9TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 10 :: SARAH A. CHAVEZ on GLORIA ANZALDÚA
In the last weeks of February, I interviewed around thirty high school writers auditioning for the creative writing leg of the West Virginia Governor’s School for the Arts. When asked about poets they admire and would aspire to emulate, the three most common names mentioned were Edgar Allan Poe, William Shakespeare, and (sheepishly) Shel Silverstein (incidentally, not terribly different from what many beginning college writers sometimes say when asked about poetry they find successful).
These answers make sense. It’s what the majority of young readers have been introduced to. In school, students are taught assonance, consonance, alliteration, and onomatopoeia. These craft devices privilege the singing of 19th and early 20th-century poetry, the lilt, half-nod, the coy-eyes’ quick glance from across the room; the edge of the crag, emo professions of love unrequited. There is romance and maybe the picturing of petticoats and long-tailed suits — at least that is what I pictured, having zero sense of the gross lack of hygiene prevalent in new cities in the early days of Industrialization — nor a clear grasp on time period and how truly far apart Poe was from Shakespeare (thanks for the misleading costuming, Shakespeare In Love . . .).
Had I been asked that interview question in high school, I would have responded similarly. I used to read “Annabelle Lee” over and over to myself, sitting on the floor of my bedroom, back against the side of my bed, facing the wall (in case I cried, no one could see me). Young me sighed, such tragic love! That poem and all the poems written by long-dead white male writers were mesmerizing and had nothing to do with my life. Sure, there was tragic adolescent love at the end of every weekend, but there was no sepulcher by the sea! (I had no idea what a sepulcher was.) There were no crags, no long-hanging gray, no melancholy rain, only dust kicked up by tennis-shoed feet by the edge of the irrigation ditch. My world was hot and bright; the sun a weight pressing one’s back when walking home, playing sports — when working. I got my first job before qualifying for an underage work permit. It was on an organic farm building boxes and crates and packing basil and eggplant. Next, as a janitor in the evenings after volleyball practice. In the summers I worked maintenance, painting, replacing fist-sized lightbulbs from the tops of 40-foot ladders, hauling yard debris, various breakings and fixings. Each job included a lot of sweating, being or getting dirty, and sometimes needing to stop before the hottest part of the day. None of the poetry offered to me in school reflected my life, and that is how I knew my life was not beautiful or worthy of note. It was certainly not romantic, and poetry was nothing if not romantic.
This is where I place blame for my first reaction to Gloria Anzaldúa’s poetry — I thought it was artless. I was assigned Borderlands/La Frontera during the first year of my MA program. Undergraduate education had brought my poetry reading into the mid-20th century: Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman. All breathtaking poets, with heartbreaking confessionalism often couched in deft turns of phrase; and I loved them. Deeply. But still, these eastern settings, these upper-class homes, so much leisure. “Oh, that’s just protest poetry,” I’d heard a poetry professor say of Chicano poetry brought in by a student to our advanced workshop. The lesson being that activism is not art and real poetry had artistry and beauty and romance. And ennui (which was a new concept for me). Anzaldúa’s poetry was too active, too raw, too straightforward to be Literature, too familiar to be art.
In poems like “sus plumas el viento” (138–141), there were depictions of manual labor and the ways it distorts the body:
Swollen feet
tripping on vines in the heat,
palms thick and green-knuckled (1–3)
. . .
She husks corn, hefts watermelons.
Bends all the way, digs out strawberries
half buried in the dirt.
Twelve hours later
roped knots cord her back (40–44)
Reading those lines for the first time, I could feel the heat of midafternoon sun, feel the aches my body remembered from stooping and hauling, the wear of repetitive movement. I could see the bent bodies of the workers overlooked by California drivers speeding down Highway 99, their invisible, indispensable labor. Labor done by my father, my abuelitos, generations of ancestors.
And she didn’t focus solely on the difficulty, the toll, but also celebrated the pride and dignity earned through that work, like the viejo in “A Sea of Cabbages” (154):
His eyes: unquiet birds
Flying over the high paths
searching for that white dove
and her nest. (20–24)
. . .
Though bent over, he lived face up,
the veins in his eyes
catching the white plumes in the sky (30–33)
The image of the “[m]an in a green sea” (25) looking up, the sky reflected in his eyes, brought tears to mine. Like my abuelo, how he worked so lovingly hard on his garden, the cactus, nectarine and orange trees. The “white plumes,” the clouds reflected in his eyes, his face a reflection of cielo, of that which is heavenly.
Reading Anzaldúa’s poetry and theory brought awareness to my own internalized racism and classism. I was never ashamed of my past, where I came from, who I came from, but I also didn’t celebrate it. I was sometimes embarrassed to not be familiar with what my grad school cohorts were: no studying abroad, no big summer vacations, no family members suggesting I read a certain book, no hand-holding through the application process of literally anything that required an application. I had unwittingly accepted that their worlds held more intrinsic value than mine did, that art was a narrowly defined thing on which my people — the folks I grew up with in the mobile home park and mi gente — did not weigh in.
Anzaldúa’s theories and poetry changed that for me, which in turn changed my area of study, how I write poetry, and how I move through the world.
It’s not enough
deciding to open.
You must plunge your fingers
Into your navel, with your two hands (1–4)
. . .
It’s not enough
Opening once.
Again you must plunge your fingers
into your navel, with your two hands
rip open,
drop out dead rats and cockroaches
spring rain, young ears of corn.
Turn the maze inside out.
Shake it. (24–32, “Letting Go”)
Part of what I admired about her writing was her ability to communicate so clearly about what she feels are the ailments of “psychic trauma” caused by the repercussions of colonialism passed from generation to generation; thinking not only of herself and her experiences with language and in(ex)clusion, but that of her people: queer folx, Chicana/xs/Latina/xs, the working class, border dwellers of all kinds. Her theory, as well as her poetry, is both academically critical and fundamentally rooted in compassion and empathy for all those who by their mere existence were pressed into living between worlds. Her poetry is the enactment of engaging with what she calls nepantlera — “living in intersections, in cusps, we must constantly operate in a negotiation mode” (71, Luz En Lo Oscuro). To exist between the intersectional interstices of identity with the understanding that no person is one thing or another, but the intersection of many historical and social threads that are incapable of detangling, even while they may be contradictory.
Much like the labor performed by our own hands and those of our family members and ancestors, Anzaldúa’s poetry is never idle. Even when it is fantastical, like “I Had to Go Down” (189) and “Interface” (170–174), the conceit of the poems is rooted in metaphors of self-discovery, sexuality, and spiritualism. Each image reaching out to teach the reader to look at these queer, working-class, Chicana speakers with compassion, yes, but also to turn that compassionate and questioning eye onto themselves.
I was so blinded by my own emotions grappling with the emotional subject matter all those years ago, I didn’t initially see the truth, which was that Anzaldúa’s poetry most certainly has artistry. There are clever and deft uses of metaphor, assonance, consonance, repetition, such beautiful clear images — all the things the poetry I learned in grade school had, all that the canonized poets had. There was no reason her work shouldn’t be read and appreciated right alongside theirs. Anzaldúa’s poetry also teaches us something that I was not taught in school, but wish I had been — how to love ourselves and our communities in ways that embrace our contradictions and hold out esperanza for better inclusion.
Sarah A. Chavez, a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley, is the author of the poetry collections, Hands That Break & Scar (Sundress Publications, 2017) and All Day, Talking (dancing girl press, 2014). Her most recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Xicanx: Mexican American Writers of the 21st Century, IDK Magazine, &Five:2:One #thesideshow. Her new poetry project, Halfbreed Helene Navigates the Whole received a 2019–2020 Tacoma Artists Initiative Award. She recently joined the faculty at the University of Washington Tacoma where she teaches creative writing and Latinx/Chicanx-focused courses. A proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop, Chavez serves as the poetry coordinator for Best of the Net Anthology and is currently practicing riding her first multispeed bicycle up and down the hills of the South Sound.
