Marian Haddad has my full attention this week. She and I are having a great conversation about what it means to identify (or not identify) through place. Starting with the title, I am drawn in because I've lived in the bay area for 16 months and often find myself saying, "I have no history here."
It often feels like I no longer belong to Florida, but that I don't quite belong to California either. This line of thinking brings me to lots of questions about how identity and place work together. I'm Floridian and always will be in many ways, but I also find that I am very much "of" the east bay.
So is identity about what we identify with/as?
Haddad suggests that it has something to do with length of time,
nothing but a year
and a few months of turning
She then goes on to suggest that where we make our home
I have made a home
in a land I never knew
and where we write ourselves is who we are,
I am starting to write myself
down inscribe myself
later she talks about shedding her "southwest skin" and I feel her in that moment of deciding what to keep and what to drop quietly into the grass.
For me, identity is about the micro and the macro, so when I step back and look at this poem with a wider lens, I wonder what the poem does when/if we change the "I" to "We". When I make this shift, the micro moments no longer stand out. Instead, the last five stanzas become an identity of the "we".
something quiet
about this place
this is no desert
the air here is damp
water seems present
where water is not
my southwest skin
has scaled off
dropping quietly
into this grass
place starts to take on an identity. It has sound and it feels and we can see it and hear it and if we back up three stanzas, we can taste it,
are we not all welcome
in this salty land by sea
Haddad reminds me that identity exists on many levels from the "i" to the "I" to the "We" and with those, there is the spectator and the participator and identity can be different depending on which "-tor" you happen to be.
I'm struggling with the concept of "Identity" in my poetry (yes, capital 'I') so when I come across poems that deal with it in fresh and unexpected ways, I am fascinated and inspired at the same time. This poem does that for me.
Hopefully our discussion this week will spark (or fuel) further conversation about the role of identity in our own writing and dealings with the world.
peacelovelight
Kiala
Showing posts with label Identity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Identity. Show all posts
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Us & Them(s)
Like Shel, I've been sitting with this piece by Perez-Wendt for a few days, wondering how it is we are meant to access the poem. “We Are Not the Crime / We Are the Evidence” is such a pointed title that it took me many reads to even begin absorbing what was going on inside the frame. I think perhaps the title is supposed to have that effect, the proverbial “stick ‘em up” moment of having a gun pointed in your direction. When I read it, I froze. I couldn’t remember anything that happened afterwards. I couldn’t really tell you any specifics about the initial encounter of the title, either, except to say that I sucked in my breath. Perez-Wendt turns the tables here, puts us (the general, the canon, the capital-u Us) on defense for once.
What’s interesting about the beginning of the poem is that without the title, it would be an easy access point. Like Shel mentioned, there is an intuitive understanding of a nursery rhyme here, or at the very least, a sing-song sway between punctuation. “They’ve dusted us / From toe to top / Well nigh / Two hundred years;” and we breathe, then begin again. She accomplishes this by shortening that third line and accenting in a way that drives forward motion. “Well nigh” (as well as “All over us” in the next section) has a forward lean to it, a momentum that helps us through “Two hundred years;” (and through “Uncontroverted, clear;”). Perez-Wendt is a master in these moments, truly schooling the form and working it for her benefit.
What’s happening while she’s linguistically manipulating us? The dusting of a people, specifically Hawaiian I think, over the entire period of the missionary occupation leading up to and through the (unconsensual) annexing by the United States in 1898. The searching for blame, even today, as Hawaiian is still rapidly eaten up and swallowed away by the imperialist language that, while no longer “required” there, has injected its colonial venom and is slowly wiping out history. “They’ve dusted us,” the speaker says, only to find “their fingerprints / All over us / Uncontroverted, clear.”
This is not a new story – the searching for a group or people or person or culture or whatever to blame for “substandard” or “uncivilized” or “urban” or “inner-city” living, only to find that the ones trying to point the finger are, in fact, the ones to blame.
“They’ve kicked the chair / From under us,” the speaker continues, “Acquitted themselves well.” The repetition that follows supports this recycling of history. The powerful and imperialistic repeatedly pull out the chair from under an area or people they have invited to “sit down,” if you will, and then look the other way when the area or people fall on their asses.
Perez-Wendt goes on, using the same imagery, but changing the metaphor of the chair. It goes from representing bailing on some kind of assistance, to stealing the chair (& thereby appropriating, like the US appropriates so many cultures for monetary gain). She doesn’t bother with the rest; there is too much to list. In the last two repetitions of this impacted triplet, we finally get the emotion. “Ignored the tolling bell,” whether that is a warning bell or an alarm bell, it doesn’t matter because both apply to the US, who has both continued to take from a country well past the point of subsistence, and continued to disregard requests (or rulings or laws or peace treaties) to stop its abuse after they’ve been made. They’ve “Consigned themselves to hell,” she writes, before volunteering “Etc. etc.” The poem doesn’t need more examples at this point, but including the “etc” really drives home that she would need more pages than available to really get into the wrongdoings. What’s important here, though, is that she has made her point that “We Are Not the Crime / We Are the Evidence.”
Just as a final note, there’s an interesting juxtaposition here of Us & Them. The “They”s aren’t clear and I’m not sure they have to be. Who is on Hawaii’s side except Hawaii? The United States (post-annexation) is what made Hawaii into a tourist destination, crowding its islands with vacationers and co-opting its culture for profit. The title infuses us with the idea of cause and effect and it would seem that Perez-Wendt is arguing that the only effects are visible in Hawaii, making everything else a cause. I only mention this because the “They” has multiple identities in this poem, showing up in a variety of faces and roles, while the “Us” stays the same. Even within the repetition, the Us never changes, but the lines including They are always different. Great technique, I think, for showing the tally marks building against Us.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Haddad & Identity
Thanks for the very directed reading response questions, Identity group—I’m excited to go deeper into these twelve poems on Tuesday! (Especially Camillo’s “The Monster of the Dead”, which I didn’t have space to blog about – his crying for the immortality of the doll, the beauty of the wine, the transparency of its glass – amazing stuff!)
When considering how these poets create or challenge identity in their pieces, I thought of Marian Haddad’s “Malfunctioning FLOWTRON.” This poem places us in the hospital room of a dying man; we do not know his relationship to the poet—he could be a grandfather, father, uncle, father-in-law, mentor—because that element is not critical to this piece. The tension established in the early lines tells us there is a close relationship and impending sorrow: “—he is /sleeping better now—quiet/makes us think—our minds/crank every few minutes, eyes/open…” The enjambment (yea, I wrote that word down in my notebook) and series of m-dashes make the verse stutter, and mimic the “cadence/of the high pitched beep…” The words are caught in this image of cranking minds, minds that seem afraid of the quiet that will force them to think. We know that the speaker is tired, stretched out, and anxious about the state of this man; so we gather she loves him without needing to know who he is to her.
His identity is then tossed around even more—we are offered suggestions and then those suggestions are negated. He asks for Agua in his hazy, Morphine-padded state, so we gather this word must be quite familiar to him, a word that comes from his deep subconscious. Then we are told he is not Mexican (as though this is the only type of person who could ask for water in Spanish). I was slightly offended by that line, and wondered if the poet chose it to play on the assumptions some Americans have that all Spanish-speakers are of Mexican heritage or nationality. Two lines later we learn that he is American and Arabic. But wait—Arabic is a language, not an identity. Again, the poet seems to be playing with our assumptions—that if a person speaks Arabic, it must mean he is an Arab. I’m fairly certain this isn’t true, considering the fact that millions of people around the world, primarily in Northern Africa and what is known as the Middle East speak Arabic but may not consider themselves Arabs. (If anyone else has more insight on this cultural identity, please speak up!) Defining Spanish-speakers as Mexican disacknowledges all other Spanish-speaking South and Central American (not to mention European) nationalities as much as defining all speakers of Arabic as Arabs homogenizes many ethnic identities into one umbrella term.
Of course, after I spent some time breaking this down and presuming what stereotypes Haddad is playing on, I read her bio, which identifies her family as Syrian-Americans living on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, and as speaking English, Arabic and Spanish at home. So perhaps her use of the word “Mexican” is more intentional; perhaps the man in the poem was often mistaken for Mexican because of the family’s proximity to the border and his Syrian features. (My partner is Sri Lankan and is often mis-identified as Latino—folks will speak Spanish to him when he walks around Berkeley and he doesn’t understand a word of it.) I might even go so far to say that this potential mis-identification of the man in the poem was not always disadvantageous—perhaps he felt more at home on one side of the border than the other; perhaps his new-forged identity as a Spanish-speaker had some commonality with his identity as an Arab-American; perhaps there is even an degree of “passing” here that happened between the two. I bring this up because, in her bio, Haddad is quoted as seeking the “‘connective instead of divisive’ aspects of difference” in her work.
Later in the poem, the subject is infantilized, as he is portrayed sucking the water sponge like a mother’s nipple. Finally, he sleeps and we end with the sound of his snores, much like we began with the sound of the beeping—the sound of the living versus the sound of the dying. Haddad is further exploring the connectivity of these opposing identities—elderly and newborn, living and dying—as she pairs these sounds and images and synthesizes their presence in one person.
So many of the images in this poem could have been taken from my own witnessing of grandparents struggle against age and health—the dryness of the mouth caused by the Morphine, the beeping of the monitors (wondering if they hear, how it affects them), the feeding of the sponge stick. In the last days of my stepgrandfather’s life, he lay with his head back and mouth sticky-dry. All he asked for was water and all we could do was run that moist little sponge over his lips and his tongue. Sometimes he gripped it with the muscles of his mouth, absorbing the only fluid allowed (drinking water would have actually been harmful to him at this state). This man never asked anyone to do anything for him in life, and here we—the women of his family, only recently joined by marriage—were feeding him droplets of water, massaging his arms, warming his cool-shallow cheeks, and inserting Morphine enemas. He was transformed from a regal man into a helpless child, and witnessing this transformation made me feel first slightly sickened, and later, more intimately close to him than ever before.
I imagine many people have held this same sort of vigil over the loved and the dying, and that this poem is not just for Haddad’s unnamed loved one, but for each of ours, or for the shared love/pain that life’s last transformation erupts in us.
When considering how these poets create or challenge identity in their pieces, I thought of Marian Haddad’s “Malfunctioning FLOWTRON.” This poem places us in the hospital room of a dying man; we do not know his relationship to the poet—he could be a grandfather, father, uncle, father-in-law, mentor—because that element is not critical to this piece. The tension established in the early lines tells us there is a close relationship and impending sorrow: “—he is /sleeping better now—quiet/makes us think—our minds/crank every few minutes, eyes/open…” The enjambment (yea, I wrote that word down in my notebook) and series of m-dashes make the verse stutter, and mimic the “cadence/of the high pitched beep…” The words are caught in this image of cranking minds, minds that seem afraid of the quiet that will force them to think. We know that the speaker is tired, stretched out, and anxious about the state of this man; so we gather she loves him without needing to know who he is to her.
His identity is then tossed around even more—we are offered suggestions and then those suggestions are negated. He asks for Agua in his hazy, Morphine-padded state, so we gather this word must be quite familiar to him, a word that comes from his deep subconscious. Then we are told he is not Mexican (as though this is the only type of person who could ask for water in Spanish). I was slightly offended by that line, and wondered if the poet chose it to play on the assumptions some Americans have that all Spanish-speakers are of Mexican heritage or nationality. Two lines later we learn that he is American and Arabic. But wait—Arabic is a language, not an identity. Again, the poet seems to be playing with our assumptions—that if a person speaks Arabic, it must mean he is an Arab. I’m fairly certain this isn’t true, considering the fact that millions of people around the world, primarily in Northern Africa and what is known as the Middle East speak Arabic but may not consider themselves Arabs. (If anyone else has more insight on this cultural identity, please speak up!) Defining Spanish-speakers as Mexican disacknowledges all other Spanish-speaking South and Central American (not to mention European) nationalities as much as defining all speakers of Arabic as Arabs homogenizes many ethnic identities into one umbrella term.
Of course, after I spent some time breaking this down and presuming what stereotypes Haddad is playing on, I read her bio, which identifies her family as Syrian-Americans living on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, and as speaking English, Arabic and Spanish at home. So perhaps her use of the word “Mexican” is more intentional; perhaps the man in the poem was often mistaken for Mexican because of the family’s proximity to the border and his Syrian features. (My partner is Sri Lankan and is often mis-identified as Latino—folks will speak Spanish to him when he walks around Berkeley and he doesn’t understand a word of it.) I might even go so far to say that this potential mis-identification of the man in the poem was not always disadvantageous—perhaps he felt more at home on one side of the border than the other; perhaps his new-forged identity as a Spanish-speaker had some commonality with his identity as an Arab-American; perhaps there is even an degree of “passing” here that happened between the two. I bring this up because, in her bio, Haddad is quoted as seeking the “‘connective instead of divisive’ aspects of difference” in her work.
Later in the poem, the subject is infantilized, as he is portrayed sucking the water sponge like a mother’s nipple. Finally, he sleeps and we end with the sound of his snores, much like we began with the sound of the beeping—the sound of the living versus the sound of the dying. Haddad is further exploring the connectivity of these opposing identities—elderly and newborn, living and dying—as she pairs these sounds and images and synthesizes their presence in one person.
So many of the images in this poem could have been taken from my own witnessing of grandparents struggle against age and health—the dryness of the mouth caused by the Morphine, the beeping of the monitors (wondering if they hear, how it affects them), the feeding of the sponge stick. In the last days of my stepgrandfather’s life, he lay with his head back and mouth sticky-dry. All he asked for was water and all we could do was run that moist little sponge over his lips and his tongue. Sometimes he gripped it with the muscles of his mouth, absorbing the only fluid allowed (drinking water would have actually been harmful to him at this state). This man never asked anyone to do anything for him in life, and here we—the women of his family, only recently joined by marriage—were feeding him droplets of water, massaging his arms, warming his cool-shallow cheeks, and inserting Morphine enemas. He was transformed from a regal man into a helpless child, and witnessing this transformation made me feel first slightly sickened, and later, more intimately close to him than ever before.
I imagine many people have held this same sort of vigil over the loved and the dying, and that this poem is not just for Haddad’s unnamed loved one, but for each of ours, or for the shared love/pain that life’s last transformation erupts in us.
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