A. Ambrosius

Identity Poetics: Las Palabras de la Gente

“Until death do us part, said your eyes, but not your heart . . .

 Your CUCARACHAS will be DEAD”

poetic liberties taken with lines by Sandra Cisneros's

character Rogelio/Flavio

            In this course, and in others I have taken throughout my graduate career, I have learned to see voice as a way, or maybe the way, for people to express what is “inside” to the “outside” or other people. Because people can be fooled by external appearances to determine our treatment of other people, appearance is the first filter for discrimination, in its literal sense as in our ability to tell one thing from another, and discriminatory practice or prejudice, as in racism or sexism. There are many factors that are used to marginalize minority cultures or people from the mainstream of the dominant culture, but one of the basic facts of negative discriminatory prejudice is that humans are visual creatures , and we sort people based on appearance, which has historically been one major, although broad, difference between those in minority groups and dominant-culture US Americans. 

            However, if our eyes may not always reach our brains, many times our ears can reach the bundles of nerves we call our hearts, our souls, or our consciences. This is to say that the voice is one way that one's self can transcend one's appearance or type in order to reach others.   This is beautifully symbolized by Sandra Cisneros's character Flavio Munguía/Rogelio Velasco, the bug killer/poet. Fictionally speaking, he is a fantastic character, but based on my previous experience he also reads true.  For just one example of many as to why this is so, when I taught ESL, I met people who had been computer programmers and  engineers in their home countries. In the US, they play the roles of house painters, or they work in landscaping or construction. Limitations on expressing one's  voice effectively limit the self, which I've seen in the real world as linguistic limitations have constrained my students' abilities to participate in their lives' works.

            Language, for people outside the dominant-culture English, is also a barrier at the same time that it is a medium of social exchange. If this does not suit the assertion that I've read* that language under pressure makes poetry, then I have no idea what would. The pressure of the expression of the voice, when one is endowed with no authority, distorts the words and changes them, which correlates to the concept of voice and choice, and is represented by encoded language that we most commonly encounter in poetry. I think of this graceful mutation in a way that I see the Brazilian martial art of capoeira. This fighting form is set to music, as it was developed by enslaved African people in Brazil and disguised as dance. What looked like group dancing to the uninitiated was actually practice and exercise in movements that enslaved men could use to defeat the armed agents of their oppression. In much the same way, double language works in both the aesthetic sense and the deadly meaningful. This double layering of meaning was beautifully exemplified in Jupiter Hammon's poem, “An Evening Thought.” When Hammon asserts the soul's desire for freedom, pleading “Haste on Tribunal Day” and reminds his fellow believers that “it is firmly fixt his holy Word/Ye shall not cry in vain,” he is not invoking only spiritual freedom and salvation. As Sarah McCall DeLaRosa noted in her spring 2010 final exam submission, “The language in Hammon’s poem is working very hard here.” The worldly, antislavery sentiment had to have been invisible or at least concealed enough to be palatable to the dominant culture of the US in order for his work to be published, but it speaks volumes to the modern reader who has the advantage of cultural hindsight.

            Versification allows for repetition, transmission, and allows information to reach a stage of cultural mimeticism even in “pre-literate” cultures; epic poems, los cuentos and los corridos in Ultima, los retablos in WHC, the prayers, and even the children's rhymes  in Song of Solomon, as well as others represented by the texts across the semester are coded transmissions of information. In them, the high culture is represented as well as that of the folk. Often it is the juxtapositions of the two types of culture (or juxtapositions of multiple cultures) that require, enable, or entail poetic synthesis or represent a hybridity of form. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's poetry and life speak not only of women's concerns, but also spirituality and class as Rachel Risinger noted in her spring 2010 final exam essay submission. Sor Juana represents a woman with unusual opportunities for her time and culture, as “she is an educated woman” which marginalizes her in her own culture (Risinger).    Her poetry studied alongside of Sandra Cisneros's folksy retablo devotions represents the syncretic multilayering of classes, but also of spiritualities.

            Even a text as apparently unpoetic as The Best Little Boy in the World demonstrates the language of metaphor and multiplicity, even when it concerns that which people do not speak of. The fact that TBLBITW's family does not speak of their “private parts” is on the surface par for the course for a “normal” white upper-class family of the time period. However, it is also metonymic for the fact that these people do not discuss what is done with these body parts, whether the functions are excretory or sexual. In another layer of meaning, queerness is the indefinable thing, and has been characterized as a love “that dare not speak its name,” so there is another layer of willful ignorance related to TBLBITW's “parts.” Additionally, the narrator of the story makes it quite clear, in a way, what he desires when he writes that his desire is “to be cowboys” with someone. This is the song that Whitman describes only a little more obliquely as that of “manly attachment,” and “athletic love.” Whitman and Andrew Tobias express their own desires in code, but their voices also queer the mainstream conception and stereotype of limp-wristed, effete attachments and loves between men.

            As a teacher, the example of linguistic pressure and identity that has remained with me since the class discussion is Pat Mora's “Senora X No More.” I particularly enjoyed my colleague Jean Cahn's reading of the piece, and I felt that the class discussion that passed through the poem yielded significant insights. As we determined in class, Mora evokes the Ur-classroom, the nurturing teacher aspect of the feminine, and the frustrations of the mature who are trying to get the language, the medium of social exchange that floats like “bubbles from their children's mouths” in only a few bare lines. However, it is the poem's title assertion that stands out as the central point of this student's efforts; “X” as the signifier for people who don't have written literacy is also a negation or a mutable variable used to represent identity. Mora's character does not only desire to gain language for assimilation, she wishes to know it in order to make herself, as we all do.

* The definition of poetry as language under pressure is attributed to Robert Frost, which is to say that the notion is probably pretty well endorsed in Establishment Poetry.