Writing Archive

IMAGINE THE MONSTERS OF ROCK

This past Saturday, I planned readings for my dying Latino Lit class and plied my living-room table with books and note-scraps like votives for altares and antepasados.

I thumbed through a book I had not read in years, by East Coast Puerto Rican poet Martín Espada: Imagine the Angels of Bread (WW Norton & Co., 1996). It had been sitting at the Borders in Uptown, overlooking skid row on the mend, an echo of Espada's urban landscapes of coughing radiators and rusted cast-off dragons. On the bus home, even titles of these poems prodded fits I could barely contain, laughter and tears and heartache, titles such as his poem for Central American activist Demetria Martínez: "Sing in the Voice of a God Even Atheists Can Hear." And titles absurd ("Do Not Put Dead Monkeys in the Freezer"), fierce ("Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Food Stamps"), and transcendent ("Hands Without Irons Become Drangonflies").

I read the title poem out loud in lit this past summer, trying to keep my voice from trembling: "this is the year/ that shawled refugees deport judges/ who stare at the floor/ and their swollen feet/ ... This is the year that those who swim the border's undertow/ and shiver in boxcars/ are greeted with trumpets and drums/ at the first railroad crossing/ on the other side."

And so, on Saturday morn, I read these pieces out loud at my table, in between records I had been spinning in a nostalgic fit of hard-rock mayhem, with Van Halen and AC/DC weaving a strange kinaesthesia of rhythms on the brain through Espada's cadences and images. I wondered how to translate my own sense of hybrid ethnic Americanism into an exciting class, with Love & Rockets comic books and lines like "I went/ to the suburban school,/ embroidered guayabera/ short sleeved shirt/ over a turtleneck,/ and said, Look kids,/ cultural adaptation" ("My Native Costume" Espada).

I wanted to show off "My Native Costume" of ironic post-ideological Chicanismo and hybrid pochismo by way of Tex(t)-Mex, stuff they once called nuevo wavo or plain-old rascuache. You know: ROCK! But my class was cancelled today. Only three students had signed up.

Just about the only response to the class was an inquiry this summer from someone at the college who grilled me about my cultural credentials. I tried to keep the conversation from devolving into an argument, but the woman from South America wanted me to speak perfect Spanish and talk about magical realism. Like Richard Rodriguez quips in his "Brown Study," "Trust me, there has been little magical realism in my life since my first trip to Disneyland." (Actually, I've only been to Disneyworld.)

I wanted to share with students quotes like the following from Ed Morales, and talk about Spanish-v.-English: "isn't this just an arcane exercise in preserving European flourishes in an American hemisphere that is moving quickly into the future? The fetishizing of pure Spanish only serves a colonial mindset, preventing Latinos from participating in the more dynamic, adaptable world of English. Spanglish is Spanish adapting the crazy rhythms of English, and English inheriting the multicultural content of Latin America" (Living in Spanglish).

I wanted to talk about hemispheric convergence and the full meaning of "America" as the joyously flawed yet vibrant and participatory place in which we find ourselves now, savoring the rich "loco slam," as a slightly tipsy black woman once put it at the AM Factory soul-hut — you know, the funk parlor that used to sit behind Ronnie's Steak Palace downtown...?

I wanted to relish and delight in the transnational Americanism of poets like Espada, who can juggle beautiful allusions to Pablo Neruda with U.S. pop references:

The only

aliens

we like

are the ones

on Star Trek,

'cause

they all

speak

English

—"Governor Wilson of California Talks in His Sleep"

Though I looked forward to celebrating such notions with my lit students, I felt nervous at the challenge, the chance to guide discussions that might have been squelched at a Stanford activist meeting, shouted down with nationalist repetition, or neglected for lack of recognition and relevance to the political exigencies of the immigration debate. Espada's revenge poem about "The Foreman's Wallet" tells what I wanted to do with nationalism and politics: "we shrink-wrapped the foreman's wallet,/ gleaming in the fresh plastic/ like a pound of hamburger."

So I'll put away the essays by Rubén Martínez and that "all-girl road novel thing" by Erika López, the short stories by "la Sandra" and anthologies of so many Chicanos and Boricuas, even the monologues of Freddie Prinze and John Leguizamo, the lyrics of Presley impersonator El Vez. I'll keep reading Espada. And I'll wait for my next chance to turn some lit up to "ELEVEN" and talk about the relevance of Led Zepplin to Mexican-American poetics. ¡ESE!

"IS YA'LL READY FOR SOME POETRY, MUTHAF****S?!"
—Mos Def

Posted by Benjamin at August 23, 2006 05:07 PM