Review of "I Used to be a Superwoman"

                                                                                                Gente del sol
                                                                                                la tierra llora
                                                                                                por tus caricias

                                                                                                (Gente del sol)

 

The genre of autobiography has constituted a particularly rich vein in Chicano literature. Because so many of these works embody themes of transformation as well as loss and absence, this genre captures much of the experience of many educated Chicanos who come from poor and working class backgrounds. It is natural, thus, to appeal to a genre that lends itself to an exploration of these changes, rendered all the more powerful because they also reflect issue having to do with cultural accommodation. Given the importance as well of community consciousness, touched as it is by the fact that many of these writers come from tight-knit immigrant communities that live in precarious circumstances, we are dealing with narratives that details more than just individual transformations. They are not necessarily celebratory narratives, and indeed, this is the essence of much of autobiography which is rooted frequently in a type of nostalgia. For Chicano narratives, these struggles are as much personal as they are political, and they capture a paradoxical sense of loss, for the initial circumstances are invariably difficult ones.

 

 

 

In the case of Gloria Velásquez’s collection of poems “I Used to be a Superwoman”, we see a work that captures much of the journey of a Chicana intellectual and artist. One of the most prevalent themes in these poems is that of separation, a theme that takes the form of nostalgia as well as displaced desire. It is a particularly rich theme, invested as it is with a consciousness of many of the struggles as well the guilt that many of us had to endure as we undertake these frequently solitary journeys. As such, I can identify with the alienation that she expresses in many of these poems, alienation that takes the form of despair at times, cursing as she does the fact that she finds herself

It conveys the sense of an existence that seems like a half-life, one that lacks the purpose of the struggle, which in so many of our works, lies precisely in the idea of the journey, and an at times contradictory sense of wishing to recapture the sense of coherence that was evident in the past. Our journeys of discovery are thus, frequently, not necessarily serene ones of fulfillment or culmination. We can’t overcome the memory of those we left behind, investing these journeys with psychic elements of guilt and abandonment.

These poems that make up this collection are presented in side-by-side versions, both in English and in Spanish. I believe that those written in the latter represent the originals, conveying as they do more of a sense of natural flow, and of sentiments that somehow sound more authentic. Perhaps because Spanish is perceived by so many of us as the language of the home, it frequently is accompanied by less of an association with artifice or inauthenticity. The Spanish-language poems sound more vigorous to me, even if they convey the sentiments of a Chicana who has necessarily been immersed in English. They are more direct, in a style that seems intimate, at times confessional, at other times searing in their directness and their refusal to shirk from confronting the more painful episodes of her life.

When considering issues such as loss or suffering or the poverty experienced when young, in the small towns in Colorado and Texas, the verses tend to be shorter and more terse. They compare, for example, poverty to hunger, revealing a leanness that is free of embellishment. They are punctuated at times by Spanglish, that which is utilized not only by Chicanos but by our immigrant parents, who use words such as “files” (pronounced fee-les), to approximate the sound of “fields”, or “lonche” to convey the Spanish approximation to “lunch”. This is the vocabulary that they use, and that is mirrored as well by their offspring, who  use words such as “fensas” to refer to “fences”, but in Spanish. These are unbalanced creations which nonetheless have their vigor and vitality, prefixes and suffixes grafted on to root words, bearing fruit of unexpected combinations.

The psychic dimension and the perception of the tension between a private and a public realm is much in evidence here. These poems are intimate but they can also reveal a more political stance, assertive and confrontational and meant to assert a public presence. This is not to say that private reflections can’t assume this role, but in the political stance assumed they reveal the intent to appropriate a public role, to address a response to the question, “Who are you?”. In the poem “¿Quién soy?”, it reaches a  crescendo in the final stanza:

                                            ¡Soy la Chicana revolucionaria

                                            mi voz grita por el Movimiento,

                                            por los derechos humanos,
                                            por mejores salarios y
                                            por la igualdad social! 

The need to assert a public role subverts at times the quiet tone of the personal reflections, and because it embodies slogans, seems a little dated. But it is in the private meditations on leaving Johnstown, Colorado, and of reflecting on the life of an artist who despairs at times to find an authentic voice. I feel much of this myself as I reflect on this need to capture and convey in my own fashion the pain and struggles of a difficult childhood, the frustration of not finding a place of one’s own, of trying to create and not finding an audience, one that is hopefully able to understand what it means to capture the novelty of a metaphor taking wing, of inspiration taking the form of geometrical patterns or formulas that somehow coalesce into meanings, a memory like a hidden temblor.

As alluded to before, despite the poverty and discrimination and the difficult home circumstances that saw her raised by an alcoholic father numb with despair, Gloria Velasquez  can express a form of nostalgia for early experiences in rural Colorado. It takes the form of sensory delight at times, in smells and touch and colors, as in her evocation of her farewell to Johnstown:

                                                        Esa mañana
                                                        de calles dormidas,
                                                        no olí el perfume
                                                        de la fábrica de azúcar
                                                        ni el dulzor
                                                       del trigo amarillo
                                                       donde descalza jugaba
                                                       con los niños de la colonia,
                                                       ni sentí las caricias
                                                       de camino de tierra
                                                      (Despedida de Johnstown)

But in other poems this evocation takes on an ironic note, where the landscape of personal interactions is filtered by the supposed hypocrisy of civic ideals that are not fulfilled. There is a tension between the two, where community history is erased to highlight instead official mythologies of the founding fathers, where the ideal of sportsmanship is expressed in terms of segregation, because the idyllic Anglo establishment dismissed the others, “ignoraban a los morenos / que eran tontos y muy slow.” (Bella Juventud).  The sensory appears associated with an emotional as well as community experience, and sunlight means different things to those who can afford pools and air conditioning as opposed to those who are forced to work outside, overpowered by a punishing burden of necessity.

The language of these poems is direct, constituted as these verses are at times by progressions of linked words like slow-moving trains climbing up steep hills, twisting and winding their way as they link as well as bypass the landmarks of a life lived in uncertainty and suffering. Aren’t all our lives like that as well? There are also prose letters, those that capture much of the sensibility of a writer and individual who is still struggling to overcome these past traumas, one of which involves the journey to Stanford. In this poem these words convey the sensation of being squeezed, an anguish of suffocation and of space closing in, where the poet doesn’t hold back in expressing how alienated she feels:

                                                           Ahora

                                                           me han
                                                           roto
                                                           el alma
                                                           en este
                                                           mundo
                                                           lleno de
                                                           teorías
                                                           inútiles
                                                           palabras
                                                           burguesas

                                                         (Metamorfosis en Stanford)

None of these useless theories or “palabras burguesas” are reflected in this poem. This world is just as alienating and burdensome, and one can sense the pain of a journey that seems pointless, just as spiritually unfulfilling as the poverty that drained her spirit back in that rural town in Colorado. It is almost as if she were forced to confront with chagrin the warnings given to her by her mother, that women “Deben estar felices y / en su familia nomás pensar” (Consejos).

Desire also plays a role, and it is in this facet that we can reflect on the female sensibility that becomes evident. For example, it appears in the memory of the heartrending cries of her mother, the cries that greeted the news of her brother who had been killed in that useless war in Vietnam, an evocation of a kindred motherhood even if she was only a child, but one nonetheless powerful, majestic, sordid and plaintive.  We see it as well in the invocation to her “lovers”, to those figures who will provide her with inspiration, as well as in the ideal of sisterhood, when she invokes the figure of Frida Kahlo.  

It is no accident, of course, that she should invoke this figure, an icon of feminism and of the socially-engaged artist.  The Frida that visits her, the one with “thick braids and / her solitary stare”, is strikingly similar to the figure of the Navajo warrior Crazy Horse, who also pays her a visit at night, “su pelo largo y grueso / su perfil decidido” (Tashunka Witico). These figures evoke cultural heroes as well as emblems autonomy and freedom, although the sense of waiting also can’t help but paradoxically put the poem in a passive position, at least in my interpretation, pointing once again at the contradictions evident in this search for models, in the same way that her “lover” poems express a similar sentiment. (She is waiting for an idealized lover in both cases, one who will visit her also at night.) Perhaps this feeling of waiting is also emblematic of the journey?

The absences that are evoked in her poems, the transformations and the search for fulfillment, represent ongoing searches. There are experiences that are never really reconciled, as is evident in the need in a work such as the “Letter to a Patroncito”, it is understood that there are conflicts that continue to haunt her the way they haunt all of us. The honest and unsparing way in which she confronts these fears, however, gives these poems a nurturing feeling while also validating her own journey. I would hope to be able to also illustrate my own psychic journey to completion in a similar fashion although I am fully appreciative that completion may be, indeed, an artifice characteristic of the autobiographic genre.
 

OGRomero © 2013
(Copyrighted by OGRomero, 2013)