Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras Letras Modernas Inglesas
HL VII Literatura Norteamericana Por: Viviana Muñoz Krauss
Profesora: Julia Constantino México, D.F., a 15 de febrero de 2012
About a Chicana
Lorna Dee Cervantes, a Chicana poet from Mexican and Native Chumash ancestors, was born in 1954 in San Francisco, California. After the divorce of her parents in 1959, Cervantes’ moved with her mother and brother to San Jose, where they lived with her grandmother, whose personality and knowledge was a great inspiration to Lorna’s poetry and life. Racial discrimination was an everyday matter she had to live in San Jose, situation that forced her family to silence their mother tongue and prevent Lorna from speaking Spanish. She graduated from the University of San Jose in 1984, and then she continued her studies at the University of Santa Cruz, where she became editor for Red Dirt magazine, a multicultural literary space.
Cervantes compiled her first collection of poetry at the age of fifteen. Her first and most recent book of poetry for children, Bird Ave, contains material of those early writings. In 1970 Lorna joined the New Chicano Movement, which was mostly male; this situation made her realized another face of discrimination: gender. Even so, she went on with her writing projects and at the middle of the 70’s, she started publishing a literary journal called Mango, which later was also the name for the small press she created with other Chicano writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Luis Omar Salinas, Ray Gonzalez, Jimmy Santiago Baca and Alberto Ríos.
Emplumada was Cervantes’ first collection of poetry published by the University of Pittsburg in 1981. “Emplumada”, a word invented by her, suggests a game of intertwined meanings that could be interpreted in English as “feathered”, as well as “pen flourished”. This book made her worthy of the American Book Award.
In 1982 Lorna’s mother was killed, this evidently was a terrible moment in her life, but in 1991 Lorna translated all her pain, rage and passion into her second book entitled From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger. This collection was published by Arte Publico, which was greatly awarded by the Patterson Poetry Prize, the Institute of Latin American Writers, the Latino Literature Award, and in 1995 she won the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award.
Drive: The First Quartet was published in 2006, which is a collection of poems in five books. Some of the poems included in this book are recent, while others had been previously published in journals, magazines and anthologies such as Daughters of the Fifth Sun (1995), ¡Floricanto Sí! A Collection of Latina Poetry (Penguin, 1998), Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (1994), No More Masks! Nowadays, she is an English professor and director of the creative writing program of the University of Colorado in Boulder, and a candidate for a doctoral degree in History of Consciousness.
The Activist Poet
Being a part of an excluded minority as a Chicana and as a woman, Lorna Dee Cervantes shows great concern about political issues in her poems, especially about those referring to cultural identity, class and gender. When she was very young she was deprived form her language and cultural traditions, which make her live as an outsider immersed in a social context that is also part of her. Cervantes, as many other biracial and bicultural people, had to face the typical dilemma of identity: “they are not this, nor that”. But her poetry is an attempt to construct a non exclusive and binary identity, a joint or space where different traditions can converge, not only through the topics that her poetry deals with, but also through the combined use of English and Spanish. “Refugee Ship” is a good portrait of this subject.
Cervantes, being a woman with a non western racial and cultural heritage, has been target of many attacks, racial intolerance and sexism in the United States. The “Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War Between Races”, particularly portrays that discrimination, is a matter that has been silenced and perceived as normal, which of course, has contributed to make it an invisible subject. Lorna Dee Cervantes makes political action when she writes about this problem because she makes it visible to the eyes of those that are blind to it or do not share her condition, and thus invites the reader to reflect upon this issue. Nowadays, there are some people that still think that sexual discrimination does not exist or that it is a topic from the past. But truth is that it exists, and Lorna Dee Cervantes especially deals with this problem since a perspective that comes from the dominions of the domestic life. If anyone had ever heard the sixties’ feminist slogan “The personal is political”, well, Cervantes’ poetry transforms that thought into action. She takes domestic violence from the realms of the private to the public sphere, and questions the roles of gender that all of us, men and women, are forced to perform. Her poems “Uncle’s First Rabbit”, “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” and “For Virginia Chavez”, are good examples on this point.
Analysis on the poems “Uncle’s First Rabbit and Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War Between Races”
Uncle`s First Rabbit
He was a good boy making his way through the Santa Barbara pines, sighting the blast of fluff as he leveled the rifle, and the terrible singing began. He was ten years old, hunting my grandpa's supper. He had dreamed of running, shouldering the rifle to town, selling it, and taking the next train out. Fifty years have passed and he still hears that rabbit "just like a baby." He remembers how the rabbit stopped keening under the butt of his rifle, how he brought it home with tears streaming down his blood soaked jacket. "That bastard. That bastard." He cried all night and the week after, remembering that voice like his dead baby sister's, remembering his father's drunken kicking that had pushed her into birth. She had a voice like that, growing faint at its end; his mother rocking, softly, keening. He dreamed of running, running the bastard out of his life. He would forget them, run down the hill, leave his mother's silent waters, and the sounds of beating night after night. When war came, he took the man's vow. He was finally leaving and taking the bastard's last bloodline with him. At war's end, he could still hear her, her soft body stiffening under water like a shark's. The color of the water, darkening, soaking, as he clung to what was left of a ship's gun. Ten long hours off the coast of Okinawa, he sang so he wouldn't hear them. He pounded their voices out of his head, and awakened to find himself slugging the bloodied face of his wife. Fifty years have passed and he has not run the way he dreamed. The Paradise pines shadow the bleak hills to his home. His hunting hounds, dead now. His father, long dead. His wife, dying, hacking in the bed she has not let him enter for the last thirty years. He stands looking, he mouths the words, "Die you bitch. I'll live to watch you die." He turns, entering their moss-soft livingroom. He watches out the picture window and remembers running: how he'll take the new pickup to town, sell it, and get the next train out. 1981
This poem is set in four stanzas, with an irregular number of lines that varies from twelve, twenty-four, seventeen and sixteen, respectively. It is not written in a particular meter, nor in a regular rhyme pattern, which makes the poem fit the category of free verse. Though Cervantes’ poetry does not always contain rhythmic schemes, it does possess a subtle musicality that sometimes becomes more or less evident, depending on the purpose of the line. She works mostly with a simple language in her poems which functions as an open door the reader could easily access, and at the same time, language is the key to a region of perhaps unexplored and intense emotions.
In “Uncle’s First Rabbit”, we have an odd combination of two semantic fields, one of guns that implies violence, and the other refers the domestic space and the family, which are supposed to be safe places. We have words like “boy”, “grandpa”, “supper”, “baby”, “mother”, “birth”, “sister”, “bed”, etc, along with words that contain in itself a strong sense of violence such as “rifle”, “blood”, “war”, “dying”, among others. There is a line in the first stanza that somehow resumes this paradoxical relationship of a pleasurable activity, which is singing, with a dreadful feeling of suspicion: “and the terrible singing began”. If we read aloud this line, we could notice it has a particular strong beat that creates a tension on the mind of the reader, and it could be graphically represented as an anapest ˘˘/˘˘/˘˘/.
“Uncle’s First Rabbit” is a poem where present and past are intertwined. The first and third stanzas are about the past, only, while the second and fourth, are about a present haunted by the past. It is about a man, very likely a Latin one that was forced to perform acts of violence since he was very young, like hunting. His cultural context dictated that violence towards women (as well as to every living creature), aggression and power, were manly things, so when he grew up, he ended up being like his father, even when he always dreamed of escaping this world.
The questions for you to discuss are:
Do you think that man was trapped in a system of oppression? How do you think the structure relates to the content of the poem? Is the poem written in the form of a cycle?
Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War Between Races
In my land there are no distinctions. The barbed wire politics of oppression have been torn down long ago. The only reminder of past battles, lost or won, is a slight rutting in the fertile fields. In my land people write poems about love, full of nothing but contented childlike syllables. Everyone reads Russian short stories and weeps. There are no boundaries. There is no hunger, no complicated famine or greed. I am not a revolutionary. I don't even like political poems. Do you think I can believe in a war between races? I can deny it. I can forget about it when I'm safe, living on my own continent of harmony and home, but I am not there. I believe in revolution because everywhere the crosses are burning, sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner, there are snipers in the schools... (I know you don't believe this. You think this is nothing but faddish exaggeration. But they are not shooting at you.) I'm marked by the color of my skin. The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly. They are aiming at my children. These are facts. Let me show you my wounds: my stumbling mind, my "excuse me" tongue, and this nagging preoccupation with the feeling of not being good enough. These bullets bury deeper than logic. Racism is not intellectual. I can not reason these scars away. Outside my door there is a real enemy who hates me. I am a poet who yearns to dance on rooftops, to whisper delicate lines about joy and the blessings of human understanding. I try. I go to my land, my tower of words and bolt the door, but the typewriter doesn't fade out the sounds of blasting and muffled outrage. My own days bring me slaps on the face. Every day I am deluged with reminders that this is not my land and this is my land. I do not believe in the war between races but in this country there is war. Rhyme patterns, regular meters and uniform stanzas are not at all in this poem, so it also belongs to the category of free verse. The poem functions with a straightforward language and it is written in present tense, which adds immediacy and actuality to the poem.
The poem, though it is not divided visually in stanzas, is divided in four parts due to its contrasting content. The first part, (the first fourteen lines) describe a utopia: a perfect place beyond fears and resentments, where inequality does not exist. The second part comes after a rephrasing of a question probably made by “the young white man”, where the poet presents the real and unfortunate situation.
The third part of the poem is an expression of the poet’s desire of writing love poems and celebrating life. Desires that become frustrated by reality. The fourth part reinforces the response by talking about the personal experiences and risks minorities are exposed to, and finally, the poem closes with a clear statement “but in this country/there is war”.
However, in this poem, we notice the tone is clearly more direct because it is a response. Being so, we have a speaker and an addressee to whom the poem is directed. The addressee is a “he” and it is referred to as “you”. It is important to mention to whom it is addressed: a “young white man”. It suggests that this man has had access to the privileges of Caucasian people: educative and professional opportunities, perhaps an acceptable economic situation, and evidently, from the wide variety of aggressions he could experience, racial discrimination is not one of them.
He is young too and not physically disabled. He has a normal life in this sense; he walks and moves without difficulties. Also, it is important to bear in mind that the addressee is a man, which is meaningful for the purposes of the poem. If he denies the existence of something like “a war between races”, it is hard to believe he is aware of gender discrimination. Being a white male implies that he is, symbolically, the center of the world according to the white western culture and civilization.
Sometimes, people find themselves in a zone of comfort where it is most difficult to perceive the disparities that have place in this our world, but we cannot deny they exist. Actually, in a world framed and codified with such straight and rigid standards, like ours, it is very hard that a person could perfectly fit. Which other codes of western culture can you find in the poem, and what do they mean? What does the imagery of the poem tell you?
I have just proposed some topics for discussion, but feel free to add any other. The more diversity in ideas and comments we have, the better.
Works cited: http://www.latinopoetrycommunity.org/lorna-dee-cervantes-biography.php http://redroom.com/member/lorna-dee-cervantes/bio http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/cervantesLorna.php#bio http://xicanopoetrydaily.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/poem-for-the-young-white-man- who-asked-me-how-i-an-intelligent-well-read-person-could-believe-in-the-war- between-races/