Embracing the “Sacred Self Fractured Self” — A review of Leslie Contreras Schwartz’s Who Speaks For Us Here
Who Speaks For Us Here, the third collection by Leslie Contreras Schwartz is a chorus of survivors. Here, we find poems that complicate the idea of self. Poems that conjure ancestors. Poems as fragments.
Informed by her own experience with dissociative identity disorder, the fragmentation in this collection is not just formal or metaphorical. In the preface, Contreras Schwartz writes that while researching sex trafficking in Houston she began to have episodes of mania and depression. She believed her research triggered episodes of post-traumatic stress disorder from an abusive relationship. But later realized she had DID:
“What was important about this is I learned that my mind had hidden and stored away parts of my personal history into fragments of “identities” and these parts of myself had helped me become successful and were virtually undetectable to myself and to others.”
Contreras Schwartz also writes that this collection attempts to show that “this place — this universe of trauma and loss many of us carry — is not the endpoint of anyone’s experience, and it doesn’t have to be.” In so many ways, this book accomplishes that. There are characters and voices trapped in their own “hellscapes” but who find their own ways to survive: a girl raises a “permanent fist,” a flightless bird becomes a lesson on joy, a woman reinvents herself. The pages are filled with brown, immigrant women, mothers and grandmothers unapologetically existing.
In “Afterbirth,” a persona poem written through the perspective of La Llorona, we see a revised Mexican myth-woman. Rather than repeating the traditional account of a delirious woman who drowns her children, Contreras Schwartz reimagines La Llorona as a woman who has agency. A misunderstood mother and painter. “She is not dangerous, only alive.” She paints until dusk then walks to the bayou to watch the water.
“Who says she has to be tame? To enter into a cage? She tells them to fuck off and they are offended. Call her a bitch, a whore, bad mother.”
Sometimes, survival takes the form of dissociation. It can be seen in the many “splitting selves” in this book. The collection is divided into six sections. In the fourth section, “underfoot,” Contreras Schwartz uses a mix of documentary poetics and persona poems to write about sex workers, survivors of human trafficking, and disappeared women and immigrant children. Contreras Schwartz expands upon the idea of “compartmentalization” in the poem “My Other Name.” The speaker, who is a sex worker and was also trafficked, recounts years of abuse. She has made herself “unreachable by any means,” and erased “the map” of her body. To survive she had to dislocate. The third section of the book, “choir,” opens with the poem “Autobiography in Fugue.” Interestingly, fugue has two literal definitions. The word has a musical definition, but also a psychological one, which describes a period marked by a loss of awareness or identity. In this poem, Contreras Schwartz uses a braided form to connect the six stanzas. The last line of each stanza is the first of the next, weaving each stanza together. The poem begins with the speaker as a child being told by her grandmother “what an ugly thing you are now.”
The poem traverses the child’s adolescence until she is 15, she meets a boy who picks her up at her house, and she never goes back. Here, the speaker enters a state of fragmentation. A dislocation of the self.
“I put myself on a shelf there — /my old girl’s room — for safe-keeping, a body/ I could borrow later.”
But this poem does something else so prevalent in the book; a clear depiction of cyclical abuse. The speaker’s understanding of herself is informed by those early utterances of emotional abuse inflicted by her grandmother. They reverberate throughout the speaker’s life until the final stanza where the she looks at herself in the mirror and says “What an ugly thing you are.” Contreras Schwartz retraces trauma, affixing it to the point of beginnings. She elucidates a relationship between present self and genealogy, a thread throughout the book. In “Wishbone,” a poem in the last section of the book, the speaker, has an organ “shared by generations/ and many people,/passed on like a recipe like a curse.”
But, in that lineage is also an inheritance of survival, that same cursed organ also allows the speaker to “survive/being broken.” These meditations reverberate throughout the book.
“How our ancestors learned to live/ with this slipping place.”
Contreras Schwartz conjures the past and in doing so, splits open the self, into the many selves, “Sacred self fractured self.” We are not isolated, not alone, but lithographs of our forebears. And with that impression is also the ability to overcome.
This work also moves beyond stereotypical notions of mental illness. In the title poem of this book, the “here” in “Who Speaks for Us Here,” is a mental hospital. The speaker is surrounded by other patients in a group circle led by a nurse who asks the speaker what brought her here. Instead of giving a literal answer she says she was learning to sing. An answer that is not acceptable to the nurse, or to the group.
“You are supposed to say I wanted to die, so A then B and now C and all of D.”
The speaker knows that she must reduce her experience to a formulaic explanation. Mainstream depictions of people with mental illness often exist in that binary, devoid of complexity or nuance. By refusing to oversimplify the answer, the book complicates mental health. Instead, the speaker continually describes what happened to her through musical metaphors and language:
I open my mouth: warble chorale. I hold up my wrists: C.
My people started chanting — this aria, terrible and beautiful, raggedy,
inner bellow and hiss
cut up sound, bells of self
A sieve or a map
to a place no one wanted to know: D.
Even here, we can see a speaker in unison with multiple voices. Whether metaphorical, part of the psyche, or ancestral, Contreras Schwartz bears a collection that complicates the meaning of survival and trauma. In her own words from the preface, “the way we protect ourselves, our creative impulse, is also the manner in which we thrive.”
