Dear María
Dear Mary, Mariah, Marie
Dear mamá, mamacita, and mami
Dear fourth wheel of the Trinity
Dear Puerto Rican Ingénue
in a Red Sash
Dear Off With Their Heads
Dear Diva
Dear Aria, missing its M (Dear Storage Engine)
Dear Ships in Your Name
Dear Asteroid
discovered in 1877
Dear Song
by
Café Tacuba
Green Day
The Jacksons
Men at Work
Blondie
Ricky Martin
Wu-Tang Clan
, et al.
Dear María, spoken in the bird’s tail
of Papua New Guinea
“How do you solve a problem like Maria?”
Dear Pool Type Reactor
Dear Uranium How You Enrich Us
Dear Spanish Biscuit
Dear Sacrificial Virgins,
of red or blond hair
of dark brunette
of the slip, apron, or veil, but never a hat
of the fresh complexion turned composite
of Jack the Ripper’s complete works
of fluency
in Welsh
Spanish
English
Quechua
French
of obscure and undocumented
origins
and of las colonias
Querida María (de los Angeles
de la Luz,
de Jesús,
del Refugio) walking home or waiting
for Transporte de Personal
without executive safe routes
Dear Señorita Maquiladora
Dexterous, tolerant of tedium
model workers
for Lexmark, FoxConn,
CommScope, etc.
Dear Queen of the Plasma TV and Print Cartridge
Dear Miss Stainless Steel Appliance
Dear Crowned with Cigarettes/Soda Cans/Boot Prints/
Dear Left Without Nipples in the Desert Branded
Dear Virgen de Guadalupe,
hand us your sanitary napkin
Blessed art thou,
your blood is
on everything.
“Dear Maria” in part (dis)assembles material from Wikipedia entries on “Maria”; “Murder in Juárez: Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Global Assembly Line” by Jessica Livingston (Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 25.1 (2004): 59–76); Migrant Imaginaries by Alicia Schmidt Camacho (New York University Press, 2008); “Electrolux, Other Maquiladoras Affected Little by Bloodshed in Mexico” by Ryan Jeltema, Daily News (Michigan), March 7, 2011; “Juarez Maquiladoras Recovering Despite Bloodshed” by Will Weissert, Associated Press, January 22, 2011; and “Upheaval in the Factories of Juárez” by Alana Semuels, Atlantic, January 21, 2016.
POETICS STATEMENT
Poetics of Not-Mother Tongue
In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes writes, “The writer is someone who plays with his mother’s body […] in order to glorify it, to embellish it, or in order to dismember it.”1 In doing so, Barthes draws a natural connection—by way of the mother tongue—between the body of the mother and the writer’s body of work, two bodies intertwined, sharing a common language.2 With this assertion, Barthes also brings to mind the larger body of literature and its many literary representations of the mother’s body, a genre of sorts encompassing myriad odes and elegies, myths and monstrous depictions.3 This perverse desire of the writer to “glorify,” as well as “dismember,” the mother’s body, is perhaps the desire of the child to negate, in the jouissance of speech (Julia Kristeva argues), her own mother through the language transmitted by her: “mother” replacing Mother. And it is in the hurling of feces that the child expresses her great love for the mother: a love through negation.4
So when I say, “I do not write with my mother tongue,” you may wonder if this negation is, also, an unconscious desire for the opposite, as did Freud of the patient who insisted, when asked who was the person in the dream, “It is not my mother,” or “Die Mutter ist es nicht.5 You may wonder if what I truly want is for English to be my mother tongue. If I deny my own mother, twice-over, by writing her in English, and thus love her, long for her, twice-over. If when hurling feces at English by embracing the romance of my Spanish parentage, or some more expansive US-born and bred Latinidad, I am saying, “I love you, English. You are my mother.”
The philosopher George Santayana, who was born Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás in Ávila, Spain, and who moved to Boston when he was twelve, justified the negation of his mother tongue by affirming that he was, in effect, negating English in English: “Thus, in renouncing everything else for the sake of English letters I might be said to have been guilty, quite unintentionally, of a little stratagem, as if I had set out to say plausibly in English as many un-English things as possible.”6
Gustavo Pérez Firmat, questioning the viability of Santayana’s “stratagem,” writes, “In English, Santayana’s un-English things will lose at least some of their un-Englishness. Ultimately everything that can be said in English will be an English thing.”7 I wonder, too, if the mother tongue I believe lives inside my poems haunts no one but me.
No, I’m sure this is a very particular ghost, and that most people assume my mother tongue is English, probably because my poems look so much like it, have similar habits and mannerisms. They were, after all, taken in at such a young age.8 Still, there are those who ask: where are you from, where are you really from? And if my usual response (New Jersey) doesn’t satisfy them (meaning, it doesn’t quite satisfy me), I begin another poem, to answer, again and again, who was that person in the dream?
It’s not not my mother.
NOTES
1. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).
2. What if the writer is also a mother, Maggie Nelson asks in The Argonauts (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2015).
3. See Barthes’s own Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
4. Julia Kristeva, “The Impudence of Uttering: The Mother Tongue,” trans. Anne Marsella, available online at www.kristeva.fr. Kristeva writes, “When [Freud] turns this utterance [“This is not my mother”] inside out to hear it in the negative, the denied desire—“I love her, I eat her and I bite her while throwing my feces at her”—I understand that the founder of psychoanalysis leaves us with a model of language that is none other than the royal path of sublimation.”
5. Alenka Zupančič, “Not-Mother: On Freud’s Verneinung,” e-flux 33, March 2012. Available online at www.e-flux.com.
6. Quoted in Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2003).
7. Ibid.
8. Perhaps for Barthes, the writing itself becomes a kind of mother tongue, a kind of mother. “Poetry has its source in an idea, in a desire,” Édouard Glissant reminds us in Poetics of Relation, “not in the literal fact of birth.” Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 37.
ROSA ALCALÁ’S AESTHETICS OF ALIENATION
John Alba Cutler
The poetics of Relation remains forever conjectural and presupposes no ideological stability. It is against the comfortable assurances linked to the supposed excellence of language. A poetics that is latent, open, multilingual in intention, directly in contact with everything possible.
ÉDOUARD GLISSANT, Poetics of Relation1
As powerfully as any contemporary poet’s work, Rosa Alcalá’s poems enact the indeterminacy that Édouard Glissant urges in Poetics of Relation as a moral and political expediency. Alcalá has developed a poetics in which labor, gender,
migration, memory, and family converge in language that is, to borrow Glissant’s formulation, latent, open, and multilingual in intention. Think, for example, of the way a poem like “Autobiography” resists the generic meaning its title announces. Rather than narrate a life, the poem explores a single word, factory, defining it as “something not heard / but written in degrees / as breath.”2 Questions multiply. Already in the first three lines, the meaning of “written in degrees” depends on whether we understand degrees to refer to increments, temperature, or educational credentials, and hence the meaning of factory to be unfolding a bit at a time, inscribed by the breath of workers on cold days, or to emerge from the alienated subject position of the upwardly mobile poet. To read one of Alcalá’s poems is to enter a door that looks innocent enough from the outside, only to find that the room on the other side defies our expectations. In one poem, the furniture has been turned upside down. In another, there is no ceiling; the walls stretch into space. We begin to question whether the problem is with the room or with our own capacities of perception.
Alcalá’s poetry pressures ordinary syntax and semantics in ways that are indebted to US avant-garde poetics, particularly the New York School, but in the service of a political project firmly grounded in a specific historical and socioeconomic situation. As she explained in an interview for Letras Latinas, “When I started [writing Undocumentaries], I wanted to write about factory work because suddenly, as a first-year tenure track assistant professor, I knew no one who worked in a factory, even though almost every adult I knew growing up, including my parents, were factory workers. My father worked in a dye house, my mother in a number of small assembly-line jobs. I lived surrounded by factories.”3 Indeterminacy is not valuable for its own sake in Alcalá’s poetry, then, but rather as a way of posing and responding to material historical circumstances—specifically, neoliberal policies that have had deleterious effects on the working class. As Michael Dowdy explains, neoliberal theory “ties all valences of freedom to the market, dismantles collective forms of organization and ownership, converts states into servants to capital, guts social safety nets and the public sphere, and relentlessly commodifies culture, including modes of resistance.”4 Indeterminacy in Alcalá’s work reflects the contingency these developments produce. As unions are disempowered and populations displaced, working-class life is governed as much by the unequal distribution of risk as by the unequal distribution of wealth.5 These concerns are central to Alcalá’s poetry both thematically and formally, as indeterminacy paradoxically focuses the intersecting concerns of class, gender, and migration into the intimacy of individual encounters.
Consider, for example, the preoccupation with the “girl” in Undocumentaries, Alcalá’s first collection of poetry. “Confessional Poem” begins with the statement “The girl next door had something to teach me / about what to air” (Undoc 21). “Valenti’s Bakery” concludes with the image of the poet “fighting like a girl / for gloves” (Undoc 22). “Jobs #3 & 4” invokes the image of a “Specious / Girl / Hired / to summon / weather” (Undoc 31). And some poems mention girl in their very titles: “A Girl Leaves the Croft,” and “Allegory of a Girl with Aspirations.” All of these invocations of girlhood (boyhood’s rarely invoked analogue) depart from the cheeky opening to the title poem, “Undocumentary”:
A girl like me falls in love
with Yeats
and never recovers
from the stretch
of recognition
more twistable now in parts
made guilty by graduation
and further distance
from technical
schools
there are perhaps questions
of sincerity
that leave me weak
at the laptop
soft for those animal shapes
ballooning into pity
or pride (Undoc 11)
The opening line, “a girl like me,” obscure at first, evokes the poet’s internal tensions, a kind of class conflict worked out individually over time. What does it mean for a “girl like me” to fall in love with Yeats? One thing it means is guilt, shame at the distance the poet has traveled and intense ambivalence—pity and pride—at reminders of factory labor. Representations might be a better word than reminders, actually, as “Undocumentary” dwells on the difficulty of documenting, or inscribing certain experiences into historical memory. The “animal shapes ballooning” in the fourth stanza refer obliquely to Barbara Kopple’s 1987 documentary film American Dreams, about a labor strike in the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota (Undoc 84). The ballooning animal shapes correspond both to shots in the film of meat being extruded through industrial machines and to the way that the film mediates—not just reflecting, but also shaping—the individuals it represents. The ballooning is another form of the “stretch of recognition,” as well as a metaphor for how the poem itself works to alienate readers from any perceived natural or transparent relationship to language.
The poem begins with a simple sentence, but then piles on modifying clauses whose antecedents are unclear. Is the girl “made guilty by graduation,” or is it her twistable “parts”? The poem’s lines produce aggressive enjambments, separating subjects from prepositions (“the stretch / of recognition”) and dividing noun phrases (“technical / schools”). This creates an ongoing tension between line and syntax, amplified by the lack of punctuation. The poem also subverts a familiar idiomatic expression—a type of paronomasia that Alcalá employs frequently—metonymically replacing “weak at the knees” with “weak at the laptop.” The tropological and syntactical complexity of these opening stanzas belies the poem’s initial simplicity. As readers, we experience the estranging “stretch” the poem sets out to describe.
“Undocumentary” is a poem about class and labor in the neoliberal era, but these are not concerns that are merely examined from a distance. Rather, Alcalá sets up a dialectic between the expansive vision of the documentary film and the radical interiority of the lyric poem. This dialectic emerges clearly in a pair of stanzas that ask what can and cannot be represented in these different media:
Documentary: The lyric of unrehearsed chemicals
acts out the tensions of progress
into a brighter but stiller image
called fact or archive
Undocumentary: The man who joined
old world industries of textile
to dirt trucked in from the Ramapos
is not a video
to behold (Undoc 13)
The “unrehearsed chemicals” refer to the chemical operations of celluloid, as images are imprinted onto film through exposure to light. These images, the poem notes, are “brighter but stiller,” more visually immediate than poetry and endowed with the authority of “fact” by virtue of their seemingly transparent representational ability. The poem goes so far as to call these operations “lyric,” suggesting some sympathy between poetry and documentary. Indeed, Alcalá’s attention to labor and class bears the mark of documentary poets as far back as Muriel Rukeyser.
Despite these sympathies, however, the poem and film are not equivalent. The term undocumentary denotes those experiences the film fails to represent. The reference to the Ramapo Mountains, an Appalachian range in northern New Jersey, relocates the poem to a different site of industrial labor: the textile factories of Paterson. The poet’s initial ambivalent reaction to seeing the working class represented on film—her “pity or pride” at those “animal shapes”—implies a continuity of experiences. Yet the demarcation between documentary and undocumentary here indicates rupture as well. The nature of that rupture is ambiguous; when the poem declares that “the man” of the undocumentary “is not a video / to behold,” that statement might be either descriptive or prescriptive. His struggles have not been documented the way that workers’ struggles of Minnesota have been, but there is also the suggestion that they should not be, that the spectacular gaze of the documentary film also somehow
corrupts.
The reference to the “old world” suggests another rupture between documentary and undocumentary: the experience of migration. This idea is elaborated in the next stanza, the first part of the poem in prose: “All those men, acres of previous dye operations. The import of their bodies distributed in lawns all over Paterson, their products overseas” (Undoc 13). The references to the Ramapo dirt and remnants of dye factories “distributed in lawns all over Paterson” point to controversies over the illegal storage and disposal of chemical factory byproducts. The second sentence depends heavily on the double meaning of import as both significance and directed movement. In other words, this is the end result of migration, the importation of workers to fill low-wage factory jobs, and this is also the final meaning of their labor—the products shipped overseas, the waste corrupting the very land they’re buried in. Despite the poem’s sympathy for the labor struggle depicted in American Dreams, these stanzas insist that the documentary film’s claim to truth obscures its representational strategies, and that the film’s uniformly white community is not representative of the American working class.
The prose conclusion of the poem brings these concerns back to the intimacy of the poetic speaker’s individual consciousness, who laments that “[t]here is no retelling” the exact nature of human experience (Undoc 14). “We were subject to families greater than nature,” the speaker declares. This second metonymic paronomasia brings the poem back to its initial phrase, as the subversion of the expression “forces greater than nature” echoes the poet going “weak at the laptop.” The plight of the immigrant worker, the poem’s limited capacity for documentation, the anxiety about upward mobility—these are all experienced as integral features not only of the poet’s class, but also of her gender. What does it mean in an immigrant family, after all, for a girl to grow up to be more successful than her father, to do intellectual labor rather than manual labor? The poem concludes: “So all this roundabout mess of trying to describe a machine that never shuts down, a father standing in two inches of water or sitting on a wooden stool, a racket of heat, is proof of nothing, except the drive of what can’t be told, a screen pushing off the pile up of bodies” (Undoc 14). The final sentence enacts a machine that never shuts down in the seemingly interminable distance between subject and verb. And now the poem has moved through several different modes—lyric verse, documentary, prose—to arrive at the relationship that has always been at its center. It derives its lyric force not so much from the revelation that it has been about a father and daughter all along, but from its unfolding through an indeterminate aesthetics whose gravitational forces suck in a dizzying collection of anxieties along the way.
American Poets in the 21st Century Page 7