Complicating the Story

"...to be perfectly clear,/ my enemies are not hungry." -Aracelis Girmay

If you know Aracelis, it's hard to imagine her with enemies.  Lately, I think I understand.  Empathy, which she has in spades, makes all the difference.  I wonder most days where our collective empathy has gone.  I wonder where my home is going. 

A poet makes linkages to things.  A poet is a creator.  This is the root of the word Poetry:  poeisis, from the Greek, a making or creating. 

If I wasn't a poet I would at least be suspicious.  If I wasn't someone who was interested in history, I'd like to think my ear would be disturbed, at least.  But I'm a poet.  Age 34.  I have a long way to go in this world (I'd like to think) and there are things about this country that truly frighten me.  Not enough to leave it.  Enough to shape it, reshape it, maybe.

The last year has been a steady stream of bad news.  Literally, news.  The news media reports these things, and we're supposed to make sense out of it.  They try to help, but they rarely do.  And I think that's because the news largely lacks historical context, obviously, but it's a lack of the right kind of historical context. 

This is what my brain looks like today:  The attack on the undocumented in Arizona.  The defeat of the DREAM Act.  The attack on ethnic studies in Arizona.  The fact that it loops back to Arizona.  Banned Latino books.  The shooting of Representative Giffords.  The Republican Presidential candidates.  The tea party.  Trayvon Martin.  War, endless.  The defense budget.  Firing teachers.  Trayvon Martin.  Trayvon Martin.  Trayvon Martin.

There is much to be said about this, both as a political question and as a literary one— a question which I have come to know as one in the same: Otherness is the central issue of American existence.   

Call it race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, what you will:  the dominant classes seek to define that which is wholly American, and shun all else.  The idea is that there is one American narrative, one center, one standard, and that the things that deviate must be made to conform, or be destroyed.  This is the mentality that led to lynching and segregation.  It also led to the construction of the classic American capitalist work ethic, the American dream, and the related continuation of Cold War troop levels that have placed American soldiers on every continent, in 150 countries.  It's a mentality that leads to neighborhood watches, police brutality, and dead unarmed teens.  And it is wholly and utterly incorrect. 

Our inability to see stories from outside what we are presented is directly responsible for violence in this country.  That's not my theory, it's bell hooks'.  It's Baldwin.  We are living in the era of The Fire Next Time.  And as such, it is incumbent upon the poets, the writers, to rethink the stories that are given to us daily.   

Because we must.  Because we define language, which in turn defines the world itself.  Without language, there is no scientific theory.  Without good storytelling devices, there is no molecular physics, no theory of relativity.  With words, we create the world, break it down into its component parts, and reconfigure it, every single day.  If you don't believe me, look to Shakespeare's language and life philosophies, which are present in his plays.  You know them like the back of your hand, because we have incorporated his sayings into our lexicon.  You may be doing so without even knowing it.  Poets are more than unacknowledged legislators.  Poets are creators.  We always have been.

There is no one central American story.  There is no one center.  There are thousands of centers.  If it is a poem, it is an anthology.  If it is a book, it is a series of books.  If it is a story, it is a complicated story.

Poets, when you write, you must check yourselves.  You must complicate the story.  You must take what the nation knows about the American dream and explode it into a million unique pieces.  This is why we have a thing called Latino literature.  Latina literature.  African-American literature.  Gay lit.  Feminist lit.  It is not racist, or counterproductive, to look at ourselves as a community while at the same time pondering how we mesh with the society at large.  We don't end the notion of otherness by pretending it doesn't exist.  You can't throw punches in the dark.  Where we fail, perhaps, is when we fail to address the dominant culture, to challenge their assumptions to their faces, and even challenge our own assumptions, while we fight the various good fights.

In the coming weeks, I want to delve into these questions of otherness, and examine where our politics and our poetry intersect, and see about complicating the story.

Good night for now.  Or, good morning?

Louis Reyes Rivera on the A Train To Harlem

1

At 42nd Street, this family of French hipsters boarded the uptown A train.  The daughter, who couldn't have been more than 16, pulled out a stuffed purple bear from a paper bag and nuzzled its face, leaning up against the door, not seeing or caring that anyone was watching.  Her sisters made fun of her in French.  Her mother and father smiled knowingly.  Then she pounced on the first open seat she could find once the train emptied at 59th Street.  I thought to myself, this could be her first trip to Harlem, or her fortieth. 

Baby girl is definitely dressed the part:  smart ankle-length boots, black cashmere waistcoat, pink scarf, black fedora with a stylish black flower, velvety, adorned with a silver butterfly in the center.  And her dad seemed to be straight out of a French jazz club:  leather waist-length jacket, dark blue jeans, perfectly shined black square toes.  Bald head.  World-weary.  The sisters and the mother could have been in a Bennetton ad.  There was a lot of hair among the three of them.

Why did I think "hipster" when I saw them?  Well, the image of the hipster started with white kids in the 1940's; who wore pork pie hats and snapped fingers along with Charlie Parker and Lester Young; the white kids who wanted to follow and emulate the black musicians they idolized.  Jack Kerouac knew hipsters.  Allen Ginsberg called them angel-headed.  Nowadays, I move out of their way when they bar hop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or Fishtown, Philadelphia.  I hate hipsters because none of them know Bird anymore, and they generally mean gentrification, but then I say to myself, what makes you any better?  You can't afford to live here, but you would if you could. 

The French family leaves the train at 125th Street, and I imagine what they encounter on their walk east:  The Studio Museum.  Starbucks.  Manna's.  The Apollo Theater.  The Adam Clayton Powell Building.  Jimmy Jazz.  The Golden Krust.  Starbucks.  H&M.  I wonder if they're on their way home.  I wonder if their on their way to LaGuardia Airport, and a ride home to some flat in Paris.  I wonder if they know what a hipster is.

2

When someone said that Louis Reyes Rivera had passed away in his sleep, I was annoyed at first, because the news cycle kills celebrities prematurely every day.  I hate rumors.  But then I think, Louis was not a celebrity in that way, so why would anyone make that up?  I shoot an email to Shaggy Flores, certain he would know for sure, since he is Louis' mentee, and he named an award after the man.  It was the first Shaggy had heard of it.  Suddenly, I'm the one spreading rumors.  But Shaggy calls Louis' wife, Barbara, and it is not rumor anymore.  Louis is gone.  And Shemal Books is gone.  And "Cu-Bop," and "Bullet Cry," and Jazz in Jail.  Gone.  Then I think of Tony Medina, his co-editor on Bum Rush the Page.  I think of August 2003, at the Acentos reading, where I first met Louis, and where Louis held court and signed books for impromptu students in a cipher on 139th Street in Mott Haven.  I think of November 2011, me freshly divorced, when he said:  "Hey.  It happens, brother.  You still doing that workshop in the Bronx?" 

And suddenly, there is a void.  And I log on to Facebook, where everyone is standing on the corner, so to speak, simultaneously posting clips of Louis from YouTube.  This is how we find things out in the internet age.  This is how we are shocked, how we wail, how we begin to mourn.  We are simultaneously lucky and unlucky.  Louis belonged to us, to the poets who looked up to him, even to the scholars who feared him, and definitely to the history of New York.  And he belonged, as he/we would say, to the Independent People's Republic of Brooklyn.  Believe that.

My phone died on the train from Jersey.  Just as well, I suppose.  I spend 45 minutes thinking about Louis and his legacy, wondering what needs to be done, what needs to be written, what needs to be defined and catalogued.  Documentation is a behavior I learned from him.  Archive is a survival instinct he tried to teach us all,

 

3

so of course the word hipster climbs into my brain in the context of some jolly Europeans on an A train to Harlem.  I know history, and I know etymology, not because I find it a cute hobby, or something to do on my lunch break, but because Louis Reyes Rivera at one time nurtured in me a curiosity for the human condition that I seek to satisfy daily, in and out of books.  In film.  In poetry.  In visual art.  And not just curiosity, but social justice:  that concept that not a lot of folk from the dominant culture are very keen on.  So I find myself on an uptown A train, thinking of Louis, thinking of gentrification and 125th Street, and preparing myself to view Precious Knowledge, a documentary film on the end of ethnic studies in Tucson, Arizona. 

At the gallery space, an independent gallery space called Azucarera, we are simultaneously surprised and unsurprised at the rank racism on display from the right wing power brokers in the state of Arizona.  At the beginning of the night, a conch shell is passed by a former teacher in the Tucson Unified School District, and we are asked to remember an ancestor.  I am, for the first time, choked up as I invoke Louis' name, and I did so because Louis knew that the poet is an cultural worker, that the two need not be mutually exclusive.  Because he was knee-deep in the fight for Ethnic Studies at CUNY in the 1960's.  Because so was his friend, the poet Sekou Sundiata, and because Louis and Tony Medina published Sekou, along with dozens of my peers, in a volume called Bum Rush the Page.  Because these are the poets I am still in awe of.  The teacher blows the conch shell, in an independent gallery space in the middle of Harlem, and I am aware that this is what Louis gave his life to:  the idea that we need not ask for permission to honor, and teach, and fight. 

Louis Reyes Rivera will always be the gold standard.  The day I grew the cojones to disagree with him is the day I felt ready to assert my identity as a poet, with all the responsibility that word entails.  I am confident in his legacy, and I am confident it will be set down to paper, because he did so, and he taught us well, and he taught us to remember, never to forget.  And because he said the title Jazz in Jail so many times, because Tony Medina is a scholar to all-be-damned, and because there is a generation of us who knew Louis was our own personal Afro-Latino Yoda, I know the man is still alive, and chillin' on the A train to Nostrand, a cane in one hand and Scattered Scripture in the other.

4

I am writing this piece in Nyack, New York, right around the corner from Edward Hopper's house and Nyack Beach.  The moon is out over the Hudson, there is a jazz soundtrack in the cafe, and there are million-dollar homes five minutes from two independent bookstores and a fine chocolatier.  The place is as idyllic, meditative, and sleepy as Nighthawks, the iconic diner painting that was Hopper's magnum opus. 

There are two white men to my right discussing the American preoccupation with the horror genre in literature and film.  One of them is waxing philosophical, and slightly long-winded, on how the moment we came to our disastrous consciousness in the racial politics and war footing of the 1850's and beyond, we filled our artistic psyches with The Cask of Amontillado, the stories and theories of dark continents and darker people, yellow journalism, zombies, Jim Crow, and Birth of a Nation.  I am fascinated by this discussion, and I join in, mentioning how Mat Johnson investigated Edgar Allen Poe, and this particularly American anxiety of otherness and literature, in his novel Pym.  And I mention Louis Reyes Rivera, who always said that racism was a sickness, one that went back to the first Spanish sailors in Puerto Rico to hear the word "Taino," which was not a name, but a warning.  Back to the first Spanish soldier who set incredulous eyes on Tecnochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, a civilization so advanced, they could barely describe it. 

The verbose one, a white man, a local artist and scholar who may have been any nationality on the planet, begins to reminisce on the time he met Louis at WBAI; and he deconstructs for me, the angry Puerto Rican poet, the myth of the American dream; and how white people were those allegorical Platonic cave dwellers who stole history from Africa, and the Americas, in a fit of rage and jealousy; and how this is the history of Western Civilization, the very same one that Arizona now seeks to strip from the children of Tucson, all children. 

This is too good to be true, and I decide this is going to be the end of the essay.  Until his companion, who to this point had been quietly writing down names and web links, responds to an offhand comment I'd made about white picket fences:

"Put this in your essay.   The white picket fence is where we have impaled ourselves."

5

Louis Reyes Rivera.  Presente.

More on Tucson, more on Latino literature, more on Librotraficante.

Six more clips from the John Jay panel on the Librotraficante movement and the Tucson banned book issue. The clips are from founders Tony Diaz, Bryan Parras, and Liana Lopez. They have a thriving organization for Latino literature (hey, I like em already!) in Houston, TX, called Nuestra Palabra. Check them out, and check out the clips below.

We Are All Librotraficantes: On the Banning of Books in Tucson, Arizona

This past Saturday, I was privileged to take part in a panel at John Jay College addressing the ban on Mexican-American Studies in Tucson, Arizona. Over 80 books, the vast majority of which are books by Latina/o authors, are now effectively banned in the Tucson school district.

With me at the panel were the novelist Sergio Troncoso, whose book The Last Tortilla and Other Stories is on Tucson's banned list; as well as the members of a remarkable movement called Librotraficante, which has sprung up within the last month to combat these bans. Professor Tony Diaz of the University of Houston, and radio producers and hosts Bryan Parras and Liana Lopez, have come together to create a caravan of banned books that are slated to be trafficked BACK into Arizona from Texas, into four (at last count) underground libraries which will exist to celebrate, and provide students and the public with access to, the sacred literature which Tucson now wishes to toss into the incinerator.

Anyone with interest in combatting this genocidal action by the Tucson school district should visit Librotraficante on the web, where you can contribute to the caravan, contact the organizers, and find ways to make your voice known.

Make no mistake: facism is alive and well, and the State of Arizona harbors it. We have not forgotten SB 1070.  And we will not forget this.  Unless we step up now to combat facism, it will bubble the surface elsewhere, like a bad memory.  (It already has.)  Do not stand still now.

In the meantime, have a look at two clips from Saturday's panel discussion, from myself and from Sergio. I will post more clips as they become available. 

A big word of thanks to the intrepid Erasmo Guerra, who was on hand to document the event and who posted these clips to YouTube. 

Homecoming.

I have a thing for the moon.

I used to do this trip quite a bit when I was a baby poet. I used to think I'd finally gotten my city dweller card when I made it down there without an automobile.  Tarrytown Metro-North train to Grand Central. Cross to the 4 train, one stop to Union Square. Forget where the carajo I'm going. End up on 4th Avenue. Lose sense of direction. Curse self. Wonder what those scrolling numbers on the building mean. One block over to University Place. One block down to 13th Street. Stop at slamming pizza joint. Eat slamming pizza. Over to 35 E. 13th Street. Climb 37,189 steps to Bar 13. Easy!

There was a waxing crescent moon in the sky last night, which means it is approaching full. Apt metaphor for me as I stepped out of the subway in Union Square yesterday, this time in the correct spot, gathering my strength. That moon had followed me all the way down the Hudson Valley outside the train window, I was certain. Just as certain as it followed me on the walk from my car to my apartment in East Orange, New Jersey. Or Paterson. Or Highland Park, when I was three. I sat at a bench, fully 45 minutes early for the festivities, and put my head back, and closed my eyes. Years before this, I'd be sweaty and disorganized, worrying about what I was going to read, shuffling the papers in my bag until I found the right order of poems. I still get nervous, but the shakes come much earlier now, so I am able to be present, and calm, when the reading approaches.

Ten minutes on the bench, and the dude next to me taps me on the shoulder. He is, apparently, a person who saw me host a reading with Rosa Alcala at McNally Jackson books, which means I'm probably now the second writer from Paterson he has met in person. Kudos are given for my insightful questions. I invite him to my reading, and get a big thumbs up in response. Awesome! Do you, man! That's wonderful! What are the odds, I wonder. Maybe that's what the giant numbers on the building are calculating. Fully convinced that I am the king of New York—and fully aware that Union Square doesn't give a shit—I get up and step away to East 13th.

Thirty thousand steps later, and I am at the doorway of the place that nurtured my earliest urges to curse out rappers who worship Che Guevara. I was still in my twenties when I started. I was alive, but rife with insecurities.  Almost too alive. In 2004, when I briefly considered the prospect of doing harm to myself, I did so because the poems, and all the self-examination they entailed, made me feel a sense of hyper-awareness that no one told me to be ready for. My ears, my eyes, my skin, were all turned up to maximum volume. I could hear and taste every extra syllable and salt particle. It was both unbearable, and exhilarating.

Since 2003, this was my epicenter: a bar near NYU, usually well-attended, even on Monday, and almost always full of the poets I'd either seen on HBO or the previous Friday at the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe. Other spaces would follow for me. But it was the Monday night reading that set me on the path to perdition, and it is always the moon that leads me.

I am feeling alive as I enter the room. Only, beautifully, alive. I am not on edge, or breathing heavily, or noticably sweating. And I am divorced, a fact that several friends had not known about until the awkward question. I handled it with far more grace than I would have been capable of in October, another fact of my life, relatively simple. I did not drink, though I know I could have. I did not sit, because that was never my habit before a reading. There were new friends present, and all of them knew the words to Nadie Como Ella. My old friends loved me newly. And I was in love with the moon, like I always was, and for the first time in years, I used that voice to speak.

What did I read? Poems, of course. What else do you do when you're home?

New.

Many things are new in my life these days. This blog is new. We'll start here.

This poem first appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly. Thanks to editor Francisco Aragon for including it in the journal's Floricanto issue.

I am thinking today of Tucson, my family, and the various loves of my life. Enjoy. Tonight, there will be more to say.


Always Here

lacking a proper entrance
into a poem
about Arizona Senate Bill 1070
prompts me instead
to tell you

about the flamboyanes blooming
in Doña Yeya's mouth
every time she speaks
about her children,
or the pasteles that do not
wrap themselves
until blood is offered to the masa,
or the boys she sent to Germany,
who came back headless
and quoting Bible verses
or the girls
with thirteen years of bruises
at the hands of those same boys
who were told asi es la vida
without the slightest sense of irony
who shouldered Nuyorican babies
dutifully to Bayamón
dreaming about a nation
under which they cannot
legally claim citizenship
or parrandas of gold stomping
flat the Jersey snow
forgetting that coquito never meant
cold weather
or the act of forgetting
beneath every aguinaldo,

because civil cafesito
and politics cannot coexist
and we do not question
our birth certificates
unless we are agents of Homeland Security
because we were born American citizens
and as such are eligible to die
at a higher rate
in exchange for houses in Orlando
that we do not own.
There are Puerto Ricans
in Arizona and New York and Nebraska and,
I promise you,
good gente, it makes no difference
if your grandmother conjures
Michoacan or Mayaguez
in her flowered breath, it makes
no difference
if you bless the four winds
or pray to San Juan Bautista,

to those who only see papers
and brown flesh, who cannot
locate your cities on the maps
of conquerors or conquered,

you are a threat,

and if this is the case,
gente, I say,
be a threat. Unquieted,
bloom where you are not permitted
to bloom. Disjointed,
walk anywhere you please, stumble
if you must, but be present.
And when they ask you
where you keep your company,
tell them here, here,
always here.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: An Anthology of Latino/a Literature from 2003-Present

Please forward this note to all relevant parties.



June 4, 2011


CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Acentos is a community-based organization fostering audiences for Latino/a literature through the discussion, promotion, teaching, performance, and publication of work by Latino and Latina writers. In our various incarnations, we have been a reading series, an online journal, and a poetry workshop.

We will be recording this work in an as-yet-untitled anthology chronicling nearly a decade of our efforts to highlight and develop Latino and Latina writing, without translation or apology, from our homes in the South Bronx.

This book will document the history of the organization and showcase the depth of Latino poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in the years since Acentos was founded. The writers represented in the archive of Acentos participants—in its readings, workshops, and public events—represent the deepest possible cross-section of genres, styles, and ethnicities; from the academic to the non-academic; from text to ear to all schools of Latino and Latina writers. This book will seek to complicate and deepen the narratives that make up the labels Latino and Latina literature; it will provide an alternative piece of scholarship for students and teachers of literature to (re)consider the American literary canon; and it will remind its readers that pan-Latino/a identity and solidarity in the literary world and the world at large has a home in the South Bronx. In Acentos.

If you have been a featured reader for the Acentos Bronx Poetry Showcase from 2003 to the present, if you have written poetry in the Acentos Writers' Workshops, if you have been a participant on an Acentos reading or panel, or if you have been published in The Acentos Review, we invite you to send your work to the editors, Rich Villar and Oscar Bermeo, at the email address acentosanthology@gmail.com.

Deadline for all submissions is August 31, 2011.


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

-For your work to be considered for publication, you must have a) been a featured reader at the Acentos Bronx Poetry Showcase between 2003 and the present; b) published work in The Acentos Review; c) attended at least four sessions of the Acentos Writers' Workshops or been a fellow in one of its two intensive workshops, OR d) been a participant in a public reading or panel sponsored by Acentos.

-Your cover letter is the body of the email you use to submit work. In it, please indicate where you fall in the above rubric.

-All submissions must be emailed, submitted as an attachment in .doc, .docx, or .pdf formats only.

-In the subject line, please indicate the genre you are submitting to, followed by a comma, followed by your full name. (Example: POETRY, John Doe)

-Submissions in multiple genres are okay, BUT please send your submissions to each genre in separate emails.

-Please include your name, snail mail address, email address, and daytime telephone number on the header of each page of the submission, and number each page.

-Though we definitely prefer unpublished work, we will consider previously published work, as outlined below:


FOR POETRY: Three to five poems in a manuscript no more than ten (10) pages in length. Poems submitted may either be unpublished poems, or poems previously published with the Acentos Review, or work published within the last two years from the date of this call, properly attributed.

FOR FICTION: One or two pieces, 500-7500 words in length. Pieces may either be unpublished pieces, or pieces previously published with the Acentos Review, or pieces published within the last two years from the date of this call, properly attributed.

FOR NONFICTION: One or two pieces, 500-2000 words in length. Pieces may either be unpublished pieces, or pieces previously published with the Acentos Review, or pieces published within the last two years from the date of this call, properly attributed.


Thank you all in advance for your time and talent, and we look forward to hearing from each and every one of you. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the editors anytime at acentosanthology@gmail.com.

Saludos,

Rich Villar and Oscar Bermeo
Editors