, so sincere and open that it both disarms and disturbs you; it is so truly a helix of dark and light that the image which comes to mind for me is an angel gone insane, desperately searching for his way back to heaven while circling it over and over without ever recognizing it.  Watching Eddie perform, I laugh as an act of defiance and acutely feel my brokenness at the same time.  I have struggled with anger a lot in my life.  As a child, emotions were not encouraged or given space in my home – only anger was named and expressed regularly by the adults.  As I grew up, it became the only sort of self-expression I was competent at.  I used to get thrown around a lot by older boys at school because I had a smart mouth and I wouldn’t back down from a fight no matter how skewed the odds were or how physically fucked up I would end up.  At home, I’d throw and break things when I fell into a rage, when it really felt like my whole body would burst if I didn’t slam it against something.  I did not fight girls, only boys and then men, probably compensating for the fact that I could never fight back against my father and other men who had been violent to me.  But the last time I picked a fight, my opponent was a woman.

It was the night after Christmas six or seven years ago and my sister and I had gone to the supermarket to pick up some photos we had just developed.  While we were there, there was a Chinese woman very loudly and persistently verbally abusing people in the checkout line-ups.  She had a little girl, I assume her daughter, in the child seat of her grocery cart and her husband, a huge tall man, was unloading their stuff as though nothing was happening.  I felt myself starting to boil but didn’t say anything as we passed by them.  Minutes later, however, my sister and I were walking down the ramp to leave the store and this woman started screaming and cursing behind us.  I turned around and yelled back at her to lower her voice.  In response, she pushed her grocery cart with her child in it at my sister and I.  That should have tipped me off that something was not right with this lady but by then I was seeing red.  The woman marched up to me and started screaming at me, sticking her finger in my face.  She was about 300 pounds and I was 1/3 her size, and without a second thought, I right-hooked her in the face.  She pulled me down with her and we went at it.  I would not let her go and just kept whaling punches at her even after her husband jumped on my back, pulling out bunches of my hair and ripping the contacts out of my eyes.  We had to be pulled apart by three security guards.  The woman accused me of trying to steal from her but I had confessed right off the bat that I had thrown the first punch and there were enough witnesses to discredit her testimony, that it was her and her family that got banned from the store.  The next day, still seething, I went to the cops in a preemptive move and reported what happened.  He was sympathetic with me and said he would get in touch after he tracked her down to hear her side of things.  That evening, the cop called to let me know that the woman was mentally ill and a new refugee from China.  She and her husband were terrified of getting deported after the events of the previous night.  Did I still want to press charges?

Until that night, I had always felt my anger to be justified. I took pride in it and savored the feeling of burning like it was my one counter-attack against a life in which I felt so often judged, humiliated and violated.  Like just a few weeks before that incident I had chased down a guy on a bike who had stolen my purse and beat the crap out of him.  Or the times I would fight my ex because he stole the milk money or got high in the bathroom where the baby’s clothes were being washed.  I would imagine myself David facing Goliath and the Goliath would take on many forms over the years as I acquired new paradigms like ever expanding battlefields: white people, rich people, men, settlers, Republicans, Zionists, the government-at-large…on and on and on.  And the point is not that people with those forms of privilege have not and are not perpetually doing fucked up shit to rightfully earn the anger of people they oppress.  But what I learned that night, when my inability to control my anger could have cost an entire family their safety, was that anger depends on and perpetuates the illusion that we are small.   It’s not because he feels like a big man that Eddie Pepitone is screaming into the crowd.  It’s not because I felt like a big bad hero that I picked a fight with that woman at the supermarket, it’s because I allowed her verbal missiles to diminish me and then I in turn, wanted to diminish her.  Anger really doesn’t give a shit who the enemy is.  And in the aftermath, when I felt overwhelmed by shame and regret, I felt once again the temptation to demonize this woman, to allow anger to make me small again and minimize my choice – i.e. my culpability – so I could say, “Well, there was no alternative.”

There are those who say that the root of anger is fear.  That we get angry so we don’t have to feel fear.  I’m no psychologist, but from my own investigation of my life, I think anger is older than fear.  Anger is what taught me fear, and fear is what gives my anger opportunities to manifest and magnify.  So I have actively sought out places and situations that nurture fear in me so I can continue to give birth to anger.  I’ve been reading Thich Nhat Han’s writings lately and the one lesson I am focusing on right now is this: I am bigger than my anger.  Because it’s not that anger is not valid response to the ignorant fuckery that victimizes us daily – and disproportionately as women, people of color, poor people, etc. - but it is dehumanizing to feel as though I have only one emotional recourse, and worse, that it is an automatic one, to problems that require not so much my craving for retribution but my capacity for transformation.  Years since the supermarket incident, I have developed self-restraint over my physical enactments of anger toward others and my immediate environment, but it has also led to a turning inward of the anger.  Into self-belittlement and punishment, into my body shutting down for weeks at a time because it is so exhausted from being at war with itself.  I am realizing more and more these days that it’s not the traumatic experiences I’ve been through that are still hurting me but my programmed response to them.

So what’s the place of art in all this?  Watching The Bitter Buddha, I see a man who has infused his craft with his anger in an effort to transform it, to find moments of freedom from it.  Instead of finding real bodies to inflict with its blunt force, Eddie uses comedy to make a mirror of the anger that permeates him like bread in a bowl of soup.  A mirror which he then offers to his audience.  I have used poetry to dig up the parts of myself where sorrow, compassion, hope and emotions other than anger are stored, though even now when I read some of my poems I can see very clearly the inflections of fury in my choice of words, in the intensity of the language, like a monster is just on the verge of breaking loose through otherwise beautiful lines.  I am aware that anger has also served me in important ways, especially when I needed to speak out strongly against injustice, but it has cast such a huge shadow over my life that I no longer wish to be at its beck and call.  I am eternally indebted to poetry for teaching me to bring other parts of my humanity into the light, but work on the page is not enough.  I can only write and get there after I’ve already suffered and come limping out the other side of anger, which like fire, does burn down eventually even if for some of us they remain active embers, just waiting for the right breath of air or a piece of wood to let it blaze again.  I have no conclusive answers yet right now, but reminding myself that I am bigger than my anger has helped immensely, if only to give me distance from my anger and permit me to look at it critically.  I leave you with this poem by my friend and teacher, Joy Harjo:

Equinox

I must keep from breaking into the story by force

for if I do I will find myself with a war club in my hand

and the smoke of grief staggering toward the sun,

your nation dead beside you.

I keep walking away though it has been an eternity

and from each drop of blood

springs up sons and daughters, trees,

a mountain of sorrows, of songs.

I tell you this from the dusk of a small city in the north

not far from the birthplace of cars and industry.

Geese are returning to mate and crocuses have

broken through the frozen earth.

Soon they will come for me and I will make my stand

before the jury of destiny. Yes, I will answer in the clatter

of the new world, I have broken my addiction to war

and desire. Yes, I will reply, I have buried the dead

and made songs of the blood, the marrow.

The Flower in the Stone: On Fantasy, Faith and Starting Over

It is time the stone made an effort to flower,

time unrest had a beating heart. 

It is time it were time. 

It is time.

-Paul Celan

Last night, my husband made an offhand comment that got me thinking about the role of fantasy in my life.  ”There are Trekkies,” he said.  ”But if there were ‘Merliners,’ you would be the president.”  It’s true, I’ve been watching Merlin, the BBC series, pretty religiously since early spring of this year.  Because it’s available on Netflix, I’ve watched all five seasons at least twice front to back, and am now in the middle of my third cycle of re-reruns.  I’m still getting a lot out of it so I don’t imagine my personal enthusiasm for the show will abate anytime soon, but my favorite part of the experience has probably been watching the episodes with my ten-year-old son: we memorize lines from our favorite scenes – British accent and all – and throw them back and forth randomly throughout the day for laughs.  Here’s an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RubpkoKkbv0

But what does Merlin have to do with the poignant lines of Paul Celan noted above (other than The Flower in the Stone being a play on The Sword in the Stone)?

I have always loved fantasy, myth, folklore and legends.  But recently I realized there is a common factor between the two periods in my life when my consumption of these genres has shifted from enjoyment and interest to need, and that factor is migration.  When my family emigrated from Indonesia to Canada, I was ten years old.  I had had some basic English lessons to know a few simple phrases, but literacy, comprehension and communication were a whole other galaxy.  I was enrolled in an ESL program in my elementary school, but dropped out after a few classes because Cantonese was the only “foreign” language used as a basis for translation.  Instead, I devoured the school library with the assistance of a dictionary and taught myself how to speak, think and write in English through reading.  I was fluent within three months and began to write my own short stories.  The vast majority of the literature I consumed in those first years of arrival was fantasy.  Dragons, gods, sorcerers, witches, warriors, pirates, fairies and kids with strange powers – these were my lot.  I remember in grade six, because I didn’t have proper shoes to play sports with the other kids, I used to spend my recesses and lunch hours reading the legends of King Arthur in the shade of portable classrooms.  I acquired a whole new language through their (mis)adventures, battles and heroic feats, perhaps because I felt that what was being asked of me – as a child suddenly responsible for writing my parents’ resumes, translating between them and the new society, succeeding in school so their sacrifices would not be in vain, all without guidance or community because we were the only Indonesian family in town – seemed nearly as fantastical.  Plus, we had meager resources.  No cable, no games, no toys, no radio.

Sixteen years later, I am once again an immigrant, this time on the east coast of the United States.  No, I don’t have to learn a new language, but this time I am starting over in every other major aspect of my life: vocation, livelihood, family, community.  From a nonprofit jack-of-all-trades to poet, single mother to wife, breadwinner to unpaid worker, multiple social circles and networks of support to stark isolation, all in the span of a single year.  And this is not even including the immigration process which I can really only compare to the process of dissecting a frog in grade 9 biology: a needle was run through the poor creature’s brain to paralyze, but not kill it, so that we could open it up and observe its living organs at work.  Once again, I find refuge in plot-lines and characters that twist and tear an everyday reality where the stakes seem to get higher and higher even as it corresponds very little to what I need or have to offer.  And Merlin is just the most revered and lasting of the shows that I have been digging up over the past year; others include Xena: Warrior Princess, Fringe, Battlestar Galactica and Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles.  No Game of Thrones for me, there’s still too much hype, especially in the age of Facebook, which destroys one’s intimate experience of/with the story and its likeness to reading a book of forgotten lore you found crawling with spiders behind a library shelf no one’s visited for years.

A few days ago, I read this wonderful interview with Edwidge Danticat, titled All Immigrants Are Artists.  She says, “That experience of touching down in a totally foreign place is like having a blank canvas: You begin with nothing, but stroke by stroke you build a life. This process requires everything great art requires—risk-tasking, hope, a great deal of imagination, all the qualities that are the building blocks of art. You must be able to dream something nearly impossible and toil to bring it into existence.” (see the full interview here  http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/08/all-immigrants-are-artists/279087/)  I repeat: risk-taking, hope, a great deal of imagination.  And I would add, no small dash of madness.  These are the qualities I sought out instinctively as a child, friendless and lost in the withering darkness of a strange land.  My parents too, had their own specific brand of fantasy that they clung to for dear life as they swam through layers of misinformation, misunderstanding, disappointment, hardship and yes, humiliation upon humiliation, in the new country.   It was called The Bible.  And in my own present reality, watching Merlin persist and struggle to do the right thing, the good thing, with his gift of magic, at a time when magic was outlawed (hello, truth-telling in America!), its practitioners hunted and massacred, to serve a prince who mirrored his own values and his highest aspirations, yet who could never see him for he truly was, could never look at him and recognize him – that kind of faith, a faith of such fantastical proportions, I know is what I need to get through the days, weeks, months when I am reduced to stone.  A stone trying to flower.  To flower in time.

So yeah, call me a Merliner.  In a world of fake news, hashtags (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57dzaMaouXA), empty rhetoric and Facebook encouraging each and every one of us to be little narcissists, I consider it a badge of honor.

Poet in Camden: An Interview with Andrea Walls

Andrea Walls, a Philadelphia native, is the author of Ultraviolet Catastrophe, a chapbook from the grassroots, Thread Makes Blanket Press. She is a VONA and Hedgebrook alum and has been published in H.O.W. Journal, Kweli Journal, Callaloo and was first runner-up in Solstice Literary Magazine’s First Annual Contest. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has recently finished her first full collection of poetry, The Black Body Curve. She currently lives and writes in Camden, New Jersey.

I met Andrea back in 2009 at my first Voices of Our Nations (VONA) summer writers’ workshop in San Francisco, California.  Priestess of the common space, rabble provocateur, hollerin’ rep of the hometown (at any time you were liable to hear “PHILLY!” booming across the halls) & champion of those who teeter on the brink of defeat.  Four years later, she’s sitting at my dinner table with her nth cup of coffee for the day and a steaming plate of rice, eggs and butternut squash.  There are cookies baking in the oven.  We’ve been kickin’ it for a couple hours but my son will be home from school soon, which means Andrea, aka Aunt Philly, will have to be shared.  So we get on with it.

~~~

C:  Tell me about how you came to poetry, or rather, how poetry came to you. 

A: I grew up in West Philly where people are poets in the natural way they talk, without being celebrated about it.  But my first intervention with “poetry” was Sonia Sanchez.  She came to my high school and I was in the library eavesdropping on her talking to some students.  She just blew my mind with what could be said.  She represents poetry in motion for me, the way she embraces you in every way.  It was a moment in Philly where everyone was there. Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange with Colored Girls.  Her ability to be raw and healed and healing and falling apart all at once.  Then Amiri Baraka came and Etheridge Knight, and Gwendolyn Brooks.  Poets were in bookstores, cultural venues, parks.  Once you got turned on to it, you couldn’t avoid it. The Black Arts Movement came to where you were. It found me where I was and talked about shit that mattered to me in a language that I could understand and it helped me confront the realities that I could not articulate.

The first poems I wrote were many years later, though poetry was always my go-to place when I felt bad or good or complicated or confused.  Seemed like a poet was always giving me a framework for my internal angst.  The first poems I wrote were for the brothers who didn’t make it out, who weren’t there anymore.  People who shared moments with me just sitting on the stoop even though they were into whatever they were into that ended up with them becoming murderers or murder victims. Refugees to the prison system.  I guess I started writing for them so the part of them that wasn’t a murderer or a murder victim could be saved somehow.

C: Who have been some of your most influential poets? 

A: All the ones I’ve mentioned earlier.  But also in terms of a whole body of work, Audre Lorde is my intellectual poet of choice. She stimulates my sense of inquiry and ability to be self-critical and critical of the culture.  But the poem that taught me what poetry could do is Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19217). That was the poem that taught me to love my father in the complication of what it means to be in a family.  How you miss the most important things about each other even though you’re there every day.   And Nikki Giovanni, she changed my life.  The stuff she would say! Like, “If you ever get your hands on any money, don’t buy stuff.  Buy an experience.”  I took that with me when I was going out in search, you know, of life.

C: Do see a lineage between you and Walt Whitman (who also lived in Camden)?

A: Yes, living in Camden, I relate that sort of sense of the roving reporter you get when you read some of Walt Whitman’s stuff.  For me he celebrates subjects that don’t always seem that poetic if you consider what gets published and what seems presentable as poetry.  So I feel a certain Walt-iness in the things I’m working on – finding dignity for people who don’t seem “poetic” and are often talked about like a collection of pathologies.

C: As poets, I suspect we have special porousness to places and people – a particular sensitivity and sense of responsibility.  As witnesses, participants, channels through which the spirits move.  How did you come to be a part of Camden and to identify with it? 

A: In the way that all poor places seem to do for me.  And when I say poor I mean that as less capital resources. The fact of that, not the quality of the people who inhabit the space.  The way Camden is spoken about as a dangerous, impoverished place that is refuted by my experience of the place.  Those labels are not about making people who live in Camden safe.  The people who use that language want to make it safe for trespassers.  When you read about how dangerous it is, it’s never about what we’re danger for, it’s how we endanger them.  How they are endangered by our very existence in a way that makes them ashamed to witness us.

I find in Camden that the people who have seemingly the least amount to share have an incredible capacity for generosity. When somebody shares their last cigarette with you while you’re waiting for the bus, when they don’t know where their next cigarette is going to come from and they are addicted to cigarettes, that’s an amazing act of generosity to me.  And I see that everyday.  The whole bus collectively moving together to help out a young mother with her babies and backpacks and unwieldy strollers, and nobody is making snide comments.   I’ve been accused of being idealistic about how meaningful those kinds of incidences are, and that’s possible but if that’s what I’m guilty of, then I’m okay with that. I’m okay with seeing the best in people who have the least.

C: I completely agree.  Actually, I don’t believe that’s idealism.  I believe that’s recognition.  And I relate as someone who lived for a while in the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, which is spoken of with so much derision and contempt, and whose residents are fighting gentrification that is being inflicted upon them with terrifying speed and intensity.  Gentrification meaning “uplifting” people to a point where you should be afraid of your own human funk, your own human need.  Which leads me to my next question…  Poetry isn’t just a craft.  It’s also an industry.  One that is driven by American values of competition, individualism, careerism, hierarchy and upward mobility as personal motivators for poets to participate in empire-building, where white people still hold the reins. What does it mean for you to be a poet in one of the most criminalized, othered, demonized cities in the heart of the empire? 

A: To your average onlooker poetry looks like a waste of time. It’s invisible until it has torn down the house. It’s the river that makes the canyon.  I think we get conditioned to think that we have to wait to have enough resources.  To be amply employed.  To have health benefits, to be… To be okay.  Before we can be poets.  But it works the other way around.  We have consumed so much rhetoric about what we don’t have and what we’re supposed to do to correct that lack that we don’t even know our own minds!

I keep coming back to that Audre Lorde quote, ”The difference between poetry and rhetoric / is being ready to kill / yourself / instead of your children.” Poetry is not romance, unless your reality is all romance.  But when your reality is pushing back the machinery of poverty every day and being exhausted by that process and afraid constantly that it’s going to collapse you, you have to wake up and say, “Shit. The only thing that is going to hold back that destruction is if I do my job as a poet and stop giving in to the fear of producing an imperfectly crafted demand that this shit has got to stop.”  And to say it, however rough the poem needs to be.

C: You are a huge advocate of the creativity of poor people. What does creativity born of necessity, of extreme struggle, have to offer our world today? 

A: Poor people are creative because they’re desperate and they need to be.  The electricity is off and you don’t have any heat and you haven’t eaten and your kids can’t read or do math and you have to respond in some way that saves your life.  You can’t teach that in school, that deep down I-need-to-come-up-with-some-shit-or-I’m-gonna-die.  I wasn’t there at the birth of jazz but it was probably someone banging the fuck out of a piano out of some real need to not be smashed or quashed or disappeared.  It has that kind of tension when you listen to it, that sound that comes from holding on that tightly or letting it all go.  From making something that wasn’t there before because what was there was killing you.  And then we try to pretend like art school is where creativity comes from.  I see all these documentaries about people taking other people’s experiences and then repackaging it because they were the person who knew its market appeal and then selling it back to the originator who can’t even pay their rent! I see the value of learning new ways to solve problems but creativity is about survival and poor people are the ones always trying to figure out how to survive another day.

C: Can you tell me about the soap poems in Camden? 

A: I just started seeing these soap epitaphs on the backs of car windows.  No matter where I was in the city I would see Rest in Peace, insert name, some little saying and the dates. The dates were indicative of short lives. Young people.  And it was a more present experience of the violence and the disappearance of young people in the city than when I hear statistics of how many people per capita are victims of a violent crime.  It was a personal, urgent, paltry yet magnificent gesture at the same time.  What do we got? We got soap.  We gon’ write something in soap that says we were here.  And it’s so temporary because you know it’s gonna rain or you’re gonna get your car washed and it’s gonna be gone.  The way that we vanish and the way we say we were here vanishes too.  We’re so vanishing.  And that expression just really moves me.  The quality of our vanishing, and the fact that we’re trying in some small way to represent our existence.

Being that close and that far, standing on a corner and then somebody’s attempt at recognition goes by me at a stop sign and what am supposed to do to answer that call?  It’s not like reading a paper. I can’t possibly interpret statistics in a way that makes me know I’m supposed to do something. It’s beyond me, personally.  It feels like I’m being manipulated by statistics to put some legislative point somewhere down the line for someone’s election, a tougher DA or something that’s gonna smother us even more. But when I walk by a graffiti tag on the curb that wasn’t there yesterday that says Rest in Peace, Homie, that makes me feel responsible to the author.

C:  I think the question what are “we supposed to do?” IS the difference between poetry and rhetoric. We have all these “lenses” to organize what happens around us into narratives, theories, agendas, answers to generate profit out of whatever horrific thing just happened or to just make ourselves feel better. Formulaic, almost knee-jerk responses. To bomb or not to bomb.  To rally or not to rally.  Most of us don’t know how to be, how to live with and probe that question: w hat are we supposed to do?  Which is really a question about the nature of our agency, choice, and power to shape the world we live in.  

A: Yes! We just get habituated to responding, without addressing the actual event, the actual need.  I’m afraid we are losing our capacity for particularity: the particular response to the particular question. And I think this is what poetry is meant to restore.

~~~

For more Andrea Walls, check out -

“In a House on Fire,” in Callaloo: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/callaloo/v035/35.2.walls01.html

“Third House Down from the Corner Behind the Red Door,” in Solstice: http://solsticelitmag.org/content/3rd-house-down-from-the-corner-behind-the-red-door/

Reading Craig Santos Perez’s “from Unincorporated Territory: Hacha”

“We had gone far away, I got used to being elsewhere, the unnamed.  So I insist: to write is to take a running start on untangling the blanks.”

-Marie Étienne, from King of  Hundred Horsemen: poems (translated by Marilyn Hacker)

In his book, from Unincorporated Territory (Tinfish Press, 2008), Perez asks the reader to follow him on a journey from his native Guam. It’s an endeavor that is less about getting from one limit to another, but pursuing multiple limits at the same time, resulting in a poetics that stands quite on its own stylistically, formally and linguistically. Think web, not line.  The way he approaches his content – history, memory, family, the place(s) and un-place the colonized subjectivity occupies simultaneously as s/he struggles for self-definition (destination? disguise? figure of speech?) – reminds me somewhat of Nathaniel Mackey’s work (Whatsaid Serif, Splay Anthem) but more naked, more tenuous, as it were.

[I would love to quote extensively from the book to illustrate statements I make about it, but I will do so only minimally due to formatting constraints which would require me to either master advanced html in 24 hours (not feasible) or mangle Perez's lines (not desirable)].

Less the sense of something-in-construction or moving-toward, but rather a-coming-undoneness that is equally rich and textured because it hinges on the jagged juxtaposition of missing and found parts. For me, the primary gestural experience of the text is that of untangling an enormous knot of silence – sound by approaching sound, not unlike the way you feel the train coming before you hear it because something in the pulse of the air has changed.  Even more powerful because each poem circulates around one or more Chamorro words, which are sometimes translated, sometimes not.  English eddies around these words like waves to an island; the island that is heartache and rebel, beloved and stranger at the same time.   An unraveling which does not necessarily reveal – a potent political stance in itself, which I relate to as a subject from an island overrun by tourists who demand the land and people to strip themselves open, to be consumed, in order to survive.

Throughout the book, Perez consistently breaches English with the use of quotations, rendering it questionable and self-questioning.  In Perez’s diction, English is made mendicant and migrant: because the quotation marks are used both to indicate dialogue (e.g. citing a speaker outside of the narrator that is usually a family member) and to problematize certain words or phrases, one effect I truly appreciate is that English appears displaced, amputated, inauthentic and yet, burdened with the weight of a narrative it is not equipped to tell. For instance:

from Tidelands 

this

chained ground-”does not constitute a

navigational hazard” but delves

“one witness”-”of different flags”

 

[cha'guan]

 

in dull ashes shining

~

[cha'guan : grass]

~

I love also that Perez breaks tradition with the format of one singular poem after another; rather the vast majority are organized as parts of recurrent themes/titles:  ”from Tidelands,” “from Aerial Roots,” “from Ta(La)Ya,” “from Stations of Crossing,” “from Lisiensan Ga’lago,” and ”from Descending Plumeria,” which are not serialized or numbered, but returned to.  I think of them as currents, each carrying its own stream of consciousness and its own distinct features, which the poet dips in and out of, crosses over, braids.  Yet each poem maintains its distinction because the features that identify it as part of a larger current are still molded to fit its unique voice.  Where disorientation occurs, it feels planned because of the meticulous discipline and detail which accompany the positioning of each word and white space.  As a reader I never felt settled for a moment: just enough context is available to guide the direction of my associations, just enough plain language to rest on, like sandbars before the plunge.

Reading Hacha is like hearing echoes of something primal and binding in an underwater cave, something I don’t yet know but recognize.  It contains my fury – gives it a place to swim - from generations of colonization, persecution, displacement; from being else and elsewhere.  As a reader, I am asked to lay it out and inspect it, closely, to map the routes.  There is a precision, an unflinching-ness in Perez’s witnessing that I suspect comes from an acceptance of what has happened – to our homelands, to our people.  Not acceptance in the sense of swallowing the poisonous root one is choking on, but acceptance as the conscious integration of the shards of history – its dead dogs and villages turned to firewood, its spears and potent herbs – into the skin we wear when we write.

“my job was to preserve things i wasn’t willing to build” (in a later section of “from Ta(La)Ya”) – fuck the distinction between political and non-political poets: as children of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, racism, hetero-patriarchy, we all contend with this basic imperative in our work, especially when we are working in English.  There is no escape in Hacha, no recovery.  Becoming visible, becoming a name or a place that is spoken and understood, guarantees no seat at the table.  Our presence might undress the emperor (and for but a moment), but it also exposes our wounds to the world.  Which perhaps is why the only un-repeating section of the book is the one that begins it, “from Achiote” -

“”mata’pang” used to mean “proud and brave”     used to mean “alert eyes” – he led the rebellion against the spanish before he was captured and killed -

now it means “silly” or “rude” or “misbehaved” or “uncivil”

[achiote was used to stop bleeding.  was used as an antivenom for snake bites.  was used to heal wounds]“ 

Writing in the Present

Last Saturday I attended a meditation session at the New Jersey Buddhist Vihara for the first time.  I’m new to mediation, having started my practice just a few months ago.  The hour long session was a powerful and humbling experience.  At times I felt like I was trapped in the jaws of forever (as in, “omg, this shit ain’t never gonna end!”) and nearly panicked. I learned an important lesson about my capacity to be present and that I am still invested in the now as a passing-through or a waiting for something else to happen.  One of the monks informed us after the session that it takes years of practice to be able to truly meditate, that is, reining in one’s mind enough to discover its true nature, for even 30 minutes.  In the beginning, an hour’s effort might yield only a few minutes of true meditation.  As a poet, I’m compelled to ask – what does this mean for my writing?

I was skeptical of meditation for a long time because I misunderstood it as a retreat into the solipsism of the self.  In part this might be because meditation was often suggested to me as a self-care/relaxation strategy, rather than a mental and physical discipline that would empower me to be of greater service to those around me.  I was afraid it would make me complacent and accepting of the status quo; that it would make me less outraged about the crazy evil shit committed by politicians, bureaucracies, corporations and yes, regular people, too.  I couldn’t reconcile the quest for inner peace with the injustices that inflicted such violence, damage and pain in my life and among people more disenfranchised than I was.  And I had doubts that contentment would be more fulfilling than the passions which when unleashed, could momentarily transform the drabness of suffering into a brilliant jewel.

But when Jimmy Santiago Baca tells you to meditate, you do it.

After the completion of nomad, I’ve been working on a lot of poems that reckon with the past, with what my family and I survived, what we are making of the histories that were imposed on us.  I fell in and out of depression over the past year because in the midst of huge life transitions (getting married after 9 years of single motherhood, moving to another country, going from multiple jobs to unemployment, etc.), I was sifting through dark memories that I had spent most of my adult life burying.  I found it difficult to get out of my head and engage with present issues because I felt overwhelmed so much of the time.  How do I carry out the task of memory-keeping for “the many lives that have fountained through my own,” as poet Lynda Hull puts it, while continuing to absorb and engage the urgent issues of the present in my writing?  The page means different things to different people, but for me it is holy ground.  It demands the best of me – the most stripped of pretense, the most vulnerable, the most willing.  I didn’t know how to offer that in multiple directions.

I discovered to my surprise, that far from insulating me from the world, meditation has heightened my capacity to relate to the world.  It has radically shifted my capacity to return from the realm of memory, to the present.  There is now burgeoning scientific evidence on the benefits of meditation for the brain, but as poet, I feel the loosening in my spirit.  As though there are streams that have been stopped inside me that are now beginning to flow again, to fertilize valleys of the soul that have lain fallow and abandoned.  Meditation certainly has not solved all my problems and I think it’s too early to tell whether it’s made me a better person, but it is empowering me to rise to the poet’s craft with greater confidence.  My understanding is this: life happens in the present.  Uneven, unpredictable, pulsating life.  Life that can take a sudden turn and either fly over the giant pothole or wipe out, like your kid on his new BMX.  The past, history, memory made us what we are, but it is the unresolved energy of the present that we need to tap into to become part of the world, to belong to it. Oppression might tell me that it is my exclusions and exiles that define my existence, but that’s a lie.  It’s how I breathe, how I take in the light falling through my window at this moment that give me the right to shape my life, to participate in what does and does not take place.

But these days, every time I sit down on the floor and close my eyes, every time I recall the monk’s instruction to “breathe naturally and place your thoughts on the breath,” I am reminded that to breathe is a special privilege.  On August 21, 2013, a gas attack near Damascus, Syria, killed 1429 people, including 426 children.  Their breaths were killed within them.  Responses to the event almost immediately jumped to whether or not the US should intervene (read: bomb Syria, read: Obama posturing as bad-ass savior of mankind, read: bumper crops for the military industrial complex).  There are a thousand good reasons why as citizens and residents of Amerika we should voice our critiques given the ravages successive US administrations have already wreaked on the Middle East, but still, I feel like something is missing, something that approaches a way of being present with the loss of these lives, and the lives of many others in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Pakistan, Yemen…the list goes on.

When I decided to wholeheartedly follow my calling a few years ago, I reorganized my life around the study and craft of poetry.  It led me to question the ways in which I was seeing – or rather, not seeing – the world and the people around me.  As an activist, there was time when I used poetry solely as a mode of reaction: one more way to fight the system.  As a person of color, an immigrant kid, a young single mom, poetry has been indispensable as a testament to survival, an archive of forbidden and silenced lives: one more way of becoming visible.  But as a human being, poetry’s incommensurate value to me is its affirmation of the sanctity of the soul and how it restores the individual to the world, to the life of the present.

The other day I started writing a poem to honor the dead in Syria, to carry and not forget this recent chasm that has opened in the world.  Here is an excerpt from the draft I’m working on:

…Myths of past and future, cloaked

and bespectacled, warm daggers against your wrists

 

but they blow away like chaff, leave you with now

which is many, shattered, clinging like wet rags –

the kind Zaynah in Ghouta stuffs against her gums

 

under the stiffening weight of her father.  The night

around her whirls into bits of plaster, gray flesh,

pistons of a thousand bodies that explode the air…

 

Are we not cast adrift?  Rent beyond repair?

Fever that will not pass, will not drown the American

city-lights where it’s so perilous to say how many of us know

 

survival means terre.  Tear.  Thread.  Like breath: