Those close to Harjo tried to dissuade her from applying. But “the word among serious creative writing students” designated the Workshop as “the place to apply.” Feeling “no kinship with or draw to the middle of the country, to Iowa,” she “struggled with the decision,” especially since “place made a difference.” The curriculum and teaching method at Iowa stood as another formidable obstacle, particularly because she had been raised according to “an approach oppositional to what was considered the Iowa writing workshop poetry style.” Words seemed to be mere abstract tools in their hands, in sharp contrast to Harjo’s tradition, in which they “absolutely mattered and could change the weather or walk into the past or future, literally.”34 She had already developed an audience for her poetry after the publication of The Last Song, her chapbook in 1975 that brought her prominence among ethnic literary circles in New Mexico, the home state of her first publisher, Puerto del Sol Press, and her undergraduate education.
Harjo’s primary objective in applying to graduate school was to avoid taking a job as a waitress, the only employment available to her, and set her sights on professional authorship. She reasoned that a two-year MFA could provide the mentorship she needed to expand her knowledge and skill in poetry and literature. At best, she hoped it might even bring her the greatest gift of all: a writing community she could identify with and proudly call her own. But telling signs of Iowa’s alienating climate appeared. Unlike the University of Montana, New Mexico State, and the University of Arizona, which all offered her either scholarships or teaching assistantships to help defray the cost of tuition and housing, Iowa was the only program Harjo applied to that denied her request of financial assistance. When she wondered why she had even been admitted given such a paltry offer, insiders to the program laid bare to her the rampant corruption in the application process, in which “female students were picked on the basis of their photographs.” After she arrived and witnessed firsthand “the predatory atmosphere in the workshop between many of the professors and female students” she could see precisely how the process functioned.35 To her dismay, it became apparent that her appearance and not her poetry prompted her acceptance to the Workshop.
With the financial assistance of Leslie Marmon Silko, author of Ceremony, one of the most highly acclaimed Native American novels, Harjo purchased a pickup truck and drove with her children, Phil and Rainy Dawn, to Iowa from Indian country in New Mexico. She had little choice but to accept the offer to attend what she called “the Harvard of writing workshops.”36 Weathering the uninhabitable cultural climate there proved more difficult than she expected. But as she would write in her MFA thesis under Donald Justice, who also served as the first director of Cisneros’s program of study before Marvin Bell replaced him in that role, “crows survive everywhere/ even in Iowa.” There, along the banks of the Iowa River, Harjo took solace in nature, the infinitude of freedom that belonged to the “black sleek bodies” of birds born free and thriving “along the edge of the city river bed.” The thrill of her realization that “they know they are the sun” enabled an undeniable connection with nature that was also hers, reinforcing her Native American belief “that there is/ an eternity of brilliant sky.” Her own poetic voice sings just as the “feathered voices sing the blueness” of that sky. Crucially, they also “sing my blueness,” in the poem’s last line, alluding to both the azure heavens above and her melancholy they console.37 The eternity in nature she witnesses along the river reaffirms her own capacity for endurance.
Without childcare assistance to alleviate the pressure of tending to Phil and Rainy Dawn, who were five and seven then, Harjo encountered some dark moments in Iowa City. Cisneros buoyed her with help babysitting, delighting in taking credit for the beauty of “her” little girl as they rode the bus, and leaving notes for Phil instructing him on the location of provisions, though he was barely old enough to read them.38 With Cisneros’s support, Harjo had the self-possession, precisely the sort that Adrienne Rich, another feminist poet of the era, admired in Emily Dickinson, to transform the sensation of “rocking off the edge” into powerful verse. “Out,” another poem from her Iowa MFA thesis, offers insight into her struggle as a single mother in unfamiliar territory plagued by deadlines, hostile peers, and faculty. “Kids keep quiet,” she writes, “I want to keep this madness/ to myself.” Thoughts echoing her grandmother Leona’s attempted suicide converge in the metaphor of the “Sun going down” and the overriding urge “to get this over with. To/ quicken the night/ with some simple violence,/ like it was/ before your fathers left.” Each child had a different father, both of whom abandoned their responsibility for raising them. “Out” sets a telling tableau of the depth and complexity of the pain Harjo suffered in the steel gray concrete dormitories at Iowa, where she struggled to reconcile the demands of her creative writing career with the maternal commitment to her children. She faced the emotional desire to escape to a simpler time, or more drastically, seek the permanent exit signified by the stark title “Out” and the “Phone pulled out/ by the neck” in her dingy kitchen.39
At the Workshop, Harjo’s ache for home, “what I am lonely for is the rhythm/ volcano cliffs/ dancing the hot Albuquerque nights,” was eased by the realization that “We Are All Foreigners,” according to the title of a poem in her MFA thesis. Although Harjo is a true native to North America, Iowa City’s eclectic mix of itinerant intellectuals meant she too was a foreigner. One night out, “drunk” and “cold in Iowa City,” she wrote, “we dance slowly back to the truck” in the parking lot of a local bar. A playful tone masks feminist resistance in the poem, as she calls out, “ ‘men ride in the back’/ I tell them/ ‘it is the Indian way.’ ” Her friend Rosalyn shares a laugh with Harjo, as the women climb into the front in the cab, leaving the men to freeze in the pickup’s open tailgate on the bone-chilling ride. The men reluctantly follow suit, unaware that “it is the opposite custom.” In Iowa City, unlike Albuquerque, the “Indian way” is virtually unknown, especially among Workshop students whose disparate geographical origins make them “all foreigners here.”40
Iowa City left Harjo without “a well-defined sense of place,” an element she deemed essential to the works of “the strongest writers.” Flannery O’Connor represented a model for how to evoke a local setting, but without a foothold in ecological or nature writing. Religious and psychological forces, according to Harjo’s aesthetic, could animate a place. One of the challenges of being dislocated in a place like Iowa City was the overwhelming sense she and Cisneros felt of being “bound by strictness imposed by [the Workshop’s] male-centeredness, its emphasis on nouns,” and the prevailing urgency to capture and pin down meaning through concrete metaphor.41 Poetic insights, she felt, were more connotative and discursive, butterflies to be set free rather than captured and anatomized. “Split the Lark,” Emily Dickinson advised with brutal sarcasm, warning against the same obsessive drive toward the mastery of essences inherently rooted in nature. Then “you’ll find the Music” and happily conclude your search for the essence of song. The result, however, is an eviscerated and silenced songbird from a bloody “Scarlet Experiment!” at the hands of a “Skeptic Thomas!”42 It is no coincidence that both Harjo and Cisneros cite Dickinson as a foundational model they both emulated.43 “There are no words,” Harjo notes, citing an unidentified poet, “only sounds/ that lead us into the darkest nights.”44
Iowa’s Monkey Garden
A key scene in Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street depicts a battle for control over a patch of small territory. In the empty lot that doubles as a playground, the boys tyrannize the girls by subjecting them to a game of their own devising. Tito is “one of the boys who invented the rules” in which Sally finds herself enmeshed. Esperanza, the narrator, who is an extension of Cisneros in her youth, rushes to Tito’s apartment, races up three flights of concrete stairs, and breathlessly reports to his mother, “Your son and his friends stole Sally’s keys and now they won’t give them back unless she kisses
them and right now they’re making her kiss them.”45 Tito’s mother looks up tiredly from her ironing and asks, “What do you want me to do . . . call the cops?” She rushes back to defend Sally herself, this time armed with a brick and a large stick. “They all looked at me,” Esperanza says, “as if I was the one that was crazy and made me feel ashamed.” Defeated, she retreats beneath a tree out of sight and tries to will her own death. “I wanted to be dead, to turn into the rain, my eyes melt into the ground like two black snails.” The episode bears witness to the ritual of masculine power in this fallen Garden of Eden. The chapter ends with the boys firmly in control of the lot they call the “monkey garden.” The significance is all too clear in the next chapter, “Red Clowns.” In it, Sally’s rape is rendered from her point of view, of “his dirty fingernails against my skin . . . his sour smell . . . The moon that watched.” Language breaks up into the fragments of Sally’s shattered consciousness, “The tilt-a-whirl. The red clowns laughing their thick-tongue laugh. Then the colors began to whirl. Sky tipped. Their high black gym shoes ran.”46
Cisneros originally crafted early versions of these scenes of male-dominated space in Iowa City between 1976 and 1978. Also characterized by their own self-serving rules, Workshop sessions at Iowa echoed the monkey garden of her youth. Ironically, the program itself provided Cisneros with the theoretical tools for the deconstruction of its own patriarchal hegemony. In a Workshop class titled On Memory and the Imagination, she listened in silent disdain as her classmates and instructor ruminated on Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space.47 What struck her was their unconscious class bias filtering their understanding of the broader concept of space through the privileged lens of suburban life. Cisneros could instantly see a gaping hole in Bachelard’s construct, particularly as discussed by her white male classmates, of how human dwellings shape consciousness, memories, and dreams. Her sense of difference, she realized, emanated from the radically diverse community in which she was raised, an environment that was the antithesis of two-story houses in safe quiet neighborhoods with vast sparkling yards and white picket fences. Certain spaces in the Latino barrio, like the Workshop itself, represented contested territory that also sparked her retaliation on behalf of justice. That activism could be found in the poetic rendering of lives otherwise invisible.
Only years after graduating did Cisneros realize racism’s subtle power. She “didn’t have a name for it until after it happened. At Iowa I never thought of it as racism. I thought that I was the problem.” But “that’s the worst kind of racism, where you don’t think you’re good enough, don’t deserve to be in that Workshop, don’t deserve the MFA . . . you were admitted because they felt sorry for you.”48 Cisneros’s sense of inadequacy in her “gender, ethnicity, and class” at Iowa prompted her to access the similar inadequacy she felt not growing up in a house like those of her classmates. Coraje, a volatile cocktail of rage and courage, enabled her to draw from this well of experience and emotion to craft what is now considered one the most significant works of American literature.
Writing in opposition to the Workshop’s prevailing apolitical and classist poetics of space, Cisneros turned toward “the people I remembered” for her subjects. “In a sense I was being defensive and rebellious,” defiantly wielding her deceptively simple diction and syntax in a world populated by whores, thieves, and drunks at workshop sessions. Those subjects and styles were her version of the sticks and bricks Esperanza brings to the monkey garden to mete out justice. “In this direction,” she began “to move as far away from the style of my classmates,” and in the process “found a voice that was uniquely mine.” Her objective was not just to raise social consciousness, but to register shock—by showing, not telling, according to the creative writing mantra—in a dominant aesthetic blind to the realities of ethnic urban life. She aimed to present “young Latinos whose problems were so great” that they would make her “Iowa Writers’ Workshop classmates faint.” Her purpose grew from spiteful retaliation to the more constructive objective “to do something to change their lives, ours, mine.” She would bring not only a startling revelation of the disadvantaged to the Workshop, but also insightful glimpses of the barrio’s unsung heroes, its moments of beauty and kindness. She names her character Esperanza out of such hope, with the intention of showing how “their lives were extraordinary, that they were extraordinary for having survived.” Their endeavors were worthy of the highest respect, despite their lack of credentialing through institutions of higher education, since “they held doctorates from the university of life.”49
To the many readers who appreciate The House on Mango Street for its lyrical prose, it should come as no surprise that the novel began as a series of poems, rather than sketches and vignettes, written at Iowa in 1978. With the support of faculty such as Marvin Bell, Cisneros pursued narrative poetry with an emphasis on inner monologue. Despite being out of fashion at the time, E. A. Robinson’s “Richard Cory” provided a useful model for probing community, economic inequality, and the inner lives of individuals within a specific social milieu. Through Robinson, Cisneros realized if she “could write monologues and do them in a voice that wasn’t mine, it was a way of removing myself from writing about what I was living.” In the process, her “poems became, sometimes, a kind of narrative, a fusion of prose and poetry.” She was “heading toward Mango Street.” However, she could not bring the project to fruition until she graduated from the Workshop, because she “felt so censored at Iowa in trying to write about myself as a young woman.” Much of what blocked her had to do with shame. “I was ashamed at Iowa, so I wrote about an older shame,” she explains. Imaginative distance from the Workshop setting and experimentation with “a younger voice, a girl’s voice that went back ten years,” proved ideal for the “vignettes of autobiographical fiction written in a loose and deliberately simple style, halfway between a prose poem and the awkwardness of semiliteracy,” according to critic Penelope Mesic.50 With that voice and vantage point she could find an imaginative space for creativity “someplace that was far from Iowa.”51
By revisiting her childhood for the source of her creative work, Cisneros simultaneously accessed an outlet of escape from the threatening Workshop environment and a means by which to defy and challenge it. Through the retelling of Sally’s first sexual encounter at the hands of her young rapists, Cisneros could process her own initiation into the monkey garden of academia beginning with her undergraduate experience. Her undergraduate adviser at Loyola University in Chicago, the man who originally inspired her to be a poet, was an alumnus of the Workshop who had studied under Donald Justice. “He told me I just had to study with Donald Justice at Iowa.” She applied, and in exchange for his support of her acceptance, her Loyola poetry professor initiated an intimate relationship. In retrospect, she is well aware of how naive she was to have assumed “my teacher was interested in me because he thought I was a good writer.” Like Tito holding the keys from Sally, Cisneros’s instructor “sort of helped himself, too. We had an affair,” much to her regret later when she realized how badly he had deceived her. “I was very, very young, and I thought this is what writers do,” that somehow it was built into a lifestyle where one is expected to “break rules and dance on tables and have affairs.” Her application to Iowa came as part of the expected behavior her Loyola instructor demanded. At the time, “I did what I was told,” she recalled of her efforts to conform to the lifestyle of professional authorship, only to discover its inherently sexist bias.52
Once at Iowa, Cisneros soon discovered that her affair with her Loyola professor had served as an initiation to Iowa’s even more rampant and systematic sexual exploitation of female students. The trouble dwells in how “these young women” students “look up to these writers” who are in authority positions as their instructors, wielding undue power over their creative careers. Many of the female Workshop students, like Cisneros as an undergraduate, regard their faculty mentors as “gods and don’t realize th
ese are men with no control.” Since graduating from the Workshop in 1978, Cisneros made a point of combating this culture of exploitation by making female students aware of their vulnerability to their own naive complicity with it. “I always talk to these young women,” she explains, in creative writing MFA programs at Iowa and elsewhere, “and say be really, really careful here.” She routinely warns them, “you’re so naive and young and beautiful and you have no concept of your power, but the first person who pays attention to you, [and] you’re completely blinded. And in my case it went beyond bad.” She pointed out that “as instructors we have lots of opportunities to abuse our students because they look up to us.” At the Workshop, “there was just a lack of respect and lack of honor there.”53 The program’s sexual politics represented the literary monkey garden, a system of sexual exchange for career advancement, for keys to autonomy and power she already had, but that men in positions of power hijacked and held hostage.
Conceiving an Anti-Workshop
Soon after she arrived at Iowa in August of 1976, Cisneros was overcome with a desperate desire to leave. “Either I could have given up and left (my plan A), and House would have never been written, or I would have to get angry to overcome my sense of low self-esteem I felt there.” Many writers of color during that period facing similar circumstances abandoned MFA programs. “If I hadn’t had Joy there,” she admits, “I would have left.” With Harjo, she could channel her anger into enough creative energy to “light a city.”54 Harjo recalls that “the first worksheets were traumatic,” especially because she and Cisneros “were the only two students whose poetry didn’t appear on the worksheet for the first month.” She too “wanted to quit the workshop,” but remained because she “had invested too much time and money and decided to stay it out, at least a year.”55
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