What is the measure of desire, of what stuff are hopes and dreams and appetites made that so torment and infuriate but also console and seduce us as we weave through time? If our appetites define us, can it ever truly be said that our identity is fixed, or does it fluctuate, coalesce and dissipate, like the haze that permeates an urban metropolis like Los Angeles, or the exhaust trailing a lonely MTA bus on a last pass through the city? There is a wonderful line that is paraphrased by the poet Marisela Norte in her last meditation that appears in Peeping Tom Tom Girl., one entitled “East L.A. Days/Fellini Nights”. This is a deeply meditative piece that crosses boundaries, merging autobiography with lines from famous movies, prose reflections with poetry and the languid rhythms of an experience that depicts not only a sense of place and time (beaches in Mexico, the barrio in East LA, film noir sets and the cosmopolitan reflections of a life steeped in cinema with reflections on family intimacy), and it portrays what at first seems a dichotomy, but one that is ultimately resolved into a merger that attests to the formative role of desire. It is the line which states, in one beautiful stanza, that evokes another literary example of haunting, the opening line in Daphne du Maurier’s novel “Rebecca” (“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”), but that could well be renamed “Marisela”:
As I read this, I was left to savor other famous literary example of hauntings, and of how, perhaps, our most compelling ghosts are provided by those we seed in the past, our prior selves, who accompany us always, who seem so piercingly familiar and yet faint, glowing with a slowly dissipating light. We weave together these ghost to combine the many strands of our experience, and this act of weaving is, fundamentally, an act of creation, the source of our own rhythm, the merging with the world.
Marisela Norte is a poet from East L.A., one who
makes love to her past and who weaves together her personal history of longing
and dreams of escape with that of the community in which she was raised. She recreates
and binds together her experiences utilizing the trope of the trip, the journey
that is undertaking together, the bus trips to the downtown Los Angeles where
so many stories of suffering and hope and desire mingle in a way that is
anonymous but, nonetheless, compelling to the sensibility of an artist. These
hidden stories (more ghosts waiting to take visible form) loom large in our
imagination, for they are illustrative of the drama of human life, of mundane
existences that are rendered beauty by the breadth of desire. They appeal as
well to our notion of how communities are formed, and in particular, our ideas
of a specific community, that of East L.A.
If Los Angeles is a pastiche of cultures melded
together in a dreamscape of the future, a place that evokes not only a
futuristic vision (like that of the slightly dated LAX terminal that greets
visitors who arrive at the airport), it is also a place with histories that are
like compressed epics of arrival and departure, an ideological terminus that is
at once transient (everyone comes from somewhere else in Los Angeles) but at
the same time settled into a hierarchy of adjacent yet separate neighborhoods.
To speak of Los Angeles is to speak not of one neighborhood but of many, to
speak of communities that arrived in tatters and formed communities only to later
disperse or be displaced, like the Jewish community in East L.A. and the
renaming of what was once Brooklyn Avenue to César Chávez St. It is to speak of
repressed energy and rage that erupts periodically in episodes of violence, episode
such as the Watts riots of 1963 but reprised almost thirty years later in the
Rodney King riots that signaled the deep fissures in this city. But it is also a
shared community, one drawn to the craft of fiction (aren’t all immigrants
writers of their own fiction, that of the self that will be reborn?), to the
aura of the familiar (the dry mountains that remind Iranians so much of their
homeland), to the ghosts of past traumas that will somehow be exorcised in the
land of eternal sunshine. But there is also a seedy side to this spectacle of
dreamlike Mediterranean light, captured in the work of poets such as Charles
Bukowski, with his evocation of the down-and-out non-conformists, the
alcoholics and drug addicts and perpetually unemployed artists, the exhausted
and aging vixens, or the world-weary detective fiction of a Raymond Chandler, a
cynicism that is nonetheless quite earnest and innocent, in the deeply
appealing figure of such detective as Phillip Marlowe.
To come from a community such as East L.A. is to be
a perpetual dreamer. It is a gritty place, densely packed with what seems to be
a constant arrival of newcomers, a world where omnipresent murals, rendered all
the more poignant for being continually tagged, a yin and yang of defiance and
celebration, where street vendors on almost every street corner, brown-skinned
men and women selling tamales and paletas
and elotes (corn) out of buckets and
coolers, where the color palette is much brighter, as if to repudiate the
shadows. The streets are packed with old
cars and the old houses packed with the young, and in these intensely
territorial neighborhoods perpetual vendettas are constantly reaffirmed with
deadly result, in the battles of ignorant armies clashing in the night (to
quote Dover Beach, or should it be, Venice and Santa Monica and Redondo
beaches?). It is a place that is vibrant and beautiful despite the challenges
faced, squat houses located on undulating hills, with one eye hungrily turned
towards the glittering skyscrapers of vertical L.A. that loom so tantalizingly
close. It is a community where the other eye is turned to the past, to
histories of departure and communities left behind, to the history and
fellowship forged in close-knit neighborhood and housing projects, in the
grinding poverty that was never really left behind in that rural past in Latin
America, in the ranchitos of Mexico. East
L.A. is like the vision of this a separate epoch, one that is invested in
emotional drama, that of loss as a rite of passing, the right to pass through
the ugly wall that separates two civilizations, two modes of being, one
grounded in the stability of a collective ethos, the other grounded in
individualism and the constant search for something new. East L.A. is the prototypical
Mexican barrio that is found everywhere throughout the United States, but also,
in a more general sense, the prototype of any and every immigrant ghetto.
The poems and prose pieces in Marisela Norte’s
collection reflect this community through the prism of a female perspective.
The writer is furthermore an artist who chooses to write about the common
people she grew up with, family members, mothers and children, workers, people
such as those that ride on the bus as they go to and from work and school. This
is, indeed, the framework that is established in this collection, that of a
journey by an artist who seeks to capture as many of the common stories of the
common people as she can, as envisioned via the medium of the bus ride on
public transport, a panorama of a living community, a mural filled with living,
breathing people, travelling along at thirty miles an hour on city streets. “She
rides those buses I do / Balancing boxes of Pampers marked half price / And
pulling two kids “ (p. 22). She becomes them, becomes the community,
internalizes all these stories and weaves them with her own.
The poet reflects as well on painful episodes in
what one would imagine are autobiographical reflection, in poems such as “The
Daily Grind”, a poem that would seem to demystify sexuality by pointing out the
contradictions involved in an idealized notion of feminine sexuality that is
marketed ubiquitously, and the female perspective, one that encompasses the possibility
of unwanted pregnancies. Out of these experiences come a startling new
comparison, in which the scalpel of the abortion doctor is met by the creative
impulse of the artist. “This pen is dipped deep in between / The legs of the
writer / The daily grind of urban clit lit” (p. 39). There is as much
affirmation as accusation in this comparison, involving as it does an attempt
to resolve personal conflicts that are apprehended as if through a haze of
passing years, in memories as well of fellowship, of friends lost to illness,
of the Wolf Pack in San Diego (in the term used to refer to a group of friends
during the 80s, several of whom succumbed to AIDS), or the images of female empowerment from an
earlier age, the story of Big Red, the older woman who dresses as if she were
still a diva from the 70s Disco age, “I only wish I were brave enough / To
follow her on to the dance floor / For the triumphant return of Cold Duck” (p.
73). The poet captures these characters and makes them singular, reproducing
the mix of English and Spanish, the vibrant informal expressions used by
working class Chicanos, describing the wardrobe and mannerisms and expressions of
people who are rendered in a timeless fashion, because the stories are
themselves timeless, reflecting desire as it percolates through the everyday
rituals of life.
These passengers remind the poet of herself, for these
people are also on a journey, and there is a fellowship involved, albeit one
that reflects most intensively on her own journey as an artist. Of course the stories
are also multi-faceted, but they weave together, a Chicano analogue to the Boccaccio’s
Decameron or to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, collections told by other
voyagers. It is the projection one individual’s sensibility on the world and a
community, encompassing as it does not only historical time (the war in
Vietnam, the Disco Era, AIDs in the 80s, etc.) but also a dreamlike vision of her
own encounters, of the many figures who seem to haunt her as well. There is a
certain wish-fulfillment involved in the way that she captures these figures.
One such figure would seem to reside in the
description of an unlikely Lothario, embodied by a Greek fry cook at a
hamburger joint, a cook who is middle-aged and is oblivious to the way in which
he, also, can be transmuted into a figure of desire. In the prose poem “Dolores Fuertes”, this cook
is described in a certain flirtatious way by the poetic persona as one who has “thick
lashes”, ones that “lower themselves deep into that space between her breasts
where Jesus hangs from a thin chain” (Dolores Fuertes, p. 32). “The uniform, it
fits these days like a Latex glove, ever since she discovered the Golden Greek
at the Ox Burger. And all day she will fight to ignore the rustle of her fleshy
thighs rubbing together, trying to start a fire only to be trapped inside AMPLE
white panty hose.” (ibid) She is playing, or course, with the idea of the Greek
hero, but the poet also humorously reflects on the symbol of the Ox, an animal
of sacrifice according to ancient lore, an offering to be burnt in a bonfire,
and in which it is she herself who assumes the contours of such a sacrifice,
consumed as she is not only by lust but also by the idea of confinement when,
ironically enough, it is the cook who labors behind a screen during his job
shift. (A comical but also touching inversion.)
There is also reverie around the figure of someone
who is in a sense a prototype, the masculine figure who is not endlessly out
for sexual conquests, but who represents instead an ideal of domesticity. Are
we not dispelling the myth of the Lotharios, the Don Juans, and is the poetic
persona of these two poems not revealing a preference for the everyman who is
the father and spouse and paragon of devotion, a “Manny” such as can be found
at a karaoke bar, “, the kind of Manny who’d have enough sense to fetch you
another Corona because he’s been watching your heels sinking into the still
damp grass every time you walked across the lawn because he was the only one
who noticed you’ve been sitting there not sure what to do with the empty bottle
in your hand” (The Secrets of Chinese Restaurants, p. 65). Aren’t these
fantasies of men who are not so self-involved that they can actually be in tune
with what their partners might desire? Is there not a hidden accusation here?
There are similar evocations of other men, of uncles
who seemed impossibly glamorous like the idols of a the movie screen,
There is still the search for a type of intimacy
that is painful to evoke, and that impels the journey that is undertaken by the
poet, whose intimacy at times seems lonely despite the company of so many
strangers with so many stories.
These poems and poetic prose pieces delve into the
anxieties and frustrations of an artist who is entranced by the stories she
creates, who drinks these fictions like a fine wine and who narrates her own
journey of desire as she discovers the markers of her own personal story. Is
there any such thing as a “mundane” reality? The possibilities afforded to the
artist seem infinitely more seductive, ultimately more fulfilling, more honest,
truer to her sense of the world and how she envisions the many imagined
communities she evokes (East L.A., female artists, Chicanos and Chicanas,
Cosmopolitan wanderers, etc.). What is evident, however, in this collection, is
that we have the recurring juxtaposition of two opposites, evident in the
contrast between East L.A. and downtown, between the grit and exhaustion of
everyday working-class life and the shimmering ideals of luxury and grace (even
if in the form of aging figures such as Big Red), and the contrast between
loneliness and the desire for community, for love, for domesticity, for the
simple intimacy of an affectionate word, “mija”,
for example.
There is also a contrast between murky lights and
shadows and the bright, searing light of midday, and perhaps it is the shadows
that proves more comforting. For the artist, writing is also a way of drinking
this light, the light of frustrated relationships that seemed so promising in
the beginning but withered in the end or was tragically cut short (as it was
for her loved members of the “Wolf Pack”), the light of the past and those
first impressions when young, lying on a beach in Cancun, the light gleaming on
the water in the Honeymoon Suite of that hotel on the top floor, she who is
able to still see the ghosts that haunt these memories that others have lost, “Only
I can’t hear him anymore / Only his lips are moving” (Act of the Faithless, p.
95).
Light symbolizes desire, and it is found everywhere
in these poems and prose pieces. It is outlined all the more effectively by the
shadows and those grey spaces, the memories of Friday nights, of murky bars, of
karaoke rooms, and of enclosed spaces like that of the bus that makes its daily
rounds. It weaves and dissipates like a hazy smoke, a fog of memory, the fire
of a veil brought too close to a candle during what must have been a religious
ceremony, an incense that is meditative, akin to a religious experience. These
trips are fueled by desire and by memories on a trip that chronicles the
formative experiences of an artist and what it entails to weave her own spells.
OGRomero © 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment