III—
The Chicana as Scribe:
Harmonizing Gender and Culture in Lorna Dee Cervantes' "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway"
1
I am a poet
who yearns to dance on rooftops,
to whisper delicate lines about joy
and the blessings of human understanding.
I believe in revolution
because everywhere the crosses are burning,
sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner,
there are snipers in the schools . . .
These two verses express two radically different perspectives on the world. Irreconcilable as their substance may seem, their origin is one single poetic voice, the voice of Lorna Dee Cervantes. The above lines, from "Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War between Races,"[1] present the two conflicting but central positions in Cervantes' poetry. The first passage expresses her desire for an idealized, utopian world, possibly called into being by the visionary power of poetry. The second counters this view with a realistic perspective that sees a world fraught with social problems, a world where social revolution is necessary because "sharp-shooting goose-steppers" hide in every corner. These two contradictory attitudes shape Cervantes' poetic sensibility. Given
the marked differences between them, one desiring a peaceful harmonious world and the other recognizing a violent polarized world, the reader may anticipate her poems to be expressions of tension between desire and knowledge.
The two perspectives stem from Cervantes' dual identity: she identifies herself primarily as a poet and as a Chicana. In comparison with Villanueva, whose identity as poet oscillates between woman and Chicana, that is, between gender and social identity, Cervantes' identity oscillates between Chicana and poet. Her voice as a poet represents her inner utopian self who desires to believe that social tensions can be reconciled by poetry, and in it Cervantes, a Chicana, speaks primarily as a poet. Her voice as a Chicana corresponds to her outer social self who feels that the world can be changed only by social revolution, and in it Cervantes, a poet, speaks primarily as a Chicana.
The social dimension of "woman" is also present in Cervantes' poetic voice. When the main identity energizing the poem is her Chicana self, as in "Poem for the Young White Man," her woman identity is implicit. When she chooses to emphasize her identity as a woman, as in "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway" and "Uncle's First Rabbit," she usually does so within the boundaries of a specific Chicano environment.[2] As a female poet, Cervantes is critical of Mexican-Chicano culture, which has traditionally given authority and power to the Latino male; she questions the privileges accorded the male at the expense of the female. This perspective is most evident in the family poems: "Uncle's First Rabbit" and "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway." Her two social identities, however, are rarely in conflict.
The same coordinates of the triad that characterizes Villanueva's poetic identity—woman, poet, Chicana—also structure Cervantes' poetic identity. In Cervantes' poems, however, the tension among these coordinates is localized at different points of the triad. In reading Cervantes' poetry we must shift our focus from tension between the identities woman and Chicana, which frame Villanueva's work, to tension between the identities Chicana and poet.
Cervantes' solution to the double dilemma of being a woman and a Chicana is to respond primarily as a Chicana, a decision that interferes with her desired utopian vision. When she decides deliberately to suppress her Chicana and female voices and re-
spond as a poet, specific discontinuities interfere to mar the harmony of her poetic vision. Almost all Cervantes' poems express the paradoxical relationship between these dual identities. And although the images of a Chicana poet and a poet-visionary do not merge easily, her poems are dramatic enactments of a desire for integration and harmony between a collective, communal voice and an individual, personal voice.
With few exceptions, among them "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway," "Refugee Ship," and "Freeway 280,"[3] most of the poems in Emplumada , Cervantes' first published collection, appeared there for the first time. She wrote most of these poems while a fellow in poetry at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1979–80. As Cervantes came originally from San Jose, California, the Provincetown sojourn gave her the opportunity to meet writers and artists from different cultural backgrounds and literary orientations. In San Jose, for several years before her experience at the Fine Arts Work Center, Cervantes edited, published, and printed Mango , a successful smallpress journal which published primarily Chicano and Chicana poets. Thus she has had direct literary and cultural experiences with both Anglo and Chicano groups.
In this chapter, I postulate that the two main audiences of her poetry are Anglo and Chicano readers. On the one hand, Cervantes' identity as a Chicana posits a Chicano readership that expects the poet to speak to the issues of social justice and community. As a Chicana she feels an overriding need to respond to the authority of La Raza because she feels that a Chicana should write for and to her own community. She probably developed this concept through her participation in the social movement of the 1960s, which aimed to express the particularities of a Chicano experience. On the other hand, her identity as a poet assumes a readership with the conventional notion that poets are or should be responsible only to their art. In poems such as "In January," "Starfish," and "Moonwalkers," she would seem to be expressing the part of her which, as she confides in "Poem for the Young White Man," does not want to write about political issues and revolution: "I am not a revolutionary. / I don't even like political poems." These two rival sets of reader expectations implied by Cervantes' poems shape and determine her themes and stylistic strategies.
Cervantes' characteristic themes and stylistic strategies come back again and again to the tensions between two worlds: one real, one desired; one violent and divisive, the other peaceful and harmonious. These thematic oppositions generate her two basic poetic modes: (1) a discursive "hard" mode where she examines and evaluates the conflicting attitudes in a series of logical, causative steps; (2) an imagistic "soft" mode that attempts to evoke contemplative and meditative moods. Poems such as "Poem for the Young White Man" and "Visions of Mexico" are discursive because they are spoken by an identifiable Chicana speaker who talks about real social struggle within a historical world. They are dialogic in tone, unfolding in a pattern of statement and counterstatement. Poems such as "Starfish," "In January," and "Shells," which are spoken by a disembodied lyric speaker, rely more on loose associations suggested by concrete images than on logical connectives between ideas. The two modes, discursive and lyrical, are not mutually exclusive; depending upon the individual poem, they intersect and traverse each other, reflecting different gradations of the same poetic voice. This intermixing reinforces the notion of continual conflict between them.
In "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway," Cervantes' richest and most complex poem, her two poetic modes are mingled. She alludes to herself as a "scribe," a translator and recorder of female experiences. In the analyses that follow I use Cervantes' image of scribe to define her Chicana voice as a translating, or a mediating, voice between her community's experience and a larger audience. "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway" also contains a variant of her lyrical voice, a self-conscious poetic "I" involved in the act of self-discovery. Cervantes' discursive "I" as scribe stresses the communicative function of language, conducting a struggle between an inner and an outer world. Her "I" as lyric poet emphasizes the expressive function of language, attempting to externalize her inner utopian world where the self may enjoy a harmonious relationship with the natural landscape. Whereas the scribe explains and asserts through propositional statements, the lyric poet presents and describes through images. Of all the poems in Emplumada , "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway" is the most dynamic revelation of the conflict between the two literary modes that characterize Cervantes' poetic universe.
2
The poetry of both Villanueva and Cervantes emerges from an experience of alienation, but, whereas Villanueva assumes alienation and responds to it primarily as a woman in search of her poetic voice, Cervantes makes the experience of alienation the subject of her poems. Two of her discursive poems, "Poem for the Young White Man" and "Visions of Mexico While at a Writing Symposium in Port Townsend, Washington," dramatize the dual conflict between a historical and an utopian vision and between community and poetry. In each poem Cervantes, as scribe, translates the experience of a Chicana's alienation from both history and utopia to a larger audience. Whereas her Chicana speaker explains in the first poem what it means to exist between a Chicano community and a white society, in the second she reflects on her relationship to Mexico and the United States. Cervantes chooses to embody the paradoxical nature of her conflict between community and poetry in several concrete oppositions: Chicano-Anglo, South-North, Mexico–United States, and oral-written.
POEM FOR THE YOUNG WHITE MAN
WHO ASKED ME HOW I, AN INTELLIGENT
WELL-READ PERSON COULD BELIEVE
IN THE WAR BETWEEN RACES
In my land there are no distinctions.
The barbed wire politics of oppression
have been torn down long ago. The only reminder
of past battles, lost or won, is a slight
rutting in the fertile fields.
In my land
people write poems about love,
full of nothing but contented childlike syllables.
Everyone reads Russian short stories and weeps.
There are no boundaries. 10
There is no hunger, no
complicated famine or greed.
I am not a revolutionary.
I don't even like political poems.
Do you think I can believe in a war between races?
I can deny it. I can forget about it
when I'm safe,
living on my own continent of harmony
and home, but I am not
there. 20
I believe in revolution
because everywhere the crosses are burning,
sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner,
there are snipers in the schools . . .
(I know you don't believe this.
You think this is nothing
but faddish exaggeration. But they
are not shooting at you.)
I'm marked by the color of my skin.
The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly. 30
They are aiming at my children.
These are facts.
Let me show you my wounds: my stumbling mind, my
"excuse me" tongue, and this
nagging preoccupation
with the feeling of not being good enough.
These bullets bury deeper than logic.
Racism is not intellectual.
I cannot reason these scars away.
Outside my door 40
there is a real enemy
who hates me.
I am a poet
who yearns to dance on rooftops,
to whisper delicate lines about joy
and the blessings of human understanding.
I try. I go to my land, my tower of words and
bolt the door, but the typewriter doesn't fade out
the sounds of blasting and muffled outrage.
My own days bring me slaps on the face. 50
Every day I am deluged with reminders
that this is not
my land
and this is my land.
I do not believe in the war between races
but in this country
there is war.
In designating a white man (and by extension, the dominant society) as the addressee, the title suggests that the "I"-speaker is different in race and gender from the addressee. This expectation is borne out by lines 29 and 31—"I'm marked by the color of my skin" and "They are aiming at my children"—from which we learn that the speaker is a woman of color. The intelligent, well-read person of whom the white male has asked a question is female and belongs to a racial minority. At the beginning the poem seems to be the response of the woman implied by the title, an assumption reinforced by the possessive adjective "my" in the first line, which must refer back to the first-person pronoun in the title. There is one small problem, however. The title suggests that the "I" believes in the existence of racial conflict. Yet the "I" implicit in the first sentence states, "In my land there are no distinctions"—racial distinctions, that is. The title leads the reader to expect one thing but the poem seems to deliver another.
The speaker of the first two stanzas describes a fairy-tale place, a land where racial tensions, it seems, have been overcome. The only visible sign of any past conflict is a "slight/rutting in the fertile fields." The title encourages the reader to think that the young white man does not believe in racial strife, for if he asks the "intelligent" and "well-read" woman how she can believe in the war between races, it must be because he, an intelligent and well-read man, does not believe in it. For him, intelligence is incompatible with a belief that racial discrimination exists. The content of these two stanzas would seem to point to him as the speaker. Yet the "I" who believes that racial conflict exists is speaking.
The lines opening the third stanza—"I am not a revolutionary. / I don't even like political poems"—are consistent with the views of the first two stanzas which sound more like a fairy tale. The rhetorical question of line 15, "Do you think I can believe in a war between races?" would make perfect sense if the young man were the speaker. But the next phrase, "I can deny it," assures us that he does not speak these words, for why would he deny racial war if he does not believe in it in the first place? The "I" speaking drops her assumed mask in the phrase, "but I am not / there."
This "I" partly identifies with the young white man's land of harmony, for to say "I am not there" implies some knowl-
edge of his land and an admission of having been there. Within the same sentence the "I" shifts from "my own continent of harmony / and home" to a negation of this land. The pronoun "my" reinforces the woman's identification with her interlocutor's fairy-tale land. The shifting intimates that the "I" of "but I am not there" is the same "I" that is supposedly in the white man's land. As soon as the "I" establishes an identification with his land, however, she begins to dissociate herself from it, triggering the retreat from a dreamland into a fragmented world. This is one of Cervantes' favorite stylistic strategies. She describes the dream and establishes her identification with it; she then inserts a conjunction—"but" in this instance—which initiates the shift away from the desired dream toward the reality. She uses the same technique in the poem's final three lines, where the "but" separates racial harmony and racial war.
Stanza 4 puts into motion the antagonist-realist voice that challenges the utopian voice of the earlier stanzas. The "I" now speaks like someone who believes in the war between races. After line 4 the speaker interrupts her narrative with an aside to her interlocutor. The preceding ellipsis may suggest that, although he has listened attentively so far, he now makes a disapproving gesture to indicate that the speaker's discourse about social violence is a cliché or a "faddish exaggeration." The fact that the speaker's statement to him is placed within parentheses heightens the conflict between them. The woman cannot speak to him from her place in this real land in the same way she did from her place in the utopian land of the preceding three stanzas. Her perspective has shifted from inside to outside his land.
She and her "children," that is, her racial community, are marked by ethnic color and bullets are aimed at them. Because the white man is not so marked, the "goose-steppers" do not shoot at him. The woman's words are definite, sharp, and direct: "These are facts." Real, physical violence produces psychological and spiritual "wounds": a "stumbling mind," an "'excuse me' tongue," and the classic feeling of inferiority shared by oppressed peoples. By her "'excuse me' tongue" the speaker means several things, all pointing to the ambiguities of her social position. For one thing, she means the English language, because as a Chicana she sees Spanish as her authentic language. She must use English, however, to express her Chicana self to a white audience that, in most instances, would not understand her if she used her own language. English is her "'excuse me' tongue" because she must
use it to apologize for her situation (in the sense of explain and defend). Second, the "'excuse me' tongue" refers to her situation as a woman. She ironically supposes that a woman does not have the right to speak, that to speak is to intrude into the conversation. Third, the phrase also suggests that Cervantes as a poet must use a discursive kind of language to communicate to an audience that has different expectations about the nature of poetic language. She expects her general audience, like the young white man, to disapprove of her direct, factual expression. In any of these meanings the phrase accentuates the speaker's, and by extension Cervantes', subordinate place in society as Chicana, as woman, and as poet.
The question posed in the poem's title implies that a person of intelligence, culture, and literacy should not entertain ideas about racial struggle. Cervantes' response inverts what we might expect to be the roles of rational argumentation and lyrical expression. For example, in the lines, "bullets bury deeper than logic" and "Racism is not intellectual," her discursive, factual argument is guided by the heart's voice rather than by the mind's. The "wounds" she feels are impervious to reasoned discourse that would deny them. The vision of harmony which the young man believes to be reasonable is in her poetic universe the expression of lyrical, counterfactual longing.
The final stanza reiterates the speaker's conflict between desire and knowledge. Associating poetry with the "inside," or the personal and subjective, she desires to write poems that might blot out the angry muffled sounds on the "outside," or the real world. Ironically, to communicate lofty gestures and sublime thoughts, she has to "bolt the door." She seeks isolation with her typewriter in a room away from the world's noise. It is the conventional notion of the poet composing the text alone in an ivory tower ("tower of words"), insulated from direct interaction but ostensibly communicating with everyone. The outside world of action and commitment is associated with sublinguistic phenomena: loud sounds and noises, "muffled outrage." The conflict between poetry and community remains present to the end:
Every day I am deluged with reminders
that this is not
my land
and this is my land.
The deictic "this" is ambiguous. In the poem it has only the immediate context of "land" in line 47—"I go to my land, my tower of words"—to provide a referent. In this sense her land is the metaphorical territory of poetry because she is a poet. Yet it is an illusion to believe that she inhabits only the world of poetic creation because insistent reminders tell her she cannot write solely about sublime thoughts and gestures: "to dance on roof-tops" and "to whisper delicate lines about joy." The word "land," however, also means a real country in the context of the poem. Yet even in this sense "land" is ambiguous because it refers to a territory that, though now part of the United States, formerly belonged to Mexico. The young man of the title assumes that he and the speaker are citizens of the same land. She, in contrast, does not share the same sense of certainty about belonging to this country. These lines thus also express the historical dilemma of identifying with a homeland that itself treats Chicanos ambiguously.
The final three lines realistically incorporate the unresolved logical paradox between the visionary ideal ("I do not believe in the war between races") and the material reality ("in this country / there is war"). Her inner utopian "I" wants to believe that poetry can reconcile racial hostilities, but her outer social "I" knows that the battle must be fought in the historical world. It is obvious that Cervantes finds it difficult to compromise on matters of race. The pulls between her lyric "I" and her discursive "I" remain conflictual to the end. On reading "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway," however, we will see that she finds it easier to compromise on matters of gender. Her scribe voice in "Beneath the Shadow," responding as a woman within the boundaries of her barrio, mediates, or compromises, the two incompatible views about men bequeathed to her by her mother and her grandmother. Her scribe voice in "Poem for the Young White Man" does not mediate; rather it explains the incompatibility between the desire to write the way she thinks a poet is expected to write and the reality that defines her community's relationship with the outside world. Or, to put it another way, Cervantes expresses the dilemma of wanting to be an American poet without compromising her identity with and her loyalties to the Chicano community.
"Visions of Mexico," divided into two parts, shows that Cervantes understands that her identity as a Chicana is defined by
an ambiguous relationship not only to the dominant society in the United States (the young white man) and to written poetry (her "tower of words"), but also to Mexico and to an oral poetry. "Visions of Mexico," in defining the conflict between oral and written poetry more sharply than does "Poem for the Young White Man," highlights Cervantes' role as an intermediary between two cultures and two literary traditions.
VISIONS OF MEXICO WHILE
AT A WRITING SYMPOSIUM IN
PORT TOWNSEND, WASHINGTON
Mexico
When I'm that far south, the old words
molt off my skin, the feathers
of all my nervousness.
My own words somersault naturally as my name,
joyous among all those meadows: Michoacan,
Vera Cruz, Tenochtitlán, Oaxaca . . .
Pueblos green on the low hills
where men slap handballs below acres of maiz.
I watch and understand.
My frail body has never packed mud 10
or gathered in the full weight of the harvest.
Alone with the women in the adobe, I watch men,
their taut faces holding in all their youth.
This far south we are governed by the law
of the next whole meal.
We work and watch seabirds elbow their wings
in migratory ways, those mispronouncing gulls
coming south
to refuge or gameland.
I don't want to pretend I know more 20
and can speak all the names. I can't.
My sense of this land can only ripple through my veins
like the chant of an epic corrido.
I come from a long line of eloquent illiterates
whose history reveals what words don't say.
Our anger is our way of speaking,
the gesture is an utterance more pure than word.
We are not animals
but our senses are keen and our reflexes,
accurate punctuation.
All the knifings in a single night, low-voiced
scufflings, sirens, gunnings . . .
We hear them 30
and the poet within us bays.
Washington
I don't belong this far north.
The uncomfortable birds gawk at me.
They hem and haw from their borders in the sky.
I heard them say: Mexico is a stumbling comedy.
A loose-legged Cantinflas woman
acting with Pancho Villa drunkenness.
Last night at the tavern
this was all confirmed
in a painting of a woman: her glowing
silk skin, a halo 10
extending from her golden coiffure
while around her, dark-skinned men with Jap slant eyes
were drooling in a caricature of machismo.
Below it, at the bar, two Chicanas
hung at their beers. They had painted black
birds that dipped beneath their eyelids.
They were still as foam while the men
fiddled with their asses, absently;
the bubbles of their teased hair snapped
open in the forced wind of the beating fan. 20
there are songs in my head I could sing you
songs that could drone away
all the Mariachi bands you thought you ever heard
songs that could tell you what I know
or have learned from my people
but for that I need words
simple black nymphs between white sheets of paper
obedient words obligatory words words I steal
in the dark when no one can hear me.
as pain sends seabirds south from the cold 30
I come north
to gather my feathers
for quills
The major structural device of this poem is the theme of migration, and the central image is the migrating bird that is always in transit between one home and another. The theme of migration has strong implications for a Mexican-Chicano community whose history has been shaped by patterns of migration, both internal (within Mexico and within the United States) and external (between Mexico and the United States). Like the migrating bird, the speaker hovers between two homelands, Mexico and the state of Washington, identifying with each place but also
alienated from each. In another poem entitled "Como lo siento," the speaker, witnessing the image of a crow spiraling and drifting, reflects: "I thought of the circle / my own life made, and how / at heart I'm a hoverer." The speaker in "Visions" hovers between two extreme points of the circle in the migratory cycle, desiring to find the harmonizing midpoint. The image of the hovering bird, like the image of scribe, connotes transition, uncertainty, and suspension between one home and another. Cervantes' real homeland, California, is the geographical midpoint between the two extremes of Mexico and Washington. Again in this poem, as in "Poem for the Young White Man," the "I" fluctuates between the desire for a utopian land and the knowledge of a real land of conflict and struggle.
Although nothing explicitly indicates that the speaker in "Visions" is a woman, the reader infers that the speaker is the female persona of Lorna Cervantes. At a writing symposium in Washington State, she looks south, thinking about her relationship to Mexico. The words of the first stanza correspond to her lyrical, inner "I" which desires to see Mexico as more utopian than it is. She immediately sees herself in a harmonious relationship with Mexico, implicitly comparing herself with birds and reptiles that shed their feathers and skins for new growth. These images of reptiles, birds, and feathers suggest Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent-god of pre-Columbian Mexico, an association reinforced by three of the names defining the historical landscape. Michoacan, Oaxaca, and Tenochtitlán, the Aztec name for Mexico City, are specific sites of the pre-Columbian empire. The pre-Columbian association is further buttressed by the image of men playing handball, recalling the ancient ball courts of an indigenous era.
When the speaker says in the opening lines, "old words / molt off my skin, the feathers / of all my nervousness," the "old words" represent the English language, which she imagines herself casting off as naturally as reptiles and birds shed their skins and feathers. They give way to her "own words" which "somersault" as effortlessly as her name. Since her name is Spanish, we assume she sees herself speaking Spanish, pronouncing the pre-Columbian names with ease. The English language is like a hard exterior, a "shell," to use one of Cervantes' favorite images, which covers the soft part underneath, her own language, Spanish. In her vision of Mexico her nervousness about speaking Spanish
leaves her, as she is able to speak it gracefully when she is that far south.
The image of speaking Spanish with grace and facility clashes with the one Cervantes gives us in "Oaxaca, 1974" and in "Refugee Ship," two poems in which she wrestles with that very issue. In the former poem she says, "My name hangs about me like a loose tooth," and in the latter, "I'm orphaned from my Spanish name. / The words are foreign, stumbling on my tongue." In these two poems Cervantes presents a more realistic portrait of her relationship with Mexico in the speaking and understanding of Spanish. In "Refugee Ship," she confides, "Mama raised me without language," meaning her mother chose to teach her English (which she views as the absence of language) but not Spanish (the presence of language).
In "Visions of Mexico," then, Cervantes' vision of herself speaking Spanish gracefully has an ironic dimension. The irony is compounded when we note that not only does she speak Spanish with facility, but she also pronounces the indigenous names with ease. The presence of the Spanish name, Veracruz,[4] among other pre-Columbian names contributes to her ambiguous relationship as a Chicana to Mexico. Veracruz is a city-port founded by the Spaniards. Cervantes' speaking Spanish and yet pronouncing the pre-Columbian names with grace recalls ironically at once both conqueror and conquered. Although, for the Chicano, the Spanish language is the language of an oppressed group in relation to United States history, in relation to Mexican history it represents the language of the oppressor.
Mexico is presented as an agrarian society, with meadows, green pueblos, acres of maíz , and adobe homes. Proof that Cervantes romanticizes Mexico is found in the lines following line 9: "I watch and understand." Her speaker is too frail to perform the heavy physical labor of the village. She remains inside the adobe house with the village women, watching the men doing the harvesting and packing mud. From the line, "Alone with the women in the adobe," the reader may infer that the native women are also frail. One of Cervantes' blind spots in these lines is that she overlooks the sexual inequalities in this society. Her speaker appears content to sit inside with the women watching the men. This portrayal of the village women suggests a sexual inequality which would surely trouble Cervantes in her own context. In
"Crow," for example, she says that the women of her community taught her self-reliance:
Before men came they whispered,
Know good polished oak .
Learn hammer and Phillips
Learn socket and rivet .
In a more realistic vision of a rural Mexico, the village women would be performing hard physical labor along with the men.[5]
A second blind spot is that her speaker's attitude rationalizes the hard, physical aspects of primitive life. Even though she perceives the men with "taut faces" and recognizes that life in this village means a severely limited existence ("we are governed by the law / of the next whole meal"), she refrains from taking issue, directly or indirectly, with a social structure implied by inequalities such as poverty. Again, Cervantes' romanticized view of a rural existence is incompatible with her view of an urban existence in, say, "Cannery Town in August," where the situation, tone, and images convey an awareness of hard, physical struggle for survival.[6]
The speaker's relationship to Mexican history and culture is clarified by the word corrido in line 23. The corrido , an oral ballad, a pristine spoken form, was cultivated in the late nineteenth century by Mexican communities with limited access to the printed word for purposes of disseminating information about events that were important to preserving their history.[7] The corrido as a literary form has characterized the experiences of the Mexican population in the Southwest, especially along the United States—Mexican border. It usually tells a story that is either unarticulated or presented in negative form by traditional United States history.[8] Originating as a spoken attempt to capture the events and actions of a community, it remains an oral form for a long time before it is put into print. As a literary form it is discursive and narrative rather than lyrical and suggestive.
Like any Chicana who writes, Cervantes is alienated from the corrido , with its gestural elements and other aspects, such as acoustic and sound qualities, which cannot be expressed by written discourse. The speaker recognizes her alienation from the oral world of her ancestors ("My sense of this land can only ripple through my veins / like the chant of an epic corrido") at the same
time that she accepts her connection with it ("I come from a long line of eloquent illiterates"). Cervantes, like the historical scribe, is in a middle position between an identification with and an estrangement from an oral world. Because she sees herself as a scribe, her image as poet is closer to a corridista (someone who recites or sings the corrido ) whose primary intent is to translate experiences to an audience, than it is to a poet who creates meaning. Like the corridista , she too is more a vehicle for the experiences of others than a composer-creator of personal experience.
Because of the proximity of the sentence, "I come from a long line of eloquent illiterates," to the word corrido , the eloquent illiterates are her own Mexican-Chicano ancestors who depended upon gestures, actions, and the spoken word to communicate their history. The words "eloquent illiterates" also echo the pre-Columbian references in the first stanza and hence include, though more remotely, the rich culture of an indigenous Mexican population which the Spanish conquerors reduced to a mute gesture. Cervantes' image of herself as a scribe is appropriate here too: as a scribe she extracts texts from different historical eras—both ancient and modern—and makes them part of contemporary culture.
Stanza 2 contains a mixing of voices from two planes of expression: language (written and spoken) and paralinguistic forms of communication (gestures, emotions, reflexes). The chant and the epic corrido , primarily spoken and sung forms, are juxtaposed with the poet-speaker's own written form, the poem itself. The mixing of linguistic with paralinguistic forms occurs specifically in the line, "the gesture is an utterance more pure than word." Gestures are precisely the paralinguistic signs of communication which escape written discourse. They are not usually designated as utterances, a classification reserved for denoting spoken and, less commonly, written discourse. Yet in this line the verb "is" syntactically links "gesture" with "utterance," with the comparative "more pure" separating them. The speaker's reference to "reflexes," or gestures, as "accurate punctuation" is another example of mixing. Punctuation is a specific convention of printed language. Yet the speaker equates this feature of writing with precisely those expressions, "reflexes," which escape it. As in "Poem for the Young White Man," Cervantes here links the world of her community with loud, violent noises and sounds: "All the knifings in a single night, low-voiced / scuf-
flings, sirens, gunnings." On hearing these noises the poet, a person of words, "bays" in empathy with the community.
The loud noises suggest an urban setting. The disjuncture between the urban image and the rural images of stanza l accentuates the poem's theme of migration from a rural to an urban context. The interplay of the two images also suggests an ambiguous quality in the poet's relationship with her community. It invites comparison with the scribe who in a medieval context marked a transitional moment in history when European society moved from an oral to a print culture.[9] In an analogous way the disjuncture between rural and urban suggests a transitional moment in the modern history of Chicanos, as they move from a culture that has used oral forms of expression in a modern context—and still does, to some extent—to a culture that begins to express itself in literary forms (novels, poems, short stories).
The second part of "Visions of Mexico" shifts to the Washington scene and continues the theme of migration. In the south, migrating seabirds from the north reminded her of "mispronouncing gulls / coming south / to refuge or gameland." The image of "mispronouncing gulls" is probably a reference to American tourists who descend upon Mexico, mispronouncing Spanish as they move toward their vacation resorts, seeking "refuge" and "gameland" from their tax obligations. The speaker is like the migrating bird who leaves the warm southern climate to come north to build its nest. More inclined toward the south, however, she feels herself in alien territory among the "uncomfortable birds" of the north ("I don't belong this far north") where nothing appears natural. She is a strange bird in a strange land whose presence makes the other inhabitants uncomfortable. They show their discomfort by gawking and by hemming and hawing at her. She is neither seen nor heard by them.
In the north she hears only negative depictions of Mexico: "a stumbling comedy. / A loose-legged Cantinflas woman / acting with Pancho Villa drunkenness." The reference to the characters of Cantinflas and Pancho Villa suggests that Mexico is known through the images reflected in the media, a technological extension of print culture. The speaker offers a specific example as proof: a painting portraying Mexico as a blond-haired woman with dark-skinned men "drooling" after her.
The penultimate stanza states the poem's central paradox. To erase the sounds of the touristic mariachi bands, the speaker
wants to sing authentic songs about her people, who knew only the oral word, to an audience that relates only to words on the page, the "you" in the first line of this stanza. This "you" includes all those, Chicanos as well as Anglos, who do not know her ancestors' history as she would like them to know it. The paradox is that in order to sing those songs she needs "words / simple black nymphs between white sheets of paper." The sexual innuendos in the references to "nymphs" and "sheets" reinforce the theme of a desire to give birth to the poet's songs. Although the content here necessitates the presence of "simple" and "black" nymphs, nymphs are traditionally white and Greek. As such they echo a schema that belongs to the symbolist tradition of Anglo-American modern poetry, a tradition that, according to Charles Altieri, contemporary poets have attempted to challenge.[10] And although the thrust of Cervantes' poetry shares in this attempt to find an alternative to the symbolist model that valorized the mythological modes of a Judeo-Christian order, the presence of these mythical nature goddesses in this poem only deepens the implication of a Chicana poet in two literary traditions: an oral, Mexican-Chicano tradition and a written, Anglo-American tradition.
As mediator between an oral people and an audience that reads, this poet steals "words . . . / in the dark" when no one hears her. The synesthesia of mixing visual and auditory modalities heightens the paradoxical relationship between oral and written. The implication of her stealing words is that these words are not hers. She furtively steals the words of others to employ them in a way they are not employed by those who own the words. To obtain these words she comes north, "to gather my feathers / for quills." Whereas birds travel south to escape the pain of cold, she comes north toward the pain. In order to write, she must accept the pain of reality associated with the north rather than the nostalgia of romance associated with the south because the north is a print culture. She comes north to gather her "feathers" to build her nest—words she needs to write poems. The repetition of "songs" in lines 21–24 and of "words" in lines 26–28 stresses the urgency the speaker feels about fulfilling her objectives as a mediator between an oral people and a reading audience. Small but important deviations in the writing of these lines create rhetorical effects of urgency and immediacy: multilevel, run-on
sentences, the absence of grammatical punctuation, and spacing to separate syntactic units:
but for that I need words
simple black nymphs between white sheets of paper
obedient words obligatory words words I steal
in the dark when no one can hear me.
The final stanza once again echoes a pre-Columbian civilization. Feathers, plumage, and quill are images relating to the theme of writing in Cervantes' poetry. The name of the volume, Emplumada , is a feminine adjective meaning "feathered in plumage." The word pluma in Spanish means "pen." Because of its associations with birds and flight, emplumada connotes the image of someone who sees herself singing beautiful songs with graceful ease. The image of feathers in Emplumada , as in "Visions," is also tied to Quetzalcoatl, a pre-Columbian god who represented the union of quetzal or "bird" (feathers) and coatl or "snake" (earth), a union joining flight and land. The unifying of two extremes in the mythic bird suggests that Cervantes wants to resolve tensions between poetry and community, oral and written, high and low, north and south. "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway" offers the geographical midpoint of California between the two poles of north and south, which circumscribe Cervantes' cultural identities.
3
Cervantes' lyric poems express a desire to be free from the pressures of social commitment and responsibility. Spoken by disembodied lyric speakers, they reveal her need to speak in a voice that deliberately tries to avoid claiming a social consciousness. As such they are less dependent than the discursive poems upon a familiarity with the subtleties and innuendos of the interrelationships among Mexican, Chicano, and Anglo cultures. In contrast with the dialogic structure of the discursive poems in which the speaker explores both sides of an issue, the lyric poems have a monologic structure in which a speaker attempts to exter-
nalize inner experiences. They are attempts either to capture specific scenes in the natural landscape, as are "In January" and "Starfish," or to express a personal and private philosophy, as is "Shells." They require readers who, of unspecified ethnic background or gender identification, can make connections between the images and the outside world.
The associations evoked by Cervantes' images are not radical leaps. Cervantes does not take the "long floating leap" advocated by the American contemporary poet Robert Bly in his essay, "Looking for Dragon Smoke."[11] Cervantes' images remain anchored in the concrete world, directed outward toward the historical landscape instead of inward toward an unconscious psychological landscape. They do not represent surreal leaps into the unconscious by which the poet attempts to make visible the latent and dormant aspects of human experience.
Although Cervantes relies on the poetic image to suggest contemplative and meditative moods in these poems, she never decomposes, never fragments or shatters, the poetic surface; words are almost always organized into complete sentences or into phrasings with rhetorical connectives and grammatical punctuation.[12] Her most radical deviations include an "I" in the act of self-discovery, an absence of punctuation, and paratactic phrasing—all elements that appear in her discursive as well as in her lyrical poems. An analysis of three lyric poems, "In January," "Starfish," and "Shells," shows that even when Cervantes speaks in her lyric voice, she does not achieve a vision of harmony and integration. Image patterns or gradations in tone intrude to suggest futility, sadness, and death. With the exception of "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway," Cervantes writes no celebratory poems—only poems that desire celebration.
IN JANUARY
That old man at the corner
keeps casting his rod.
What can he possibly snag
in this invisible season?
He reels it in.
He is all smile and bulging pockets.
His gray eyes are glazed
with the iridescence of his age.
His cheeks hold the last ash.
And though his daughter
is bringing him pillows and tea
and the handsome son-in-law
bends the line, a slow thing
stirs in the shadow of the bougainvillea.
This poem is a series of concrete images. All the sentences work well syntactically, some of them specifying actions and others describing the principal character, the old man. The narrator is a detached observer who speaks in the present tense about a succession of events taking place in the natural landscape. There is a slight ambiguity about the poem's pragmatic situation. Where are we and how do we know? Words and phrases, such as "casting his rod," "snag," and "reels it in," suggest the activity of fishing, which is usually associated with the country, near a lake or by a seashore. The phrase in line 1, "at the corner," seems to be a contradiction because it suggests an urban context: "at the corner" of a street or a house. The phrase, however, does not totally eliminate the possibility of a country setting because it could refer to the corner of a pier, placing the old man closer to a body of water than to a city street. As the poem continues, the first syllable of the word "season" momentarily suggests that the old man is at sea, but the suggestion is immediately negated by the second syllable, son . The image of the daughter "bringing him pillows and tea" seemingly puts the old man in his garden and not at the seashore. The image of "invisible season" also suggests an urban context, where the seasons are less well defined than in a rural setting. We may assume, then, that the old man entertains a fantasy that he is actually fishing. The daughter and the hand-some son-in-law who "bends the line" also participate in the old man's world of make-believe.
The poem's images establish a pattern of rising hope and skeptical realism. A pattern embracing romance and reality also characterizes the discursive poems, but there the pattern is established more by the force of statement and assertion than by the relation among images, as is true here. The old man keeps casting his rod, an action suggesting hope, for he does it again and again. The next sentence reveals the narrator's skepticism about the old man's success in this "invisible season." The images describing the old man's demeanor, "all smile and bulging pockets," soften the skepticism. The next image is one of old age transforming the old man's dismal ("gray") eyes, giving them an iridescent quality, a transformation enacting the conflict between gloom and hope.
The conflict is decided in favor of gloom, possibly death: "His cheeks hold the last ash."
The grammatical syntax of the final sentence suspends and compresses the conflict between the two attitudes of romance and reality. It communicates a sense of deficiency in the old man's world of fantasy and make-believe. In spite of his family's supportive actions ("And though . . . "), something else ("a slow thing . . . ") is happening. The final image, "a slow thing / stirs in the shadow of the bougainvillea," evokes mystery and ominous threat. This obscure image of a slow thing stirring echoes, albeit faintly, the mood and tone of Yeats's "The Second Coming":
somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs . . .
Yeats's images, in keeping with the tone of doom in his poem, are far more exaggerated and overtly sinister than are Cervantes'. Yeats is foretelling the overthrow of an entire civilization. Cervantes' mysterious portent, however, may be said to be all the more enigmatic because it comes in the enclosed space of the old man's home and garden, amid the apparently delicate and beautiful bougainvillea.
The final sentence also breaks with the earlier precise images to suggest an unnameable abstract presence ("thing") stirring beneath the surface of life. Its length contrasts sharply with the one- and two-line sentences preceding it, a feature that further emphasizes the rupture. The longer sentence slows the pace and heightens the significance of the final image, contrasting the gloom of "shadow" with the iridescent colors of "bougainvillea." The poem's implicit terminal point is loss and futility.
"In January" represents the traditional family in its three characters. The daughter and the son-in-law suggest the potential to continue the family line through the institution of marriage. Some biographical detail about Cervantes will enrich our understanding of this poem. Like Villanueva, Cervantes comes from a father-absent family in which three generations of women play the dominant role. The narrator of "In January" reflects Cervantes' distrust of the traditional family as utopia. The implication is that the family ought to be sufficient, but the "slow thing"
stirring, interrupting and ruining the perfect image, intimates otherwise.
In "Starfish" Cervantes is seeking a lyric moment that can offer an escape from the social world. The poem describes the speaker's encounter with nature on the beach: it frames, isolates, and centers on a very ordinary object, the starfish.
STARFISH
They were lovely in the quartz and jasper sand
As if they had created terrariums with their bodies
On purpose; adding sprigs of seaweed, seashells,
White feathers, eel bones, miniature
Mussels, a fish jaw. Hundreds; no—
Thousands of baby stars. We touched them,
Surprised to find them soft, pliant, almost
Living in their attitudes. We would dry them, arrange them,
Form seascapes, geodesics . . . We gathered what we could
In the approaching darkness. Then we left hundreds of
Thousands of flawless five-fingered specimens sprawled
Along the beach as far as we could see, all massed
Together: little martyrs, soldiers, artless suicides
In lifelong liberation from the sea. So many
Splayed hands, the tide shoveled in.
The hardness of minerals ("quartz" and "jasper") is mixed with the softness of "sand." The usually colorless and transparent quartz is juxtaposed with the opaque and colorful jasper. The details emphasize nouns rather than verbs: "seaweed, seashells, / White feathers, eel bones, miniature / Mussels, a fish jaw." The images of eel bones and fish jaw, connoting dismemberment and death, mar the harmony suggested by "seaweed, seashells / White feathers . . . miniature / Mussels." Lines 5 and 6 dramatize the process of the narrator's consciousness, catching the immediacy of the moment: "Hundreds; no— / Thousands of baby stars." The image of baby stars captures an inversion of high and low, heaven and earth, where the sand becomes a reflecting pool of the stars in the sky.
The next six lines establish a linear structure of consecutive events: "We touched them"; "We would dry them"; "We gathered"; "Then we left hundreds of / Thousands." The speaker and her companions leave the vision of the beach to return to the social world. The images in the final three lines suggest that the
starfish are the casualties of war: "little martyrs, soldiers, artless suicides / In lifelong liberation from the sea. So many / splayed hands." The metonymy of the starfish as "splayed hands" forebodes disintegration and disharmony instead of the peace and illumination that would more likely accompany a lyrical moment. Like the image of the family in "In January," the encounter with nature in "Starfish" is also insufficient as a transcending force. If anything, the last lines of "Starfish" convey a feeling that relates to Cervantes' wish of liberation for her people.
SHELLS
I string shells
put an order
to my life
I find in shells
the way I live
everything I touch
is fragile
but full of color
or brine
I can't
hold back
from touching
§
stranger
not my husband
you offer
seabirds
cleft surf
the sun
ripping apart
the fog-strewn
shoreline
§
I am young
balloon-mad
the child in me
scatters down the coast
off the pebbled beach
of Point Reyes
that was another time
I bordered my pale life
with the colors
of hallucinogens
every pebble
was a wonder
I could name
only by color
jade vermilion
sandstone buff
or the inexplicable
azure glass
I was alone
gathering
the polished stones
I still hold
dear—for me now
every joy
measures itself
against the brilliance
of that time
§
you said
you suffered
a sheltered life
I want to scratch
that envy
from your voice
I take refuge
in the fact
that every
pleasure
I've worked myself
like the fireplace
my grandmother built
still standing
all these years
every stone
set furiously
in place
§
I dust pebbles
turn them
to sheen
what I want
is an unnamed
thing
when you have gone
I wonder at the way
I let you go
without touching
you, wonder
at seagulls, the
danger in their willful
lines—for them
life is nothing
but picking
the coast clean
all they love
is a flicker of bread
or the opening
of another hand
"Shells" has a lighter tone, a more compressed form, than the two preceding poems, partly owing to its short stanzas and lines. In the twenty-nine three-line stanzas the three- or four-syllable line predominates, with the longest line containing seven syllables. A second reason for the lighter, more compact tone is the absence of punctuation and of explicit connectives. The only mark of punctuation is the dash, which is used twice to stress fluidity and rapid shifts in thought. The absence of punctuation makes "Shells" stand out among the poems in Emplumada . Only
one other poem, "Lots: II," the last two stanzas of "Visions of Mexico," and one section of "Beneath the Shadow" are totally without punctuation. The sections in "Shells" are separated not by numbers or subtitles, as in other poems, but by the less conspicuous marking of §, a third feature contributing to the poem's lighter quality. Yet a fourth feature is the linking of isolated images by juxtaposition rather than by grammatical connectives, as in stanzas 5 and 6 of section 3:
jade vermilion
sandstone buff
Even though punctuation and connectives are missing, the reader is clear on rhetorical pauses, which occur at different points in a stanza. Whereas the thought in some sentences is suspended by enjambment, in others it clearly stops at the end of a stanza. For example, the clause ending stanza 2 in section 1, "everything I touch," is left suspended, to be completed in the following stanza with "is fragile"; however, the phrase "of Point Reyes," the third line of stanza 2 in section 3, terminates the thought. Sometimes the pause occurs in mid stanza, as in stanza 2 of section 1: "I find in shells / the way I live."
A second feature differentiating this poem from "In January" and "Starfish" is that "Shells" presents more information about the narrator's personal background and history, making her more of a subject than are the narrators of the other two poems. Although this poem does not overtly express any social content that is of specific interest to women as women, we know for certain that the speaker is a woman, from "stranger / not my husband." We receive a sense of her life in the past as opposed to the present moment. The loose linear structure opens in the present, makes a rapid shift to the past ("I am young," section 3, stanza 1), and then returns once again to present time ("for me now," stanza 8, section 3). Although the speaker withholds direct comment, we feel her presence, saying just enough to let us know how she feels about her life. We also feel the presence of her interlocutor, the "you," who is probably an intimate friend since he confides to her that he regrets his "sheltered life" (stanzas 1 and 2, section 4).
As the speaker strings shells, putting an order to her life, the reader can piece together a meaning for the poem by associating its images. "Shells" also offers more opportunity than does "In
January" or "Starfish" for seeing intertextual relations with some of Cervantes' other poems. Hence what may appear casual and momentary in this poem yields significance when its images are related to similar images in other poems, especially in "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway."
Although Cervantes' maternal sources are more clearly seen in "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway," they are also present by implication in this poem. "Shells" understandably echoes the poet's mother and grandmother when the speaker expresses her philosophy toward life, a philosophy that evolves from the interplay between the divergent views of the two women. Whereas "Beneath the Shadow" enacts their conflict within the speaker, "Shells" only suggests their presence, presupposing the reader's knowledge of certain image patterns and expressions.
The image of dusting pebbles and turning them to sheen (section 5, stanza 1) succinctly expresses the speaker's philosophy. Essentially she transforms negatives into positives: dullness into luster. The image of the shell is emblematic of the two opposing textures she wants to blend together: the hard exterior and the soft interior. Stanzas 2 and 3 of section 1 mix sensations of softness ("everything I touch / is fragile") with the hardness of "brine," an image that suggests the salty sea, hence bitterness. The interplay of the fragile with the hard is an image that recurs in the fragile softness of the grandmother and the hard bitterness of the mother in "Beneath the Shadow."
The narrator mentions the grandmother explicitly in section 4. The references to the "fireplace," to building, and to "seagulls" (section 5) are also significant images surrounding the figure of the grandmother in "Beneath the Shadow." The image of the fireplace creates a tension between soft and hard or between the pleasure and the labor the speaker is alluding to in section 4 of "Shells." From what she says to her interlocutor in the first four stanzas, we may infer that he envies the quality of her life: while he claims he has "suffered / a sheltered life," he assumes hers is adventurous and full of romance. She assures him that underneath the appearance lies hard, furious work. She, like her grandmother, has toiled for her pleasures. The harmonious composition of the fireplace once it is built ("every stone . . . in place") is deceiving, giving the impression of ease, but the achievement of this harmony is the result of strenuous labor ("furiously").
The seabirds are an ambivalent image for the speaker. As we
read "Beneath the Shadow," and even "Uncle's First Rabbit," we shall understand the connection of the seabirds to the grandmother's life and their implications for the speaker. The speaker admires the trust and confidence the seagulls demonstrate in approaching humans for food. At the same time she knows that "for them / life is nothing / but picking / the coast clean / all they love / is a flicker of bread / or the opening / of another hand" (section 5, stanzas 5–7). In going after whoever or whatever offers them security, seagulls are scavengers of human garbage. They suggest the soft grandmother who found a false security at the cost of living with a violent man for twenty-five years. The seagulls represent a dangerous temptation ("the / danger in their willful / lines") to the speaker-poet.
"Shells" gives some indications that the stranger is to be linked with the false security of seagulls. In section 2 he offers "seabirds / cleft surf / the sun / ripping apart / the fog-strewn / shoreline." The speaker then recalls her experiences on the northern California shoreline at Point Reyes, likening them to touchstones by which she measures her joys in the present. In the final section the repetition of the word "wonder" linked with the stranger and with the seagulls suggests that the stranger too offers a false security. The speaker rejects the stranger, recognizing that her life is a process of self-invention, relying on her own experiences, past and present. The poem ends on a note of quiet restlessness that keeps alive her desire for the "unnamed / thing."
4
In this section I return to Cervantes' discursive voice by way of her family poems, "Uncle's First Rabbit" and "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway." I classify these poems as discursive because they treat the theme of social conflict. In contrast with "Poem for the Young White Man" and "Visions of Mexico," which deal with social struggle from the perspective of ethnicity, these two poems deal with it from the perspective of gender. By addressing the subject of male-female tensions, they reveal Cervantes' identity as a woman. As noted earlier, however, Cervantes' identity as woman is inextricably tied to her identity as
Chicana. Her response in these poems is specifically grounded in the setting of Chicano culture.
"Uncle's First Rabbit"
Based on specific events, "Uncle's First Rabbit" contains elements of narrative. It is heavily descriptive, attempting to explain how a specific phenomenon such as violence becomes interiorized within a male psyche.
UNCLE'S FIRST RABBIT
He was a good boy
making his way through
the Santa Barbara pines,
sighting the blast of fluff
as he leveled the rifle,
and the terrible singing began.
He was ten years old,
hunting my grandpa's supper.
He had dreamed of running,
shouldering the rifle to town, 10
selling it, and taking the next
train out.
Fifty years
have passed and he still hears
that rabbit "just like a baby."
He remembers how the rabbit
stopped keening under the butt
of his rifle, how he brought
it home with tears streaming
down his blood soaked jacket. 20
"That bastard. That bastard."
He cried all night and the week
after, remembering that voice
like his dead baby sister's,
remembering his father's drunken
kicking that had pushed her
into birth. She had a voice
like that, growing faint
at its end; his mother rocking,
softly, keening. He dreamed 30
of running, running
the bastard out of his life.
He would forget them, run down
the hill, leave his mother's
silent waters, and the sounds
of beating night after night.
When war came,
he took the man's vow. He was
finally leaving and taking
the bastard's last bloodline 40
with him. At war's end, he could
still hear her, her soft
body stiffening under water
like a shark's. The color
of the water, darkening, soaking,
as he clung to what was left
of a ship's gun. Ten long hours
off the coast of Okinawa, he sang
so he wouldn't hear them.
He pounded their voices out 50
of his head, and awakened
to find himself slugging the bloodied
face of his wife.
Fifty years
have passed and he has not run
the way he dreamed. The Paradise
pines shadow the bleak hills
to his home. His hunting hounds,
dead now. His father, long dead.
His wife, dying, hacking in the bed 60
she has not let him enter for the last
thirty years. He stands looking,
he mouths the words, "Die you bitch.
I'll live to watch you die." He turns,
entering their moss-soft livingroom.
He watches out the picture window
and remembers running: how he'll
take the new pickup to town, sell it,
and get the next train out.
"Uncle's First Rabbit" is probably Cervantes' most despairing poem. As in "Visions of Mexico," nothing directly indicates a female speaker, but I assume that the narrating consciousness is the persona of Lorna Cervantes. In the poem Cervantes reflects on the beginnings of female suffering in her family. The focus is on "mother's brother,"[13] who is often the father substitute in a matriarchy. The tone of the poem, spoken by a narrator to an unidentified auditor, is reflective and meditative. Although this poem represents Cervantes' only attempt to penetrate a male consciousness, she does not directly assume a male voice; that
is, she does not make a statement tied to an "I"-narrator. A somewhat detached speaker using mainly the third-person pronoun, "he," recounts an important event in her uncle's life when he was ten years old.
We learn that "he" is the speaker's uncle in line 8 when the niece changes from third to first person, saying "my grandpa's supper" instead of "his father's supper." This is the only place in the poem where she changes person, a shift that corresponds to the fluctuating "I" that we have observed in "Poem for the Young White Man" as well as in "Visions of Mexico," and that also appears in "Beneath the Shadow." The shifting reveals ambiguities, at levels of both content and form, about where the "I" wants to position itself: inside or outside the discourse; inside or outside dominant society.
In the story, the uncle as a young boy must fulfill his father's command to hunt for the family supper. The family has to survive and the boy reluctantly obeys his father's command. To obtain the food he shoots a rabbit (ll. 4–5), the poem's central image. The poem enacts once again the conflict between the "soft" and the "hard" seen in other poems. Here it is embodied in the tension between the rabbit (the soft natural object) and the rifle (the hard cultural artifact). Nature is a mirror for events in the world, but instead of the harmonious relationship between the natural and human worlds which the grandmother's attitude celebrates in "Beneath the Shadow," this poem reflects an antagonistic tension between them.
"Uncle's First Rabbit" assumes a mode of reading in which the shooting of the rabbit is seen as an iconic image for a prior and more tragic event in the uncle's family. The act of shooting, which the uncle associates with the female, triggers in his mind the image of his drunk father beating his mother, who was pregnant. The brutal beating caused the premature birth of a baby girl who died soon after. The poem makes clear that the newborn child was the uncle's baby sister. The brutality of man against woman is therefore the original experience witnessed by the uncle, and the rabbit "keening" under the rifle's butt is a copy, an afterimage of that experience.
The conflict in the natural world reflects the deeper conflicts in the human environment. The sounds made by the dying rabbit are linked in the uncle's mind with the cries of his dead baby sister: "She [baby sister] had a voice / like that [the rabbit's], grow-
ing faint / at its end." The shooting of the rabbit initiates for the uncle the "terrible singing," a metaphor for the painful experience of watching his father beat his mother. As long as he lives, the uncle cannot forget the "terrible singing." He dreams of running to escape his father's beating of his mother: "He would forget them, run down / the hill, leave his mother's / silent waters, and the sounds / of beating night after night." The uncle transfers his death wish for his father to himself. He enlists in the armed services: "When war came, / he took the man's vow" to destroy "the bastard's last bloodline." No matter where he goes or what he does, he is always haunted by the "terrible singing." At the end of the war he still connects the image of the suffering rabbit with his dead baby sister: "At war's end, he could / still hear her, her soft / body stiffening under water / like a shark's."
Although "Uncle's First Rabbit" is a narrative poem, it differs from the two examples of discursive poems analyzed earlier in this chapter. It is especially striking for its technique of compression and condensation. At least three levels of experience are mingled indistinguishably within the uncle's mind: shooting the rabbit, his father's kicking his mother, and the dead sharks he probably saw in his war experiences at sea after the boats had been torpedoed, "as he clung to what was left / of a ship's gun." The compression is expressed graphically in the ambiguous lines, "her soft / body stiffening under water / like a shark's." The image of the rabbit and the baby sister are condensed into one, the "soft body" in the ocean. The image of water also refers back to his mother's "silent waters," or the embryonic fluid of the placenta. The sensation and the sight of the stiffening shark also merge with the images of the dead rabbit and the baby girl.
The presentation of man beating woman is circular: how things were, how things are, and how things will be in the future are all the same. When the uncle returns from the war he continues the same activity: he "awakened / to find himself slugging the bloodied / face of his wife." Unable to understand, much less transform, the voices singing in his head, he breaks out of the torment by "slugging" his wife. His tragic song—a far cry from a melodious, creative enterprise—is the beating he inflicts on his wife. In "Uncle's First Rabbit" the protagonist achieves no integration. The poem ends on a note of realistic rupture: after fifty years of wishing to run away, he keeps dreaming only of taking "the next train out."
A striking feature is the cluster of noises, sounds, and voices. The alliterative repetition of numerous participials—a total of eight in stanza 1 ("making," "sighting," "singing," "hunting," "running," "shouldering," "selling," "taking")—creates a haunting effect that lingers throughout the poem, an effect reinforcing especially the violent physical actions of beating, slugging, and kicking. Sounds are linked to the victims: the rabbit, the dead baby girl, the uncle's mother, and his wife. The rabbit's keening is referred to as a "voice." It is associated with the mother ("his mother rocking, / softly, keening") and with the cries of the dead baby sister (ll. 23–24). Ironically, the mother and the wife—women with the ability to articulate words—make noises: the mother keens and the wife hacks in bed. The uncle pounds the feminine voices "out of his head." These voices are not human voices but sublinguistic forms of noise. In contrast, the uncle articulates words: "he took the man's vow." He has the only lines of dialogue in the poem, though his words are probably mumbled more to himself than to the person for whom they are intended: his father ("That bastard. That bastard") and his wife ("Die you bitch. / I'll live to watch you die").
The conflict between male and female is reinforced by the oppositions between hard and soft images, as in the metonymy "blast of fluff," to stand for the rifle and the rabbit, the male and the female. The family atmosphere of bitterness and brutality is countered by the irony of the "moss-soft livingroom." The uncle's tears are opposed to his slugging. The Santa Barbara pines provide an ironic background for the family tragedy.
The reasons for the uncle's actions are not clear. Does the war experience turn him into a brute? The narration makes clear that he was a good boy; he never wanted to inflict pain on anyone. He brings the rabbit home "with tears streaming / down his blood soaked jacket," and he "cried all night and the week / after." Or are we to think that men, as young boys, are gentle, but that when they are grown, especially if they go to war, they will turn into brutes? Or is it that the uncle is simply condemned in a fatalistic way to continue his father's brutal habits? The poem, I think, does not yield enough information to form a judgment. Cervantes' strategy in "Uncle's First Rabbit" is to present a situation with no direct commentary. Her main intent is to explain, not why but how a phenomenon of this sort becomes interiorized in one man.
The resolution of the woman's dilemma in "Uncle's First Rabbit" depends upon the male. The male has two options: to stay or to leave. For the woman, it will be better if he leaves, for if he stays he will not change his behavior. Yet he will not leave. The decision is up to the man for the women are completely passive and silent. "Uncle's First Rabbit" presents an aspect of the sexual dilemma which Cervantes finds abhorrent: the silent submission of women who endure male brutality. In "Beneath the Shadow" Cervantes breaks her grandmother's "silent waters," not as her mother does by condemning the good in her grandmother, but by transforming the uncle's "terrible singing" into a "hymn of mockingbirds." These are the two sides of Cervantes' dual perspective: the "terrible singing" and the beautiful songs she says she wants to sing in "Visions of Mexico." The first gathers together the dissonant noises of reality: the "blasting and muffled outrage" in "Poem for the Young White Man"; the "low-voiced / scufflings, sirens, gunnings" in "Visions of Mexico"; and the clashing, grating noises in "Uncle's First Rabbit." The second relates to the peaceful, serene moods of the lyrical poems and specifically to the harmonious singing of the mockingbird in "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway."
"Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway"
Each publication of "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway" showed minor changes.[14] I analyze the version in Emplumada because I think it is the most definitive one. It is among the few early pieces Cervantes included in Emplumada , and the only poem in which she tries to capture two character voices, juxtaposing and counterposing them throughout the poem. "Beneath the Shadow" presents an exchange of statement and rejoinder, a pattern of thought demanding that in the end a choice must be made. The "I" narrating the story is detached, apparently trying to describe the course of events from the outside. Yet the "I," presented as a character taking part in the action in one section of the poem, is involved as well as detached, inside as well as outside.
BENEATH THE SHADOW OF THE FREEWAY
1
Across the street—the freeway,
blind worm, wrapping the valley up
from Los Altos to Sal Si Puedes.
I watched it from my porch
unwinding. Every day at dusk
as Grandma watered geraniums
the shadow of the freeway lengthened.
2
We were a woman family:
Grandma, our innocent Queen;
Mama, the Swift Knight, Fearless Warrior.
Mama wanted to be Princess instead.
I know that. Even now she dreams of taffeta
and foot-high tiaras.
Myself: I could never decide.
So I turned to books, those staunch, upright men.
I became Scribe: Translator of Foreign Mail,
interpreting letters from the government, notices
of dissolved marriages and Welfare stipulations.
I paid the bills, did light man-work, fixed faucets,
insured everything
against all leaks.
3
Before rain I notice seagulls.
They walk in flocks,
cautious across lawns: splayed toes,
indecisive beaks. Grandma says
seagulls mean storm.
In California in the summer,
mockingbirds sing all night.
Grandma says they are singing for their nesting wives.
"They don't leave their families
borrachando."
She likes the ways of birds,
respects how they show themselves
for toast and a whistle.
She believes in myths and birds.
She trusts only what she builds
with her own hands.
4
She built her house,
cocky, disheveled carpentry,
after living twenty-five years
with a man who tried to kill her.
Grandma, from the hills of Santa Barbara,
I would open my eyes to see her stir mush
in the morning, her hair in loose braids,
tucked close around her head
with a yellow scarf.
Mama said, "It's her own fault,
getting screwed by a man for that long.
Sure as shit wasn't hard."
soft she was soft
5
in the night I would hear it
glass bottles shattering the street
words cracked into shrill screams
inside my throat a cold fear
as it entered the house in hard
unsteady steps stopping at my door
my name bathrobe slippers
outside a 3 A.M. mist heavy
as a breath full of whiskey
stop it go home come inside
mama if he comes here again
I'll call the police
inside
a gray kitten a touchstone
purring beneath the quilts
grandma stitched
from his suits
the patchwork singing
of mockingbirds
6
"You're too soft . . . always were.
You'll get nothing but shit.
Baby, don't count on nobody."
—a mother's wisdom.
Soft. I haven't changed,
maybe grown more silent, cynical
on the outside.
"O Mama, with what's inside of me
I could wash that all away. I could."
"But Mama, if you're good to them
they'll be good to you back."
Back. The freeway is across the street.
It's summer now. Every night I sleep with a gentle man
to the hymn of mockingbirds,
and in time, I plant geraniums.
I tie up my hair into loose braids,
and trust only what I have built
with my own hands.
"Beneath the Shadow" is an utterance of a single speaker. Within it are mingled two voices that represent two different belief systems. The poem oscillates between these two voices: the romantic-idealist voice of the grandmother, and the pragmatic-realist voice of the mother. In my reading of the poem, the Mexican grandmother participates in the domestic realm while the mother, in the father's absence, fulfills the role of breadwinner, going out into the world to support the family. Based on this point, and on what Cervantes says in "Refugee Ship" about her mother's teaching her English but no Spanish, my reading links the mother with the more acculturated generation in the family.
The mother and the grandmother have antithetical philosophies toward men. The poem dramatizes the speaker's efforts to come to terms with the conflicting voices of the two women. It is important to stress that neither the grandmother's nor the mother's attitude toward men is sufficient. Although the speaker listens to each voice, her own voice represents a compromise that stands in opposition to each of the other two voices.
Since the girl's family is matriarchal ("We were a woman family" [section 2]), it is not surprising to find the presence of many feminine attributes. Softness, imagination, birds, and myths are associated with the grandmother. These attributes make up her voice. They contrast with the properties of hardness, noise, activity, and fragmentation which characterize the mother's voice. At times, these two modes or ways of being intersect or crisscross. For example, the girl describes her mother as a "Swift Knight," a "Fearless Warrior," epithets suggesting masculine behavior; she also notes, though, that her mother really wanted to be a "Princess instead./. . . Even now she
dreams of taffeta/and foot-high tiaras." Inversely, the girl describes her grandmother as "our innocent Queen" who cooks and sews, activities that are traditionally feminine, but she also points out that her grandmother labored strenuously to survive: "She built her house,/cocky, disheveled carpentry" (section 4).
As the cynical and embittered mother believes that men will take advantage of soft women, she manifests a hard veneer to them. The grandmother is soft and gentle, too soft, in the view of the mother, since she lived "twenty-five years/with a man who tried to kill her." From her vocal and assertive manner the girl learns the importance of being hard, but she does not want to hear her mother's cynicism and resentment. She admires her grandmother's softness but not her submissiveness. Her portrait of the grandmother recalls the image of the seagulls in "Shells": trusting, but also dependent upon whoever or whatever offers them security. These extreme positions are the girl's legacy from her maternal sources. The girl-narrator has internalized these two conflicting attitudes, and now, in the poem, she attempts to externalize in language what is inside her.
Her own conflict is an inability to decide ("Myself: I could never decide" [section 2, stanza 2]) between "Queen" and "Knight . . . Warrior," between a feminine and a masculine style. The "So" in the next line implies a link between the girl's inability to decide and her momentary solution: "So I turned to books, those staunch, upright men." She becomes a scribe, a translator, an interpreter; she pays bills, fixes faucets, does "light man-work." Although she chooses neither "Queen" nor "Knight," she inclines toward activities traditionally attributed to males.
The girl paints a fairy-tale picture of her family, likened to a medieval hierarchy. The relationships among the three family members are well defined and clearly established. Her images of "Queen," "Knight . . . Warrior," and "Scribe" suggest a preliterate, preindustrialized society, one in transition from oral to literate modes of communication. The sexually ambiguous image of the scribe fits her state of indecision: "Scribe" is male but does not conjure up the image of the actively aggressive knight slaying the dragon. Furthermore, "Scribe" is ironical because the speaker is a female recorder of the experiences of the Mexican-Chicano women in her family. As a scribe she captures in print what her maternal predecessors have orally transmitted to her.
These medieval images of "Queen," "Knight . . . Warrior"
and "Scribe" contrast sharply with the image of the freeway, an indicator of the American dream and of a complex technological society. They also emphasize the disparity between the Chicano community and the larger society: one an urban community with vestiges of the oral and rural; the other an advanced, modern society. The parallel suggested is that the speaker's Chicano community is to the modern society what European medieval society was to the world of print, when print began to dominate. The parallel, of course, is not exact, for the speaker's world is an urban barrio in northern California. As noted earlier in the discussion of "Visions of Mexico," the important point suggested by the historical parallel is that a Mexican-Chicano community in transition from a rural to an urban context begins to participate more fully in a literate society by articulating what has so far not been said in the literary world.
Despite the ambiguity characterizing the girl's attitude, she still valorizes her grandmother positively as someone desirable to imitate. To the grandmother, the first character the girl recalls to memory (section 1), is assigned the highest place in the medieval matriarchal hierarchy, a queen among knights and scribe. The grandmother's presence, more than the mother's, permeates the girl's memory. Sections 3 and 4 elucidate in more specific ways the contrast between an inner, dreamy, soft voice and an outer, cynical voice.
Images of birds—mockingbirds and seagulls—and myths are the standards by which the grandmother assesses people and events. The grandmother's way of thinking is formulaic, a feature characteristic of an oral culture.[15] She still lives by standards connected more with an oral way of life than with a culture dependent upon writing. She thinks in fixed standard expressions and speaks in metaphors. The arrival of seagulls means storm. Mockingbirds sing for their wives who nest. By explaining what mockingbirds do the grandmother negatively alludes to the behavior of human males: "They [mockingbirds] don't leave their families/borrachando." Her metaphor is prescriptive: human males should be on hand to care for their wives and children, but instead they leave their families to borrachar ("get drunk"). The grandmother respects the way birds "show themselves/for toast and a whistle." As in "Uncle's First Rabbit," nature is a kind of mirror, but here it reflects the ideal patterns of behavior which should govern the way men live. The analogy between birds and
men offers a slight hint that the grandmother thinks men devious. Negative, unflattering statements about men can only be inferred.
The mother's mode of expression is different: direct, crude, and satiric. The mother mocks and condemns the grandmother for putting up for twenty-five years with a man who brutalized her. "It's her own fault,/getting screwed by a man for that long./Sure as shit wasn't hard." The mother's quoted statement undermines the positive qualities the girl has attributed to her grandmother; for the mother, the grandmother is too soft. The pun on "hard" reveals her satiric, mocking attitude. The grandmother was not hard with men; hence, it was not hard for men to victimize her. Although hearing her mother's words, the girl turns her attention once again to the grandmother's softness in the next line: "soft she was soft." A more meditative tone marks these words, which also have a nice ironic quality. They convey the girl's agreement with her mother, but they also reveal affection for her grandmother.
In section 5 the poem shifts from a contemplative, serene evocation of the grandmother to a violent, noisy, loud outburst. The images now evoke disruption and divisiveness instead of harmony and peace: glass bottles breaking in the streets and words cracking into shrill screams. The lyrical subject becomes more involved, as though experiencing the situation in a present moment. The language creates emotive effects: fear, confusion, danger. It also becomes ambiguous. Who are the referents of the pronouns? Is the "I," for instance, the same girl-narrator who now focuses on her experiences with her mother? Or is the "I" the mother herself now stepping to the foreground to tell her experiences with her own mother? And what is the referent of the impersonal "it" that now intrudes into the scene?
Possibly "it" refers to the nonpersonal force of the freeway, already designated by "it" in section 1, line 4, or the phenomenon of noise: the glass bottles breaking, the shrill screams. The context suggests quarreling, fighting, perhaps even physical abuse. Both components, freeway and noise, are outside. Presumably the speaker is inside the house, an inference derived not from any explicit statement but from the context: "bathrobe slippers/outside a 3 A.M. mist heavy." When the "I" says "it entered the house in hard/unsteady steps stopping at my door," the "it" takes on a more precise identity: "hard/unsteady steps" and "a breath full of whiskey" are metonymic references to a male per-
son. The sounds of the freeway, the noise, and the male all displace themselves from the outside to the inside. We are not told precisely who this male is.
The referent of "it" changes again when the speaker says, "stop it go home come inside/mama if he comes here again/I'll call the police." Grammatical syntax eliminates the possibility that the "it" is a quarrel between the mother and the male. The speaker says "come inside" to her mother and not to the man, for he has already entered the house. Furthermore, the tone and the mood of these lines make it unlikely that she says "come inside" to the man. The mother has to be outside for the directive to make sense. The "it," then, does not refer to a quarrel between the mother and a male, for if the male is already inside and the mother is outside, this line makes no sense. The "it" probably designates the man's sexual advances which threaten the speaker: "mama if he comes here again/I'll call the police." Whoever and whatever the "it" is in the latter part of this stanza, the pronoun refers to a threatening force coming in from the outside associated with maleness and the mother.
Both the male and the freeway are associated with the outside world, and both can be sources of influence: the male on the family and the freeway on the barrio. The freeway in Cervantes' poetry is an ambivalent image. On the one hand she reveals an acceptance of this particularly Southwestern invention as part of a Chicano experience. On the other, she sees it as an invader of the more private spaces of Chicano communities in the Sun Belt states. The freeway in "Beneath the Shadow" is not the disruptive force of, say, "Freeway 280," where it "conceals . . . [the barrio] all beneath a raised scar." Rather, in "Beneath the Shadow" the freeway defines and limits the speaker's community. A linguistic detail reinforcing the freeway's association with a masculine force is the gender it is given in the bilingual codes of Chicano Spanish: freeway is "el freeway" and not "la freeway."
To return to my earlier question, is "mama" in section 5 the grandmother, that is, the mother's mother, or is she the girl's mother? Although this section is ambiguous, I think the speaker is the girl-narrator who has witnessed her mother's experiences with men. One might argue that the narrator is really the girl's mother speaking about her own mother because it is the grandmother who is soft toward men: men take advantage of her. The mother, in contrast, is hard toward men and therefore says to her
mother, "mama if he comes here again/I'll call the police." According to this interpretation, the first stanza of section 5 is the mother's reenactment for her daughter of her own mother's softness toward men and its meaning for her.
This interpretation, implying that the male comes to visit the grandmother, is at odds, however, with what the girl-narrator has told us earlier about her grandmother: "She built her house . . . after living twenty-five years/with a man who tried to kill her." This sentence has a ring of finality. The male was not present when the grandmother built her house: either he had left or he was dead. Section 5 contains markers of transiency pointing to a man who comes and goes: "mama if he comes here again " [my emphasis] and "go home." The mother would not say "go home" to the grandmother's partner, who is probably her husband, and therefore, I assume, the mother's father.
My interpretation, therefore, argues that this section refutes the mother's position. In other words, the mother's aggressive personality may be an improvement over the grandmother's submissive nature, but both suffer the male's physical abuses. The narrative force of section 5 is derived from the fact that it comes between the mother's two speeches wherein she advocates hardness toward men (stanza 3 of section 4 and stanza 1 of section 6). Its very placement exposes the contradiction in the mother's position.
In stanza 2 of section 5 the girl-narrator withdraws from the outside—the disturbance and confusion of her mother's life with men—into the inside, into the quiet, calm world of her grandmother's quilts and mockingbirds. The phrase "from his suits" refers to the man the grandmother lived with, not to the male who visits the mother in the preceding stanza. The stanza marks a thematic break with the first stanza because the girl moves from outside to inside on two levels: literally from outside to inside the house, and metaphorically from her external to her internal consciousness. All the images in this stanza are soft, suggesting peace and harmony. What the girl means is that inside herself there is a softness (a "gray kitten"), which functions like a "touchstone" to help her assess the authenticity of relationships with men. Just as her grandmother collected the scraps and pieces discarded by men ("from his suits") to make a quilt, so too the girl will create order out of disorder. The quilts stitched from the patches of men's suits, and the mockingbird's songs composed of
disparate sounds ("patchwork") of other birds, are like mosaics, the piecing together of unlike elements to form a continuous whole. Like her grandmother and like the mockingbird, the girl-narrator wants to harmonize the dissonant voices of her grandmother and mother to establish her own voice and her own attitude toward men.
In section 6 the girl, in effect, steps into her grandmother's place. The mother directly criticizes her daughter for being too soft, warning her that her softness will be an open invitation to men to take advantage of her:
"You're too soft . . . always were.
You'll get nothing but shit.
Baby, don't count on nobody."
The girl inwardly agrees ("—a mother's wisdom") by affirming that she is soft on the inside, like her grandmother, but she also notes that she has grown "more silent, cynical/on the outside," like her mother. The next two stanzas constitute the girl's answer to her mother:
"O Mama, with what's inside of me
I could wash that all away. I could."
"But Mama, if you're good to them
they'll be good to you back."
The "I could" is repeated to stress her insistence to her mother that she could wash "that" (the "shit") away. The insistence suggests that she is trying to overcome her own doubts. She wants to believe that with the springs of warmth inside her she will find the magnanimity to rise above men's injuries. She also wants to believe that if she is good to men, men will be good to her, and hence she will not have to "wash that [shit] all away." Her point is an implicit criticism of her mother: men weren't good to you, mother, because you weren't good to them. With this argument the daughter undermines the mother's style of relating to men.
If the daughter means these words seriously, she comes across as an idealistic naive young girl, because all men will not be good to women simply because women are good to them. Rather, her words are ironical because she knows her grandmother's life disproves this philosophy. These words express her
desire for what relationships between men and women ought to be and not her knowledge of what they are.
The insertion of "back" in "But Mama, if you're good to them / they'll be good to you back" suggests a child's language. The rhetorical emphasis on "back" as the last word of her answer stresses the idea of reciprocity. Her inner voice desires smooth relationships between men and women. When "back" becomes the first word of the next stanza, its effect is to pull the girl out of the reverie, the dream, and return her to the poem's points of origin: the freeway and her grandmother. The inclusion of the verb "is" in the sentence, "The freeway is across the street," makes the tone more emphatic than it was in the first line of the poem: "Across the street—the freeway." The girl recognizes the existence of the freeway, defining her barrio and setting its limits.
The two final stanzas embody the daughter's resolution of the two extreme positions of her mother and grandmother. Her compromise represents a reversal of our expectations about the benefits she might derive from her maternal sources. We would expect her to learn softness and trust from her grandmother. Instead she learns a kind of mistrust: "and trust only what I have built / with my own hands" is a direct echo of the grandmother's behavior (section 3, stanza 4). Indirectly the phrase is also a positive echo of what the mother said earlier to her in a negative form: "Baby, don't count on nobody" (section 6, stanza 1). Similarly, we would expect her to derive hardness from her mother. Instead she learns gentleness: "Every night I sleep with a gentle man." The "gentle man" stands in direct opposition to the mother's macho visitor who struts in at three o'clock in the morning. The images of "gentle man," "hymn," and "mockingbirds" in the night evoke a scene of order and harmony, in direct contrast with the loud noisy nights of her mother. The pun on hymn and him suggests a harmonization of male-female tensions. These lines also echo, albeit more faintly, the presence of the grandmother because "mockingbirds" and "summer" are linked with the grandmother's life. The irony of the narrator's mediation—trust in self from the grandmother and gentleness from the mother—demonstrates that the narrator comes up with her own reading of their lives.
In the final stanza the girl envisions herself in the future ("and in time" as opposed to "It's summer now"), harmonizing the three voices: her grandmother's, her mother's, and her own.
Her voice and her grandmother's dominate. She inserts herself ("I") within the pattern of activities her grandmother performed. She, like the mockingbird, mimes and imitates the same actions. The language of this stanza implies repetition and circularity. The girl is still in the same place as she was when the poem began, that is, within the defined boundaries of her environment. She has not crossed the street to the freeway. She is also bounded by her grandmother's pattern of life: summer, mockingbirds, geraniums, loose braids, and the will to survive. The girl does not mean that she will literally return to her grandmother's ways, for that would be a return to the past. There is a slight ambiguity in the phrase, "and in time." It may allude to the future, but it also means "in history." In other words, while her grandmother planted geraniums and believed in myths and birds to escape historical time, the girl performs her actions with full acceptance of the here and now.
The girl's attraction to her grandmother also reveals her desire to assert her Chicana identity and culture. Hence her compromise allows her to affirm several identities: her identity as a Chicana, as a woman, and as a poet. As a poet she transforms the elements of her grandmother's and mother's voices into the substance of her poetry. Cervantes does not build houses or cultivate the earth. Instead she belongs to another generation that inscribes its own cultural identity in writing and thus gives value to the words and actions of her ancestors.
In its final stanzas the poem momentarily achieves a breakthrough into a lyrical moment, an integration between desire and knowledge, utopia and history, in which Cervantes' persona imagines a harmonization in male-female relationships. Envisioning an agrarian utopia with matriarchal overtones, the woman ("I") is in control, planting the earth and wearing her hair in loose braids. Her hairstyle evokes an image of a rural, Mexican woman, but not the traditional one dependent upon a man. This woman trusts in her own abilities. The girl-narrator expresses an immanentist[16] philosophy oriented toward an experiential order rather than a timeless transcendent realm. She will rely on herself, trust only her own tangible experiences, and find meaning not in already existing schemata and patterns, but in the dynamic qualities of her own secular experiences.
The irony is that in the entire body of her poetry Cervantes achieves her one lyric moment in a poem that is primarily discur-
sive and narrative. There is no such moment in any of her lyrical poems. "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway" communicates a dialogic struggle taking place within the protagonist who wants to reach a compromise between mother and grandmother. Yet the poem offers no clear mapping of how a real harmonization in male-female relationships is to be effected. It communicates no comparable struggle in how the narrator achieves a relationship with a "gentle man." The process of how the narrator transforms the macho male in section 5 to the gentle man in the penultimate stanza (section 6) is not explained. The poem does, however, imply—in the phrase "in time," in history—the presence of struggle and conflict. In making this suggestion I do not mean to imply that the poem should explain this process; rather I want to stress that its culminating moment is an inner one in which the protagonist expresses her utopian, lyrical sentiments.
5
"Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway" not only confronts the question of Cervantes' existential voice as a woman and as a Chicana, but it also brings out the conflict between her two literary voices: a discursive one and a lyrical one. By juxtaposing these two poetic voices, "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway" combines the principal elements of Cervantes' style, thus suggesting that it also confronts the question of her literary voice.
The poem's first four sections are written in a discursive mode. Section 5 interrupts this mode by moving into the softer lyrical mode, a shift that accommodates the specific content. Ironically, the more violent, chaotic content of section 5 necessitates the softer lyrical mode, whereas the peaceful, harmonious content of sections 1–4, and later 6, requires the harder discursive mode. The reverse has been true of the other poems where the discursive style is used to present a speaker in a struggle with a social, sometimes violent, world, and the lyrical style, a speaker with no stated social identity, searching for personal expression. In "Beneath the Shadow" the speaker of section 5 is concerned with self-expression, which is integrated with a social world. The speaker of the other discursive sections finds her moment of
inner illumination. The two styles crisscross and intersect, just as certain qualities of the soft grandmother and the hard mother crisscross at the poem's thematic level. To understand the interplay between these two verbal strategies, I associate the discursive style with a mimetic or referential voice, and the lyric style with a more self-conscious, self-referential voice, one associated with certain modern techniques.
Mimetic voice, derived from verbal imitation, refers primarily to the representation of spoken speech in a written text.[17] It gives the illusion of a human voice speaking and enunciating words. In "Beneath the Shadow" three levels of mimetic voice characterize sections 1–4 and 6: (1) dialogue, or a character's speech acts (the words in quotation marks which the girl-speaker attributes to her grandmother, her mother, and herself); (2) indirect discourse, or paraphrasings of another speaker's words; and (3) narrative, or storytelling by an identifiable narrator, the girl who documents her family's past events and sayings. The first two, dialogue and indirect discourse, give facticity to the reality imitated, the speaker's psyche. They convey the impression that these words were actually spoken in the same order and form as they are rendered to us. The third kind of mimetic voice—storytelling by an identifiable narrator—predominates in these first four sections, whereas a combination of the first and third kinds makes up the final section. The third kind of mimetic voice predominates throughout Cervantes' poetry.
In her voice as narrator, Cervantes splits herself into narrator and one of the characters in narration and recounts in a present moment the activities of her family and barrio in a past moment. Her manner is detached and objective: "I watched it"; "We were a woman family"; "I turned to books." She functions as an eyewitness narrator, telling rather than showing. In section 2 the poet-narrator describes herself as scribe, translator, and interpreter. At a stylistic level, these three terms situate the poet, because they indicate how she envisions herself with respect to her subject matter and her audience. These three writing activities do not include the primary creation of a text; instead they transform one kind of text into another. They suggest some "middle person" who mediates between an oral speaker or writer and an audience.
The language of the poem is appropriate to someone who documents memorable events and sayings. The majority of lines making up the narrator's discourse are cast in complete sentences,
structured according to conventional patterns: subject, verb, and object-clause. The human origins of particular sayings are clearly identified: "Grandma says / seagulls mean storm"; "Mama said, 'It's her own fault.'" The narrator uses parallel phrasing which facilitates understanding and recall: "She likes . . . "; "She believes . . . "; "She trusts . . . " The lines are easy to follow, even when the poem is read or heard for the first time. The language and the phrasing imply that the text functions as an exchange between its message and an audience that is primarily, although not exclusively, a listening audience.
In section 5 Cervantes' narrating voice, especially in the first stanza, does not recount events solely in the storytelling voice of the earlier sections, where she tells about events and people. She now makes the "I" the center of the action, speaking in the voice of someone who is experiencing an event. We feel that these threatening events are happening to someone. More emotionally involved, the voice communicates urgency and rapidly accumulating sensations: visual (darkness), auditory (freeway traffic, glass bottles breaking, "hard / unsteady steps"), olfactory ("a breath full of whiskey"), and emotional (fear, anger).
Whereas narrative discourse is distinguished from speech utterances in the preceding sections (for example, section 3, stanza 2, lines 4–5, and section 4, stanza 3), in section 5 narrative and speech discourse are run together. No quotation marks separate the mother's words to her mother or to the male from the narration. Specific conventions of printed language are deliberately violated. The absence of capitalization and of any kind of punctuation breaks with the earlier style, which obeys standard grammatical rules. The wider spaces between words are also a new feature.
Rhetorical connectives are omitted to suggest confused and rapid processes of thought at moments of emotional turmoil. Examples are the paratactic phrasing and the spacing in section 5, stanza 1:
inside my throat a cold fear
as it entered the house in hard
unsteady steps stopping at my door
my name bathrobe slippers
outside a 3 A.M. mist heavy
as a breath full of whiskey
stop it go home come inside
These shifts in mood and tone are apparent when the poem is recited, for two reasons: (1) the conventions of mimetic voice—an identifiable character narrating and articulating speech, for example—provide continuity; (2) certain elements of graphic scoring, particularly the absence of punctuation and the spacing, are signs instructing us how to recite these lines. Their function is to convey the agitation and emotion felt by the speaker. The spacing gap on the page is the analog to the gesture in spoken discourse, a gesture inevitably lost in written discourse. In this particular context the gap corresponds to the speaker's gesture of heavy and broken-up breathing to communicate fear and urgency. Cervantes captures the gesture forever lost to the written word.
A curious paradox emerges here. The scoring of this section captures the "I" in the performance of the event, dramatizing the "I" in the act of self-discovery. In this sense the passage is closer to an oral experience than the passages of sections 1–4 because it stresses the immediacy of the gesture and the emotions of the narrator. Yet the only way we know that we must recite this passage so as to communicate the gesture and the emotions is by seeing, by reading, the text. The ability to convey the "I" in the performative act presupposes a reader who has a relationship with the written text, who can read a "voice" on the page. What the eye must note is the sudden change in the notation of language, in spacing and punctuation, for example. Such changes register language itself as performative, attempting to generate signification on the printed page.
In stanza 2 of section 5 the poet eases out of the threatening situation and returns to the inner secure world of the grandmother: the "gray kitten . . . purring," grandma's quilts, "the patchwork singing / of mockingbirds." Like the preceding one, this stanza uses no capitalization; even "grandma" is lower case. Yet, unlike stanza 1, it uses only one spacing gap. Generally, stanza 2 opposes a soft inner world to the hard outside world of stanza 1, but the opposition occurs within the lyrical-suggestive mode.
The conflict suggested by these two voices is the one between "Scribe" and the lyrical "I." Sections 1–4 are oral in the sense that they depict an "I" that sees itself as mediating between a community and a larger audience, performing a similar role to that played by the poet in a traditional oral culture. Paradoxically, the role of mediator is dependent upon typographical markings.
In contrast, in section 5, the poet is being more oral than in the previous sections because she captures the "I" in its performative act. Paradoxically, the orality is dependent upon the activity of reading. The conflict between a spoken voice and a voice on the page helps to reinforce the idea that a modern poet's "I" can never be an unmediated phenomenon, a totally oral experience, not even for a Chicana poet as consciously rooted in her community as is Cervantes.
The final section seems to resolve the poet's paradox in favor of the discursive style. Stanza 1 repeats the exact words once spoken to her by her mother. Stanza 2 interrupts the girl's answer to her mother, which follows in stanzas 3 and 4. The interruption reveals the girl's inner thoughts as she reflects upon her mother's words. Yet the girl's words, which are directed inward toward herself, are couched in the language of her storytelling voice, which up until now has reported on events related to the outside—her environment and her family. The use of quotation marks in stanzas 3 and 4 suggests that she articulates her thoughts and sentiments aloud to her mother. The presentation of these words as direct speech utterances corresponds to Cervantes' outer discursive voice. Their content, however, expressing her desire for peace and harmony in male-female relationships, corresponds to her lyrical vision. Furthermore, the "I" speaking in stanzas 3 and 4 clashes with the "I" speaking in stanza 2, which represents itself as silent and cynical on the outside, because the direct speech utterances of the former stanzas do not represent the voice of a cynic. The word "Back" in stanza 5 achieves the return to the outer, real world where she ironically succeeds in expressing a utopian vision "in time" in her discursive and narrative voice. The intermixing of a discursive style with a lyrical vision intimates Cervantes' desire to hold the tension between outer and inner, public and private, hard and soft, history and vision, in a dynamic, creative relationship.
"Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway" highlights Cervantes' social voice as a Chicana and as a woman in its struggle with a stylistic voice. The poem is the best example of the mixing of her two dominant modes. She moves in and out of these two modes, showing us what it means to be a Chicana, a woman, and a poet in the contemporary world. Whether she is expressing a personal identity through a disembodied lyric speaker, or a social identity either as a Chicana or as a woman who is a Chicana, Cervantes
desires to integrate public and private, discursive and lyrical. The salient feature of Cervantes' conflict between scribe and poet, mediator and creator, is that she does not find her inner moment of harmony in either of the two polarities: a personal expression or a social expression as a Chicana. These two identities remain polar opposites in her poetic universe. Instead, she finds harmony in the expression of her feminine consciousness as a Chicana in relation to her community.
Alma Villanueva and Lorna Dee Cervantes come from similar personal backgrounds. Both were raised in father-absent families living in urban, working-class environments. Two generations of women—grandmother and mother—played a central role in their personal development. In spite of these similarities, Villanueva and Cervantes are two very different poets, both in their choice of themes and in their poetic strategies.
As poets, Villanueva and Cervantes make different responses to the dilemma created by their social situation as women and as Chicanas. Although the triadic identity of woman, Chicana, and poet exists in a relationship of conflict and struggle in the poetic worlds of both, they differ in the nature of the relationship. Villanueva, responding to the dilemma with a strong feminist voice, succeeds in smoothly integrating her identity as a woman with her identity as a poet. The single, most important issue for Villanueva is to make her divided self cohere as a woman. Strongly identifying with alienated women everywhere, she never assigns markers of race, culture, or class to the women who constitute her audience. Because she sees herself as culturally consonant with alienated women everywhere, she acknowledges no social barriers between herself and other women, or among other women themselves. The time and energy Villanueva devotes to elaborating her poetic "I" as a woman as contrasted with her poetic "I" as a Chicana are evidence that she speaks from a feminist position within Anglo white culture, taking issue with the masculine principle that defines women as subordinate and marginal. Villanueva's decision to give priority to her identity as a woman—that is, a gender identity—may perhaps be explained by the circumstances of her birth. If we take her reference to "bastard" seriously, her protagonist may not know positively the identity of her father, a detail that would make it impossible for
her to know his ethnicity. Thus the protagonist may have a social certainty, but not a biological certainty, about being a Chicana. In contrast, she is totally certain of her gender. This sociological factor provides objective grounds for Villanueva's ambiguous relationship to "Chicano." And though there is evidence that she desires to be part of a social community, her autobiographical poem expresses conflict between a longing to reach an audience of alienated women everywhere, regardless of race, and a longing to communicate with a more particularized Chicano readership. What is unsaid in Mother , May I ? is a hungering for a reconciliation between the two audiences and an inability fully to achieve it.
The situation is quite the contrary with Cervantes, who responds to the dilemma with a strong historical and social voice. The problem, as she conceives it, lies not in the expression of her personal poetic "I," as it does for Villanueva, but in the expression of a historical collective community. Whether she looks out toward the white dominant culture, as in "Poem for the Young White Man," or looks at what she envisions as Mexico in "Visions of Mexico," she speaks as a poet who identifies culturally and ethnically as a Chicana. The barrier preventing her integration with Anglo or Mexican culture is one determined by culture and not by gender, as it is for Villanueva. For Cervantes, the term "Chicana" encompasses both gender and ethnicity because her identity as a woman is inextricably bound to her Chicana self.
The conflict among the three identities of woman, poet, and Chicana in Villanueva's poetic universe is reversed in that of Cervantes. The two entities that remain juxtaposed in Villanueva—woman and Chicana—are the very two identities that find a synthesis in Cervantes. Inversely, the two entities synthesized by Villanueva—woman and poet—are the very two identities that remain juxtaposed in Cervantes—Chicana and poet. What is unsaid in Cervantes' poetic world is the desire to harmonize a social voice as a Chicana with her voice as a poet who has concerns other than social ones. Cervantes, therefore, does not integrate community and poetry, history and utopia, when she speaks from a position of race. Rather, she integrates them when she speaks from a position of gender. It is easier for her to envision harmony between men and women than to envision harmony among different racial groups.
Although both these Chicanas choose English as their pri-
mary vehicle of expression, they use it for different purposes. Villanueva wants to communicate the personal quest for her poetic "I" to a universal audience of women. She makes sparing use of Spanish words and phrases; when she does use them, she translates them in footnotes.[18] Cervantes, on the other hand, uses English because she intends to translate the experiences of her community to a larger audience. She feels no need to justify her world to an Anglo audience. Instead, she records, explains, and memorializes it. In Mother , May I ? Villanueva wants to express how prior generations of women contributed to the development of her "I." Cervantes, the scribe, wants not only to explain what prior generations of women contributed to the formation of her "I," but also to record their own history. In this sense, Cervantes records the thoughts and sentiments of her maternal predecessors which previously were absent in written discourse.
When we consider these Chicanas' poetic endeavors from the standpoint of publication and distribution, the results are contrary to our expectations. Since Villanueva is the poet who sees herself as communicating with a female audience everywhere, it would be logical for her poetry to be published by a major press. The fact is, however, that her three collections were published by small presses, oriented toward a Chicano community. In addition, she was recognized by the Chicano academic community of the University of California, Irvine, which was responsible for publishing Poems and awarding her first place in poetry. In contrast, whereas Cervantes sees herself as documenting a specific cultural experience and transmitting it to a particular audience, she is, ironically, the only Chicana thus far to be published by a major press.