Hands That Break & Scar
an interview with Sarah A. Chavez
conducted by Therese Marie Konopelski
As a biracial person myself, half Peruvian and half Caucasian, it was powerful to encounter another mestiza with similarly complex racial self-identification. Understood relationally, race often forces those of mixed race into a liminal understanding of their own ethnic identity. Hands That Break & Scar reminds us of our shared fundamental humanity: to touch and be touched, and to love and be loved, regardless of the characteristics of the physical body we inhabit.
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[Therese Konopelski]: Hands That Break & Scar uses tactile anecdotal descriptions to illustrate your transition from childhood to young womanhood. What did you edit out of the collection? How does the perception of touch change in this youthful transition?
[Sarah A. Chavez]: While many (most?) of the poems in the collection are based on my personal experiences growing up, I certainly would not call it nonfiction. A professor in an advanced poetry workshop I took at Cal State Fresno once—sort of callously—told a student defending her poem in workshop (“but that’s how it happened”) that the factual truth is irrelevant in poetry, it is the emotional truth which the poem must serve. That really stuck with me, because our emotional responses to life do not necessary translate in the exact recounting of a situation. There is too much context missing. That being said there are aspects of my life I did not mine for this collection and poems that got left out because they just didn’t quite fit with the arc of the book.
For instance, I have a poem, “When Dana Was About to Be Raped,” which appears in the anthology Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence that was originally included the early manuscript. The poem is based on an experience I had teaching in which I was triggered by a student’s reaction to the rape scene in Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred. The poem’s present moment is the speaker teaching at the front of a university classroom, but the bulk and heart of the poem takes place in the past when she was a teenager. The speaker (and me in real life) were assaulted by a much older male co-worker and details of that assault and how visceral those tactile and scent memories are, even many years later, are expressed in the poem. The book overall addresses themes of gender violence, sexuality and being sexualized, as well as working class spaces, but because the present of the poem was a speaker in a career, in a space outside the Central Valley, it didn’t seem right in later edits.
Also, in regard to the reception and perception of touch that you mentioned, poems I have which explore or illustrate similar situations as to that in “When Dana Was About to Be Raped” where the act of touching is not nuanced, but rather experienced as expressions of violence, I did not feel ultimately fit with the tone and representations that became central for the collection. While there are dangerous and hurtful situations depicted in the poems, most of the touching in the collection ends up primarily to be positive and hopeful in amidst difficult and dangerous situations and spaces. I wanted to maintain those threads of happiness and empowerment because of and in relationship to pain. Moments of touching in the collection are primarily done with affection, even if as the speaker ages, the type of affection transforms. For example, a poem like “When She Asked Was I Afraid of Needles” or “The Day the Alligators Feasted on Time” are the girls touching and tattooing one another as a way to bond and have a sense belonging. Later in the collection, poems like “On A Summer Afternoon” and “My First Tattoo” show the ways in which touching has moved from friendship affection to sexual encounters. The touching itself is not necessarily more sexual in nature, but the perception and possibility of it is.
For instance, I have a poem, “When Dana Was About to Be Raped,” which appears in the anthology Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence that was originally included the early manuscript. The poem is based on an experience I had teaching in which I was triggered by a student’s reaction to the rape scene in Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred. The poem’s present moment is the speaker teaching at the front of a university classroom, but the bulk and heart of the poem takes place in the past when she was a teenager. The speaker (and me in real life) were assaulted by a much older male co-worker and details of that assault and how visceral those tactile and scent memories are, even many years later, are expressed in the poem. The book overall addresses themes of gender violence, sexuality and being sexualized, as well as working class spaces, but because the present of the poem was a speaker in a career, in a space outside the Central Valley, it didn’t seem right in later edits.
Also, in regard to the reception and perception of touch that you mentioned, poems I have which explore or illustrate similar situations as to that in “When Dana Was About to Be Raped” where the act of touching is not nuanced, but rather experienced as expressions of violence, I did not feel ultimately fit with the tone and representations that became central for the collection. While there are dangerous and hurtful situations depicted in the poems, most of the touching in the collection ends up primarily to be positive and hopeful in amidst difficult and dangerous situations and spaces. I wanted to maintain those threads of happiness and empowerment because of and in relationship to pain. Moments of touching in the collection are primarily done with affection, even if as the speaker ages, the type of affection transforms. For example, a poem like “When She Asked Was I Afraid of Needles” or “The Day the Alligators Feasted on Time” are the girls touching and tattooing one another as a way to bond and have a sense belonging. Later in the collection, poems like “On A Summer Afternoon” and “My First Tattoo” show the ways in which touching has moved from friendship affection to sexual encounters. The touching itself is not necessarily more sexual in nature, but the perception and possibility of it is.
[TK]: Tag is an incredibly symbolic poem where the children point trigger fingers at each other and wage racially charged insults at each other. What inspired it, and what do you think it says about parental/societal influence on children? How does the repetition contribute to the poem’s theme?
[SAC]: That poem is derived from a real memory. I went to a Catholic school where I’d say the breakdown of students might have been around a third students of color and two thirds Anglo students (in my very specific class). That third maybe included six Mexican Americans students, one Asian American student, and only a few Black students. One day at recess a boy called me “mess-in-a-can.” I don’t remember how I reacted, nor do I remember him having a malicious tone, but I do remember him saying, “you know, cuz you’re Mexican. And I’m pork-n-cheese, cuz I’m Portuguese.” But kids said other cruel things to each other all the time, mocking someone’s ethnic name, their body shape or size, skin color, their perceived masculinity or femininity.
In this way, I suppose the poem is a commentary on where discrimination begins that felt clearly connected to this childhood member. I initially wrote “Tag” for a forms class I took with the poet Grace Bauer during my PhD program at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. We were tasked with either specifically a villanelle or at least to write in one of the primary forms utilizing repetition. I’ve always liked the turning structure of the villanelle, it made me think about moving in a circular fashion toward something without coming at the heart of an idea directly, almost talking around it until you are able to understand what is at the heart of what is meant or said. I had also been thinking a lot about race and ethnicity and the relatively monocultural environment of graduate school. In some ways, grad school, and the academy more largely, follow the kind of circular structure of discrimination that children learn in school. If you make something a game, then the rules change and hurtful things can be said with a sort of immunity – I was just kidding, or we were just playing. In the academy though, it’s always in the guise of tradition or intellectualism. It’s not personal, it’s an intellectual exercise, or that’s just how things have always been, or such and such group just isn’t creating the kind of art/scholarship that is meritorious by whoever’s standards. The same kids getting picked on during recess are often the ones being marginalized academically: writer/scholars of color, women, queer folks, the working class, and people with disabilities. These are also the same people with higher rates of depression, suicide, incarceration, and death at the hands of police and the judicial system overall. And where do people learn those behaviors? In school, with parents, from families and the actions and words of their neighbors.
We don’t have to look hard to see those behaviors forming in the play of children. Even if someone wanted to argue that a child may not have full cognition of the implications of using the term “gay” as a derogatory or demeaning another’s race or ethnicity, the end result is the same. They learn that word is bad and the person who embodies that identity is bad. It’s never just “boys being boys” or “they don’t know what they said.” Children grow up with those ideas and parents and institutions of education do not correct them and often times are where the ideas are learned. Then those kids grow up to be police officers, judges, social workers, grade school teachers, and college professors and administrators.
In this way, I suppose the poem is a commentary on where discrimination begins that felt clearly connected to this childhood member. I initially wrote “Tag” for a forms class I took with the poet Grace Bauer during my PhD program at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. We were tasked with either specifically a villanelle or at least to write in one of the primary forms utilizing repetition. I’ve always liked the turning structure of the villanelle, it made me think about moving in a circular fashion toward something without coming at the heart of an idea directly, almost talking around it until you are able to understand what is at the heart of what is meant or said. I had also been thinking a lot about race and ethnicity and the relatively monocultural environment of graduate school. In some ways, grad school, and the academy more largely, follow the kind of circular structure of discrimination that children learn in school. If you make something a game, then the rules change and hurtful things can be said with a sort of immunity – I was just kidding, or we were just playing. In the academy though, it’s always in the guise of tradition or intellectualism. It’s not personal, it’s an intellectual exercise, or that’s just how things have always been, or such and such group just isn’t creating the kind of art/scholarship that is meritorious by whoever’s standards. The same kids getting picked on during recess are often the ones being marginalized academically: writer/scholars of color, women, queer folks, the working class, and people with disabilities. These are also the same people with higher rates of depression, suicide, incarceration, and death at the hands of police and the judicial system overall. And where do people learn those behaviors? In school, with parents, from families and the actions and words of their neighbors.
We don’t have to look hard to see those behaviors forming in the play of children. Even if someone wanted to argue that a child may not have full cognition of the implications of using the term “gay” as a derogatory or demeaning another’s race or ethnicity, the end result is the same. They learn that word is bad and the person who embodies that identity is bad. It’s never just “boys being boys” or “they don’t know what they said.” Children grow up with those ideas and parents and institutions of education do not correct them and often times are where the ideas are learned. Then those kids grow up to be police officers, judges, social workers, grade school teachers, and college professors and administrators.
[TK]: What is your primary and secondary sense you remember memories in? How does this affect how you write sensory poems? How did feelings and writing interact in your childhood? What were your favorite childhood books/stories growing up and do you see signs in your past that you would become a poet?
[SAC]: I suppose my primary sense would be touch, followed by sight. I am sometimes surprised at how clear and visceral the memories I hold in my skin are. Whether it’s the feel of the bumpy, burning asphalt on the soles of my feet or of the pressure on my lips of that first kiss, it’s as if my body has stored these sensations. After that, I think I am able to visually recreate in my mind what time of day it must have been and where the sun would have been positioned coming in which window, and what the living room looked like or what someone was wearing.
In regards to writing as a kid, I definitely used writing as an outlet. I didn’t feel as though I could freely share certain kinds of feelings, like anger, desire, fear, and resentment. I felt such an overwhelming longing sometimes, whether it was to be in households like my classmates’, wishing my body looked different, or that someone would feel about me the way I felt about them. Writing those feelings in a notebook helped me be able to communicate somewhere, to get it out so I wasn’t carrying the weight of those emotions all day. I honestly don’t even remember where I got the idea to write in a journal. I certainly didn’t see myself as a writer or write to try to improve or really to communicate with others; it was primarily for me; writing things down felt cathartic. In fact, writing as a kid felt private, like a secret, something personal and selfish. I assume I must have gotten the idea from a teacher or a character on TV or in a book, maybe I was mimicking a behavior I thought would help me be like someone else. I also loved to read, so I think I would sometimes try to extend the feelings I got from books by writing.
I suppose there were signs in my past, though it took me longer than some to see poetry writing and writing more broadly as something that would dominate my life and something I could make a living involved with. It sounds a little cheesy, but Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabelle Lee” and a number of his other poems, like “Alone” and “The City In The Sea” were fairly influential to my love of writing and use of poetry as something comforting to turn to. It wasn’t just the musicality of the trochaic octameter, but his focus on grief and the speakers trying to hold on to something. I read a lot of macabre growing up, like Stephen King’s short stories and novels, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice. That was between the ages of 11 – 14, but before that I loved the book series Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark and Goosebumps. I joke with my students that all poets are goth kids in their hearts, and they think I mean dramatic (or melodramatic) and “angsty,” but what I really mean is preoccupied with loss, often manifesting as a focus on death. This doesn’t have to mean the body’s last breath, but the small deaths that happen every day: the death of a romantic relationship, the death of a job opportunity, of a friendship, of an idea you had about someone, the death of a previous version of the self.
As a kid, it was sometimes hard for me to mourn or grieve losses, because they were rarely happening to just me. There was always someone else crying or scared or depressed, or I was (partially jokingly, sometimes very seriously) told to “suck it up.” So often I did not grieve, because it didn’t feel like there was room. Things still needed to move forward, whether that’s going to school, cleaning the house, helping care for a friend or family member. But in Poe’s poetry, that grief or loss could be redirected. His speakers are not just consumed by loss, but they communicate it and channel it into something beautiful. Reading and hearing the sonic melodies created by his use of repetition provided a kind of meditation on grief, those lines big and roomy, pressing out the air around me, making space. Eventually reading wasn’t enough, I started to write out my grief/feelings too, attempting to mimic the rhyme structures, create my own space between words and lines. It would never have occurred to me then to call myself a poet though.
In regards to writing as a kid, I definitely used writing as an outlet. I didn’t feel as though I could freely share certain kinds of feelings, like anger, desire, fear, and resentment. I felt such an overwhelming longing sometimes, whether it was to be in households like my classmates’, wishing my body looked different, or that someone would feel about me the way I felt about them. Writing those feelings in a notebook helped me be able to communicate somewhere, to get it out so I wasn’t carrying the weight of those emotions all day. I honestly don’t even remember where I got the idea to write in a journal. I certainly didn’t see myself as a writer or write to try to improve or really to communicate with others; it was primarily for me; writing things down felt cathartic. In fact, writing as a kid felt private, like a secret, something personal and selfish. I assume I must have gotten the idea from a teacher or a character on TV or in a book, maybe I was mimicking a behavior I thought would help me be like someone else. I also loved to read, so I think I would sometimes try to extend the feelings I got from books by writing.
I suppose there were signs in my past, though it took me longer than some to see poetry writing and writing more broadly as something that would dominate my life and something I could make a living involved with. It sounds a little cheesy, but Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabelle Lee” and a number of his other poems, like “Alone” and “The City In The Sea” were fairly influential to my love of writing and use of poetry as something comforting to turn to. It wasn’t just the musicality of the trochaic octameter, but his focus on grief and the speakers trying to hold on to something. I read a lot of macabre growing up, like Stephen King’s short stories and novels, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice. That was between the ages of 11 – 14, but before that I loved the book series Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark and Goosebumps. I joke with my students that all poets are goth kids in their hearts, and they think I mean dramatic (or melodramatic) and “angsty,” but what I really mean is preoccupied with loss, often manifesting as a focus on death. This doesn’t have to mean the body’s last breath, but the small deaths that happen every day: the death of a romantic relationship, the death of a job opportunity, of a friendship, of an idea you had about someone, the death of a previous version of the self.
As a kid, it was sometimes hard for me to mourn or grieve losses, because they were rarely happening to just me. There was always someone else crying or scared or depressed, or I was (partially jokingly, sometimes very seriously) told to “suck it up.” So often I did not grieve, because it didn’t feel like there was room. Things still needed to move forward, whether that’s going to school, cleaning the house, helping care for a friend or family member. But in Poe’s poetry, that grief or loss could be redirected. His speakers are not just consumed by loss, but they communicate it and channel it into something beautiful. Reading and hearing the sonic melodies created by his use of repetition provided a kind of meditation on grief, those lines big and roomy, pressing out the air around me, making space. Eventually reading wasn’t enough, I started to write out my grief/feelings too, attempting to mimic the rhyme structures, create my own space between words and lines. It would never have occurred to me then to call myself a poet though.
[TK]: Is the California Central Valley, the primary setting of the collection, important to your identity? How important is location for your body-focused poetry? What is your strategy for creating a story arc? Which poem are you most proud of and why?
[SAC]: I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about it as a central aspect of my identity, but I suppose if not central, undeniably one of the defining characteristics. This is partly because if I had been raised in any other location, under any other circumstances, my understanding of self, family, community, and world would be very different. I don’t mean to imply that there isn’t a kind of core sense of self (though many people believe there isn’t, I lean, at least at this point, toward maybe there is), but location is essential in identity development in that region shifts how someone is viewed and treated based on appearance, socioeconomics, and (dis)ability. I didn’t come to understand that as fully as I did until I left California and moved to a small college town in the Midwest.
My partner is originally from the Midwest and still had/has family there and sort of warned me that people would probably say things, like “when you did you move to the U.S.” or “when did you learn to speak English.” At the time I thought that was hilarious, because here I am, this ambiguously ethnic-looking pocha who in California was often having to defend ownership of my Mexican heritage. I mean, pretty regularly people used to ask if I was Native American, Spanish, Indian. My sister is lighter than I am and people often assumed she was Armenian. And while ethnic mixing is not by any means the majority in California, it is certainly more prevalent than in the Midwest (and of course the Latinx population there is significantly smaller and less varied), so while I could run often under the ethnic radar in Fresno, in Muncie, IN, it was like wearing a big brown neon sign. I didn’t change my appearance when we moved and in fact, if anything, my skin inadvertently lightened due to less sunlight annually and from the change in how I spent my time. No more swimming or working outside, I was holed up in an office inside studying and writing. So while I had always been aware of my body: its size and shape, its color, the ways it didn’t meet conventional standards of beauty depicted in the media, I had never felt/been treated so ethnic. All of a sudden, I was the darkest person in the room, the one with the most ethnic/racial social capital.
Experiencing this shift in how others saw me definitely contributed to my thinking about the ways in which understated nuance belays someone’s reading of another’s identity; a theme I explore in my poetry. These are all political issues, of course—race/ethnicity, gender, body type, sexuality, (dis)ability, but for me in poetry and literature more broadly, overt didacticism in addressing these issues isn’t usually as successful as a means of communication and discussion as is narrative. It’s that narrative that I think you are referring to as “understated anecdotes.” What’s more compelling, saying life is hard for immigrant women or telling the story of a young protagonist trying to understand her abuela’s deformity? The one approach can end up being othering or exclusionary (as in, “you don’t understand this, so you have to listen to me”), while the other, I believe, takes the opposite route—if you have a family member you love whose life you are invested in understanding, we have a place of commonality. These grandmothers are not the same, their struggles are not, but I believe that common ground can be a bridge to carrying people toward an attempted understanding of difference.
That example being used, I’d say one of the poems I am most proud of is “El Traspatio de mi Abuela.” That poem began while I was reading Vine Deloria Jr.’s theories on Native American spirituality and the construction of indigenous spirituality through Western understanding of religion. In “Sacred Lands and Religious Freedom,” Deloria talks about the divide between Western Christianity’s placement of the sacred indoors and the buildings of cathedrals and monuments, whereas in many indigenous cultures, nature and naturally occurring structures are the “houses” of spirituality. This made me think of how much I love my abuela’s backyard and how it does function as a sacred space for me. I wanted to try to root that feeling of family alongside history of the area to create a poem that scratches of the surface of the complexity of connections to place. I think it does that.
My partner is originally from the Midwest and still had/has family there and sort of warned me that people would probably say things, like “when you did you move to the U.S.” or “when did you learn to speak English.” At the time I thought that was hilarious, because here I am, this ambiguously ethnic-looking pocha who in California was often having to defend ownership of my Mexican heritage. I mean, pretty regularly people used to ask if I was Native American, Spanish, Indian. My sister is lighter than I am and people often assumed she was Armenian. And while ethnic mixing is not by any means the majority in California, it is certainly more prevalent than in the Midwest (and of course the Latinx population there is significantly smaller and less varied), so while I could run often under the ethnic radar in Fresno, in Muncie, IN, it was like wearing a big brown neon sign. I didn’t change my appearance when we moved and in fact, if anything, my skin inadvertently lightened due to less sunlight annually and from the change in how I spent my time. No more swimming or working outside, I was holed up in an office inside studying and writing. So while I had always been aware of my body: its size and shape, its color, the ways it didn’t meet conventional standards of beauty depicted in the media, I had never felt/been treated so ethnic. All of a sudden, I was the darkest person in the room, the one with the most ethnic/racial social capital.
Experiencing this shift in how others saw me definitely contributed to my thinking about the ways in which understated nuance belays someone’s reading of another’s identity; a theme I explore in my poetry. These are all political issues, of course—race/ethnicity, gender, body type, sexuality, (dis)ability, but for me in poetry and literature more broadly, overt didacticism in addressing these issues isn’t usually as successful as a means of communication and discussion as is narrative. It’s that narrative that I think you are referring to as “understated anecdotes.” What’s more compelling, saying life is hard for immigrant women or telling the story of a young protagonist trying to understand her abuela’s deformity? The one approach can end up being othering or exclusionary (as in, “you don’t understand this, so you have to listen to me”), while the other, I believe, takes the opposite route—if you have a family member you love whose life you are invested in understanding, we have a place of commonality. These grandmothers are not the same, their struggles are not, but I believe that common ground can be a bridge to carrying people toward an attempted understanding of difference.
That example being used, I’d say one of the poems I am most proud of is “El Traspatio de mi Abuela.” That poem began while I was reading Vine Deloria Jr.’s theories on Native American spirituality and the construction of indigenous spirituality through Western understanding of religion. In “Sacred Lands and Religious Freedom,” Deloria talks about the divide between Western Christianity’s placement of the sacred indoors and the buildings of cathedrals and monuments, whereas in many indigenous cultures, nature and naturally occurring structures are the “houses” of spirituality. This made me think of how much I love my abuela’s backyard and how it does function as a sacred space for me. I wanted to try to root that feeling of family alongside history of the area to create a poem that scratches of the surface of the complexity of connections to place. I think it does that.
[TK]: The Language of Stories reveals that you do not speak fluent Spanish. Section 1 opens with a quote from Gloria Anzaldua: “I remain who I am, multiple and one.” How has your experience and comfort with Hispanic and Caucasian culture differed? What have been some of your struggles with biracial identity?
[SAC]: My lack of fluency in Spanish has/does often weigh fairly heavily on my heart, “[p]ena,[s]hame,” as Gloria Anzaldúa refers to the complicated emotions surrounding the relationship between language and ethnic identity. In the section, “Linguistic Terrorism,” (in Borderlands/La Frontera) she writes that, “Repeated attacks on our native tongue diminish our sense of self. The attacks continue throughout our lives.” In the context from which she is writing, she is referring not only to a divide between English and Spanish, but also between variations and dialects of Spanish: Chicano Spanish, Castilian, Proper vs. working-class slang, etc. In my case (and in the case of a growing percentage of third generation Mexican Americans), English is my “native tongue” (though both English and Spanish in the U.S. and Mexico are the languages of the colonizers—which provides further historical complications) and it is both that language and Spanish in which I feel pulled and pushed.
In some ways I feel discomfort in both due to the complications of socioeconomics and gender expectations. For example, while I was privileged enough to attend private Catholic school (on scholarship and with financial aid) where we were taught to speak Standard English, I grew up in a mobile home park where the majority of residents were undereducated white folks, but the area surrounding the park was primarily low-income apartments populated by people of color. Every day, just getting to and from school I passed through three dialects of English and pocho Spanish. The demographic of my friends was reflective of this environment even in silly ways, like when I was with my friends of color or Mexican American cousins, we listened to rap and hip hop and used culturally-specific slang, but when I was with my white friends we listened to grunge and alternative and cussed, but mostly as punctuation to Standard English. In the company of my friends of color, there were often times when the frustrations of racism and microaggressions would arise and it was a space to complain about the oppression of white culture. And while I too was the recipient of this kind of treatment, at least in childhood it wasn’t at nearly the prevalence which my darker-skinned/haired friends experienced it. I would feel a kind of internal embarrassment at remembering racist comments my white conservative grandfather told me and the cultural privileges I saw my white mother receive. But in the same token, almost half of the people I loved most in the world were white and I had almost equal experiences of discrimination from mi gente.
In this way, to get to the heart of your question and my experience and comfort with both cultures, I’d say that often times I wasn’t comfortable in either. I felt like an imposter, a poser. Neither white and financially comfortable like my school friends and not a “real Mexican” like my friends whose parents were both of Mexican descent and spoke conversational Spanish. Code-switching is a term that is relatively prevalent now, but I didn’t hear it until graduate school. I had no idea that my lifetime of continuous fluctuation between linguist paradigms was an issue experienced by generations of people in the U.S. It just felt lonely, as if not belonging to this or that, I belonged to nothing—not even our parents could really understand how my sister and I were treated by strangers and family members from both cultures.
As open as I think most people want to be to difference, there is still comfort in identification and belonging; unfortunately belonging has been defined in ways that encouraged exclusion. I think this mindset is changing though. For example, Chipsters = Chicanx Hipsters. It’s a silly term and one that is often used to make fun, but it’s a thing. Skinny-jean wearing, slouchy beanies in not cold weather, listening to music like Mumford and Sons. Hell, vegetarian Mexican food! I shouldn’t even begin talking about that, this answer will get obnoxiously longer. Those cultural engagements are clichés of course, but I see even in my students greater tolerance/acceptance for varied performances of Latinx identity. Even the almost common use of “x” instead of the binary “o/a” is a movement toward a hopefully more accepting cultural environment for those of us in the third space of identity.
In some ways I feel discomfort in both due to the complications of socioeconomics and gender expectations. For example, while I was privileged enough to attend private Catholic school (on scholarship and with financial aid) where we were taught to speak Standard English, I grew up in a mobile home park where the majority of residents were undereducated white folks, but the area surrounding the park was primarily low-income apartments populated by people of color. Every day, just getting to and from school I passed through three dialects of English and pocho Spanish. The demographic of my friends was reflective of this environment even in silly ways, like when I was with my friends of color or Mexican American cousins, we listened to rap and hip hop and used culturally-specific slang, but when I was with my white friends we listened to grunge and alternative and cussed, but mostly as punctuation to Standard English. In the company of my friends of color, there were often times when the frustrations of racism and microaggressions would arise and it was a space to complain about the oppression of white culture. And while I too was the recipient of this kind of treatment, at least in childhood it wasn’t at nearly the prevalence which my darker-skinned/haired friends experienced it. I would feel a kind of internal embarrassment at remembering racist comments my white conservative grandfather told me and the cultural privileges I saw my white mother receive. But in the same token, almost half of the people I loved most in the world were white and I had almost equal experiences of discrimination from mi gente.
In this way, to get to the heart of your question and my experience and comfort with both cultures, I’d say that often times I wasn’t comfortable in either. I felt like an imposter, a poser. Neither white and financially comfortable like my school friends and not a “real Mexican” like my friends whose parents were both of Mexican descent and spoke conversational Spanish. Code-switching is a term that is relatively prevalent now, but I didn’t hear it until graduate school. I had no idea that my lifetime of continuous fluctuation between linguist paradigms was an issue experienced by generations of people in the U.S. It just felt lonely, as if not belonging to this or that, I belonged to nothing—not even our parents could really understand how my sister and I were treated by strangers and family members from both cultures.
As open as I think most people want to be to difference, there is still comfort in identification and belonging; unfortunately belonging has been defined in ways that encouraged exclusion. I think this mindset is changing though. For example, Chipsters = Chicanx Hipsters. It’s a silly term and one that is often used to make fun, but it’s a thing. Skinny-jean wearing, slouchy beanies in not cold weather, listening to music like Mumford and Sons. Hell, vegetarian Mexican food! I shouldn’t even begin talking about that, this answer will get obnoxiously longer. Those cultural engagements are clichés of course, but I see even in my students greater tolerance/acceptance for varied performances of Latinx identity. Even the almost common use of “x” instead of the binary “o/a” is a movement toward a hopefully more accepting cultural environment for those of us in the third space of identity.
[TK]: My First Tattoo tells how you “long for the heat” of the “tattoo proof “that the tattoo artist touched you. What is the connection between your poetry and tattoos, especially in the first tattoo memory and the playground tattoo (When She Asked If I Was Afraid of Needles)?
[SAC]: My tattoos and poetry share the connection of expression. By which I mean, both are expressions of my emotions and life experiences. Both are also representative of my translation of those events and emotions rather than being a kind of “autobiography.” For example, “When She Asked If I Was Afraid of Needles” is based on tattoos my friend and I gave each other when we were like in fifth grade, but the brother in the poem was based on someone else in my life not related to the IRL friend in the poem. But the emotional truth of gang presence, fear of omnipresent violence, and a desire to belong are all very real.
People get tattoos for a lot of reasons, but mine—the two alluded to in these poems and the other half dozen or so I have—function for me as reminders of milestones in my emotional and intellectual life. For example, I recently commissioned Dia de los Muertos-inspired portraits of my cats who passed away. I had these tattoos done half on and inside both shoulder blades, almost like emotional sentinels guarding the area around my heart. My cats, Scratch and Talulah, were with me for basically my whole adult life, through some of the most difficult times I’ve ever experienced and unquestionably through the beginning of my writer life. They were at my feet, on the desk, or trying to walk on the keyboard through every poem I wrote and revised, through hundreds of submissions, and the writing of my dissertation and two published collections of poetry. I certainly don’t need these tattoos to remind me of my sweet gatitos, just like I don’t need the tattoo on the web of hand to remember the love and connection I felt for my friend (which is good, because we did a terrible job and those tattoos faded away probably within a matter months, maybe weeks).
For me, my poetry feels like the embodiment of experience on the page and tattoos are my body having the experiences literally scarred in. It’s like I have these feels so viscerally, it brings me comfort to have visual and tactile evidence of the pain and joy.
People get tattoos for a lot of reasons, but mine—the two alluded to in these poems and the other half dozen or so I have—function for me as reminders of milestones in my emotional and intellectual life. For example, I recently commissioned Dia de los Muertos-inspired portraits of my cats who passed away. I had these tattoos done half on and inside both shoulder blades, almost like emotional sentinels guarding the area around my heart. My cats, Scratch and Talulah, were with me for basically my whole adult life, through some of the most difficult times I’ve ever experienced and unquestionably through the beginning of my writer life. They were at my feet, on the desk, or trying to walk on the keyboard through every poem I wrote and revised, through hundreds of submissions, and the writing of my dissertation and two published collections of poetry. I certainly don’t need these tattoos to remind me of my sweet gatitos, just like I don’t need the tattoo on the web of hand to remember the love and connection I felt for my friend (which is good, because we did a terrible job and those tattoos faded away probably within a matter months, maybe weeks).
For me, my poetry feels like the embodiment of experience on the page and tattoos are my body having the experiences literally scarred in. It’s like I have these feels so viscerally, it brings me comfort to have visual and tactile evidence of the pain and joy.
[TK]: Positive and affirming female friendship is a prevalent theme throughout Hands That Break And Scar. What advice do you have for feeling comfortable in your body and has writing body, touch-focused poetry affected that?
[SAC]: What’s sort of funny about this observation of the poems depicting positive and affirming female friendships is that in my real life, my most contentious relationships are primarily with woman. Women and female friends have caused more pain and long-term hurt in my life than any male relationships I’ve experienced. Growing up in the 1990s I think was an especially strange era for girls growing into women and learning how to engage with one another. There was that sense of women/girls needing to look out for each other (a kind of shallow, pop feminism), to get each other’s backs, but there was also fierce competition for limited resources. All of the friends in the collection are based on real relationships and incidents from my life, but they are only a snapshot of much more complicated dynamics.
For example, the friend Tracy who recurs in the collection is based on one of my childhood best friends. That character gets the most development in the book I think because the relationship gets complicated between the poems “In the Time of Alligators” and “Doing Laundry.” Tracy and the speaker are completely intimate and loving to each other when they are younger and not wanting to part, but in the latter poem, their bodies are compared by others (the boys, the adults), which creates tension between the two. Even women who love each other—and I’d say especially teenage girls— shame each other’s bodies and romantic choices as a way to learn how to understand where their own bodies fit into (hetero)normative society. In real life, even though Tracy was my very first best friend, she would make fun of my weight and I would tell her at least I could lose weight, but she couldn’t do anything about her face (this was a taunt my mom taught me). It borders on funny as I write it now, but at the time, it felt incredibly serious and cruel. We attacked the characteristics we knew the other one was most self-conscious about as ways to mitigate how other people were reading our bodies in relation to one another. Who’s the “pretty one,” the smart one, the fun one, etc. Of the friends and friendships alluded to in the poems, only one of those has remained close.
Along with the pressures of (hetero)normativity, the friendships depicted in the poems are also very much influenced by socioeconomics. Working class people—I would argue women and people of color in particular—are forced to rely on one another, which creates the kind of tender and vulnerable moments that I chose to focus the poems on. The real life situations are always more complicated, but I made a conscious decision to focus on the ways in which we supported and loved one another, as well as depicting realities of young female friendships. You asked if I had any advice about feeling comfortable in one’s own body, I don’t know how helpful this will be to others, but what helped me (of course, I still don’t always feel comfortable in my body) was looking at my body. Just looking at it. It’s only now thinking about this question that I am remembering the first broadside I made. It was for a mixed media art class in college. I think the title of the poem was “Trying on Jeans.”
I had been taking Women’s Studies classes that were challenging the narratives regarding fat and women’s bodies in advertising and I must have been trying to internalize what I was reading. In the poem the speaker is in the dressing room of a clothing store trying on pants that are too tight. Rather than getting upset (which is probably what I would have done in real life at that time) she begins to notice the rolls of fat around her middle and the ways that the fat moves while she is pulling and straining to button the jeans. I don’t remember exact lines from the poem, but I know the fat was described as resilient and pliable, rhythmic as if it were dancing. The poem ends with the speaker jumping up and down to watch the movement of her stomach and then stripping and dancing around the dressing room allowing her fat to move freely. It’s a joyful poem (if a bit on the nose). I think that early attempt at writing through the body was not only a precursor to this preoccupation in my writing now, but also helped me understand how to see literal bodies differently, like a painter or a photographer. This is one belly. There are many bellies. This is one set of hands, one foot, one curve of a hip. I think reading widely writers who have different bodies than our own provides this perspective for us. If we read broadly, then we can write the body with an understanding and respect for difference. If allowed, literature, poetry in particular (writing and reading it), has the potential to change the toxic relationships many have learned to have with the body.
For example, the friend Tracy who recurs in the collection is based on one of my childhood best friends. That character gets the most development in the book I think because the relationship gets complicated between the poems “In the Time of Alligators” and “Doing Laundry.” Tracy and the speaker are completely intimate and loving to each other when they are younger and not wanting to part, but in the latter poem, their bodies are compared by others (the boys, the adults), which creates tension between the two. Even women who love each other—and I’d say especially teenage girls— shame each other’s bodies and romantic choices as a way to learn how to understand where their own bodies fit into (hetero)normative society. In real life, even though Tracy was my very first best friend, she would make fun of my weight and I would tell her at least I could lose weight, but she couldn’t do anything about her face (this was a taunt my mom taught me). It borders on funny as I write it now, but at the time, it felt incredibly serious and cruel. We attacked the characteristics we knew the other one was most self-conscious about as ways to mitigate how other people were reading our bodies in relation to one another. Who’s the “pretty one,” the smart one, the fun one, etc. Of the friends and friendships alluded to in the poems, only one of those has remained close.
Along with the pressures of (hetero)normativity, the friendships depicted in the poems are also very much influenced by socioeconomics. Working class people—I would argue women and people of color in particular—are forced to rely on one another, which creates the kind of tender and vulnerable moments that I chose to focus the poems on. The real life situations are always more complicated, but I made a conscious decision to focus on the ways in which we supported and loved one another, as well as depicting realities of young female friendships. You asked if I had any advice about feeling comfortable in one’s own body, I don’t know how helpful this will be to others, but what helped me (of course, I still don’t always feel comfortable in my body) was looking at my body. Just looking at it. It’s only now thinking about this question that I am remembering the first broadside I made. It was for a mixed media art class in college. I think the title of the poem was “Trying on Jeans.”
I had been taking Women’s Studies classes that were challenging the narratives regarding fat and women’s bodies in advertising and I must have been trying to internalize what I was reading. In the poem the speaker is in the dressing room of a clothing store trying on pants that are too tight. Rather than getting upset (which is probably what I would have done in real life at that time) she begins to notice the rolls of fat around her middle and the ways that the fat moves while she is pulling and straining to button the jeans. I don’t remember exact lines from the poem, but I know the fat was described as resilient and pliable, rhythmic as if it were dancing. The poem ends with the speaker jumping up and down to watch the movement of her stomach and then stripping and dancing around the dressing room allowing her fat to move freely. It’s a joyful poem (if a bit on the nose). I think that early attempt at writing through the body was not only a precursor to this preoccupation in my writing now, but also helped me understand how to see literal bodies differently, like a painter or a photographer. This is one belly. There are many bellies. This is one set of hands, one foot, one curve of a hip. I think reading widely writers who have different bodies than our own provides this perspective for us. If we read broadly, then we can write the body with an understanding and respect for difference. If allowed, literature, poetry in particular (writing and reading it), has the potential to change the toxic relationships many have learned to have with the body.
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