4

In Restless Serpents Zamora repeatedly uses the work of other authors, usually male poets in the English-American literary tradition, to generate her own poetic texts. One influence, as noted earlier, is Shakespeare. Others are Edward Dahlberg, Herman Hesse, Virginia Woolf, Theodore Roethke, Guillevec, and Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962).^[28] Of these, the most important by far is Jeffers. Whenever Zamora responds to Jeffers, her poetic strategy is to include the female voice which he excluded.^[29] In her own poems she assumes the masks of Jeffers's female characters to express sentiments he never permitted them to express. In "Pico Blanco" she speaks as Jeffers's Cassandra in the poem with the same title.^[30] By so doing, Zamora transforms his silent Cassandra who never speaks but is spoken to only by Jeffers. In "The Extraordinary Patience of Things" Zamora's speaker meditates on Jeffers's "Carmel Point," clearly identified by Zamora in her

poem.^[31] The most dramatic of the three poems influenced by Jeffers, in both content and form, is "California," which offers the clearest challenge to Jeffers as a male poet and blends Zamora's two main poetic modes, narrative and dialogue.

Like the narrative poems discussed in Section III of this chapter, "California" presupposes a woman speaker who makes a personal statement to no one in particular about some event whose primary significance is its relation to her own life. In this respect "California" is narrative-lyric: narrative because it reports events; lyric because it is a personal utterance. As it responds to neither a question nor a statement by any particular individual, it implies no direct auditor, as do the dialogue poems presented in Section II. If, however, we examine "California" against its precursor text, "The Roan Stallion" (1926) by Robinson Jeffers, Zamora's poem takes on the nature of an intertextual dialogue.^[32] "California" is Zamora's attempt to rework and change the parent poem; in this respect it resembles "Sonnet, Freely Adapted." These two poems represent two divergent literary strands in the English-speaking cultural heritage: "Sonnet, Freely Adapted" is Zamora's attempt to transform a universal, sensual poet; "California" is her attempt to transform a minor, regional author. In this section I argue that Zamora transforms Jeffers more successfully than she does Shakespeare.

CALIFORNIA

"The night-wind veering, the smell of the spilt wine
drifted down hill from the house."
Two gods lay at my feet; I have
     shot one, and that one killed the other.
Each in his turn, each in his fashion of late
     laid over me splitting hairs, splitting atoms.
The dog, dead too, leaped to his death.

Beasts they were, both of them beasts—one                              8
     of the wind and rein, one of the night and wine
     and all of us pools in the moonlight.
My child stands witness to one aimed shot, three
     flamed and freeing ones, and one that plunged
     my wailing will to the center of this bloody corral.

The poem is named for the heroine of "The Roan Stallion." California, the daughter of a Scottish father and a Spanish-Indian mother, is married to Johnny, an Anglo gambler and drunkard

who uses her to satisfy his lust. Johnny brings home a roan stallion, an animal representing sexual potency. California has a mystical encounter with the stallion, which she perceives as a transhuman power. One night she becomes the center of physical warfare between Johnny and the horse. Johnny, lusting to do with California what he has seen the stallion do with a buckskin mare, wants to abuse California sexually, but as she has translated her experience with the stallion into a mystically liberating one, she repulses him and escapes to the corral. Johnny and his dog Bruno pursue her. The dog leaps at the horse and Johnny dashes toward California but falls under the stallion's forehooves. California, armed with a rifle provided by her daughter, aims at and kills Bruno. The stallion tramples Johnny. The poem ends as California fires three bullets into the horse.

Read as an autonomous unit without reference to "The Roan Stallion," "California" is written in a language of evocation and suggestion rather than persuasion and precision. Although the poem is indefinite as to place and time, it is imbued with a mood. The nexus of wind, wine, blood, and night images, the splitting of hairs and of atoms, and the spilling of wine mingle with images of gods and beasts ("dog" in 1. 7 and "corral" in 1. 13, for instance) to suggest physical and sexual energy, violence and conflict. The first lines summon up a concrete image of a landscape (sound, smell, color, movement), probably in California.

Without knowing the specific context of Jeffers's poem, we assume that the "I" speaking is a woman and that the gods she refers to are masculine. The central event is the killing of the gods. "California," then, is an utterance by a woman with a child who explains why she has shot two males. The relationship between the woman and the two gods is not explicitly defined, but expressions such as "laid over me" and "splitting hairs, splitting atoms" suggest conflict involving the release of sexual impulses and energy. The poem's sequence—the subject of its first stanza is two "gods"; that of the second, two "beasts"—invites us to relate the two contrasting entities, for obviously some relationship between them is intended. The woman's utterance seems to mock male powers, for gods are not supposed to die. She satirizes the gods by reducing them to the level of beasts: "Beasts they were, both of them beasts" (1. 8). The rhetorical emphasis on "beasts" and "both" leaves no doubt that the woman regards these male powers as beasts and not as gods. Although they share

the nature of beasts, they are, nevertheless, distinct from each other: "one / of the wind and rein, one of the night and wine." The pun on rein-rain is a clue that one of the gods-beasts is of the outdoors.

A second way to read the poem without reference to Jeffers is to put the associations it suggests into a historical frame. As the title is the name of the state of California, the poem has allegorical resonances. In the historical framework, the state is personified in the speaker, reflecting and presenting her view of the events. The two gods would refer to the conquerors of the land, Spanish and Anglo-American. The images evoke the blood struggle of the human and animal impulses that created the state, perhaps the havoc, frenzy, and lust of the gold rush. The merging of human and animal impulses is suggested in line 10: "and all of us pools in the moonlight." The child is a reference to future generations. The phrase "splitting atoms" refers to the liberation of energy in the conquest and the defense of the territory. More specifically, it suggests Berkeley and Livermore. In its colloquial and popular usage, "splitting hairs" conjures up an image of the state's condemnation of its conquerors for ignoring the important considerations of population and natural resources. Although the allegorical overtones are loose and sketchy, the historical struggle is probably the first interpretation the average reader would bring to the poem.

Even without regard to Jeffers, then, "California" has autonomy. The poet presumes a reader who will respond associatively to the images in the poem and will draw inferences from such associations, rather than a reader who will insist on clear statement and logical relationships. Some details, however, will remain unclear without the help of the parent poem. Why, for example, are the first two lines a quotation? Why did the woman kill only one god? How was the other god killed? And what is the meaning of ones , and one in lines 11 and 12?

Reading "California" with Jeffer's poem in mind slightly alters our perspective: instead of seeing the poem as narrative-lyric, we see it as a form of dialogue. By assuming the fictional mask of California, Zamora makes a direct response to Jeffers, who is clearly the implied addressee of "California." Considered with Jeffers's poem, Zamora's presupposes a reader who will see logical relationships between the two poems, searching in "The Roan Stallion" for the antecedents of the personal pronouns, the com-

mon nouns, and the events in "California." The two quoted lines that open Zamora's poem are the last two lines of "The Roan Stallion." This technique suggests that Zamora is criticizing Jeffers for ending the poem where he does. Attempting to complete the original narrative, Zamora retains its plot and characters, and even its terms, but gives them different meanings, as though Jeffers had not gone far enough. Zamora writes her own sequel to Jeffers in order to give woman the final word.

In "California" Zamora introduces four transformations of Jeffers's text. First, her attribution of a consciousness to the character of California is absent in Jeffers, whose California is a told consciousness. Jeffers never allows his protagonist to be critical of Johnny or, much less, of the stallion. Zamora's character, in contrast, is critical, even condemnatory, of her oppressors. She says what Jeffers's heroine might have said had she been given a voice in the matter. Thus Zamora's California enlarges and extends the original.

Second, Zamora lowers both man and animal to the level of beasts. As Jeffers presents Johnny metaphorically as a beast, Zamora's designation is nothing new. Her reference to him as a god is, however, a new dimension. It is a satiric reference, mocking Johnny for thinking himself a god and behaving as though he were one, whereas in actuality he is crude and vulgar. When Zamora's California insists that both gods are beasts (1. 8), she demolishes the aura of godliness surrounding the stallion in Jeffers. By demystifying her counterpart's perception of the stallion as a god, she reduces the stallion to Johnny's level. If the concepts of god and beast are in conflict in Jeffers with respect to the stallion, Zamora's are not: her transformation is to equate man and animal at the level of beast. God and beast are locked together from the speaker's female perspective. Zamora thus provides a critical female dimension absent in the original poem.^[33]

The third transformation hinges on the interpretation of one in "one that plunged / my wailing will" (11. 12–13). The identities of the referents of one in line 11 and of ones in line 12 are made clear in Jeffers. The "one aimed shot" is the bullet California uses to shoot Bruno; the "three / flamed and freeing ones" are the bullets that kill the horse, which in turn kills Johnny. The one in line 12 has no clear referent in Jeffers. Rather than referring to an actual bullet in Zamora's poem, it reflects the existence of a consciousness that knows that something—some unidentified

presence or power—beyond the desire to escape the husband's lechery has driven her ("plunged / my wailing will") to the "center of this bloody corral."

Finally, Zamora removes all traces of ambiguity in the original California's motive for killing the stallion. In "Roan Stallion" Jeffers leads the reader to believe that California's motive for shooting the stallion is some obscure human fidelity to civilization. Caught between culture (Johnny) and nature (the stallion), California must opt for culture. Jeffers's reader, however, is left to wonder whether an instinct that the stallion, too, is her oppressor does not also prompt California's action. No such ambiguity exists in "California." We are certain that Zamora's protagonist shoots both man and beast because each has been her oppressor. Johnny's abuse of her was both physical and spiritual. The stallion represents a sexual energy that also prevents California from asserting her true nature.

This conflictual relationship between Zamora and her intertextual choice is, at deeper levels, a conflict between written, literary discourse and oral, popular discourse. If we are unaware that Jeffers is the literary source for this poem when first reading it, we are uncertain as to whether the quotation marks refer to written or spoken discourse. Only upon learning that they are the final lines of "Roan Stallion" are we certain that they are written discourse. The lines that follow are Zamora's rendition of California's own spoken words, left unspoken by Jeffers. California's fictional speech in Zamora's poem revises and corrects the written text of the dominant tradition.

The transformations made by Zamora's poem suggest a dialectical response to Jeffers. They imply a close identification between Zamora, the poet, and California, the fictional character. By assuming the persona of Jeffers's own creation, Zamora criticizes him, but her criticism also implies that his poem has had a significant impact on her. Zamora's involvement with Jeffers is more intense than her relationship with Shakespeare. She more successfully maintains a dialectical tension between herself and Jeffers, identifying but also criticizing. She challenges his story and constructs a new one that includes herself. The dynamic force behind the poem comes from a poetic voice that responds to Jeffers first as a woman and second as a Chicana. The dramatic artifice of the implied sexual allegory, the state presented as a woman raped by male powers, presupposes primarily

a female audience. This frame of reference, however, does not exclude a Chicano audience. For one thing, it is possible to interpret the poem as a historical allegory; and second, Zamora has chosen to speak from the consciousness of a character who has a Latina name.^[34]

Zamora goes as far as she does with Jeffers because Jeffers, a modern American poet who writes about northern California, offers Zamora a congenial poetic mode. The northern California landscape, the dramatic persona of the native woman, and the theme of sexual domination of women by men are subjects that interest and provoke Zamora. Whereas Shakespeare may be remote from Zamora, Jeffers, the minor, local poet, is of major concern to her.

Ultimately, Zamora's poetic voice in "California" occupies a liminal space between her own voice and Jeffers's. Read as a narrative lyric, the poem has some autonomy but remains incomplete without reference to "The Roan Stallion." Read as an intertextual dialogue responding to Jeffers the poem makes its impact and can be fully explained, but it raises the question of independence of and autonomy from its literary source. The two poetic modes remain discontinuous with each other, suggesting a poetic consciousness that slips in and out between the two modes.

The poems of Restless Serpents present a dramatization of a shifting poetic consciousness. In the work of no other Chicana poet discussed in this book do we hear the same multiplicity of voices as we do in Restless Serpents . The many voices making up Zamora's two main poetic modes range from meditative, erotic, mythic, lyrical, and impassioned to discursive, ironic, comic, satiric, and analytical. In one sense, Zamora's poetry represents a hymn of all these literary voices, for no single voice predominates.

These voices evoke a multiplicity of divided selves: woman versus Chicana, woman versus man, female poet versus male poet, Chicana versus Chicano, and Chicana versus Anglo. The tensions between and among the different identities juggled by the poetic consciousness reveal pulls from different traditions and contexts: from poetic to nonpoetic, from English-American to Mexican-Chicano; from Aztec-mythological to Judeo-Christian. Zamora's poetic consciousness is a voice absorbing and re-

sisting its literary and cultural influences, attempting to define itself in relation to intertextual choices from two distinct traditions.

If there is a fundamental loyalty marking Zamora's poetic consciousness, it is to her female voice, to her identity as a woman. Almost always tied to her female identity is her identity as a poet. Running third among her identities is her Chicana identity, because the poetic consciousness insists on proving its autonomy as a woman to the Chicano male as well as to the dominant culture. The only way it can prove its autonomy to the Chicano male is to engage in the struggle to transform him. Inherent in this belief is the assumption that one must master the male in order to criticize him. For this reason Zamora's poetry is silent with respect to the expression of her Chicana identity to the dominant culture.

Similarly, Zamora's obsession with correcting, modifying, supplementing, revising, and humanizing Anglo culture and its male poets also reveals a silence. Inherent in this objective is the belief that one must master the dominant culture in order to criticize it. Zamora's poetry thus helps to expose the circularity of one kind of cultural response available to ethnic groups in our society. By excluding Chicanos and Chicanas from participation in its mainstream, our society makes them desire it. The struggle of the consciousness is, therefore, always dependent upon the very object it desires to master.