Somewhere in the world there are twins named Center and Edge

I was surprised to read of the large Arab communities in Michigan and Pennsylvania. A white child raised on canon-authorized history books thinks of these states as centers of (white) American industry - steel manufacturing and coal mining. How enlightening to find that, like Florida and California, relatively recent (and not so recent) immigrant populations are scratching out a living, maybe even thriving, in these bastions of "American" identity.

I was taken by Samuel Hazo's language and form. His lines breathe with calm intelligence, a worldly awareness, and make the infuriatingly overlooked logically undeniable. While I cannot recreate them here - my lack of blog formatting knowledge disallows it - his line breaks inform the poems' content. I speak specifically of those that begin in the blank space beneath the end of the preceding line. This deliberate spacing technique acknowledges division and connection, the edge and its center.

In "Intifada," the final four stanzas demonstrate this visual message. Each idea is separated from one above, marking division of thought, perhaps individual minds working (or not working) on the same befuddlement. And yet the next begins, separate, though standing in the echo of the one above, demonstrating connection, its logical follow, until we reach the end and he has walked us through the scattered links in the chain, and given the dense and disconnected an example they cannot deny: "Like someone buried / upright and alive, anyone / trapped there would stop at nothing."

The idea of center and edge is constantly shifting turf. In one way, the rebel movement achieves its prize and becomes the idea the next generation rebels against. For marginalized cultures fighting for swimming room in the mainstream, the anchor line cuts both ways. For to achieve livelihood, food for family, stability among pressures, to reach for the center of the dominant culture is to choose the edge of one's own. To remain entrenched (whether by choice or not) in the culture of one's ancestors, if these ancestors are not white, is to be sequestered on the edge, or pushed over it. To be the child of an immigrant and born in this country is to have no land to put your foot down, to have traded backbone for new language and lighter skin. (of course I'm only saying that it feels this way to the dispossessed, not that 1st, 2nd, or 3rd generation Americans are weak by virtue of being born here.)

Jack Marshall speaks of all of these interpretations of center and edge in "The Home-Front," where he writes of watching his father's people subjugated by the adopted country, feeling both a part of the subjugators and dominators. "If eyes don't lie, / who will not see his own / child's face in theirs, stark / beauty of things in peril, more alarmingly / alive looking out of the ditch / than we looking in?" Safe here, with only racism to combat, not tanks and land mines, there is something bland about life, something less alive than being faced with the possibility of losing life every day. Here, they are the edge; for them, they are the center. Perspective shifts as location shifts, and sides are always changing.

Khaled Mattawa, in "Echo & Elixer 3," a lament on the hollow space between homes, between edge and center, creates an interesting observation on belonging, its transience and the essential elements of proximity and perspective. "You take a blade of grass / and for a second / you are a citizen of its taste." Referring perhaps to a dominance, a violence, in "taking" the grass and biting it, the aggressor turns to subject as the juice it provides makes one, for a moment, "of" the grass. But also perhaps, referring to the arbitrary nature of citizenship. Are we "from" only the place we are born (or the place our skin shouts)? And if this can change by leaving, how does it change upon return?

How the center one desires changes when faced with a culture his name says he belongs to, yet one he does not know. David Dominguez speaks of this shift, and the different kind of longing it brings, in "Framework." He writes, "I want to be the kind of man who changes / his oil and brakes in the driveway, / [...] a man who knows plumbing, electricity, concrete. / Instead skinny men from Mexico, / with fire and muscle in their forearms and fists / maintain my cars and build my house." Mainstreamed, able to afford cars (plural) and a house, but just barely, as poems listed earlier in his section of the anthology tell, he longs for manual skills and knowledge that only those who must do for themselves attain. The center here has become the edge, and he can only peer in longingly.

Sheryl Luna speaks of my personal edge to my family's center in "Learning to Speak." Language is not only a barrier for those trying to assimilate, but also for those trying to re-similate. It keeps outsiders on the edge, maintains the center. This is perhaps why the Spanish sought to destroy the languages of the Amerindians, burning the books of the tribes they found on islands and the interior of the "new" land, why the English beat Hawaiian children (and many others) into submission. "He waits for my voice. / His eyes generations." When one loses language, they lose the link to thousands of years of heritage. To compound this loss, their skins or their names say they should already know - they cannot speak to ask, and shame keeps them on the edge longing for a center.

This class should be required. Poets of Color should be a prerequisite for every major offered on this campus. World community, reveling in difference, communing in connection. To undo unknowing, how can education begin before this?

Here is my tribute to making a center on the edge:

All the pops on my street
are firecrackers.
Suns rise for honor,
arch on sacrifice.

Sisters aren't mamis
but healers, they
dress in discs of onyx and rosewood
Korean copper, Honduran gold

Here's what crusaders couldn't tell you:
Belief is a choice
Defiance a seed
of possibility

My mind and my heart sow
light laughter fervently
so we might reap
silence at night.