I wanted to interview Carmen Calatayud
since I first read In the Company of
Spirits (Press 53) back in October when it was first released. In the Company of Spirits is Carmen’s
debut collection of poems and in it we find a voice that weaves a poetry of
testimonio which is—as one could expect—both personal and political but which
also blurs the line between the world of the sacred and the spiritual. Here voices
become a single spiritual guide that help us navigate these violent spaces
which are separated by time and space but interwoven together by this single
voice, voice of a multitude of voices. For me Carmen is the perfect poet to
combine and blur the distinction not only of the personal from the political
but also from the spiritual. And although we have never met in person, Carmen
and I share similar interests as you will see in this interview. (Also, please note that Carmen will be
reading on January 29, 2013 in the DC area, see here.)
Lauro
Vazquez: First of all thank you for taking part in this
interview. I was surprised to learn that you were born to a Spanish father and
an Irish mother. What part does heritage play in your new collection of poems, In the Company of Spirits?
Carmen
Calatayud: I’m honored that you would interview me
for Letras Latinas, Lauro—thank you.
My Spanish heritage plays a large role in my new
book. My father, in particular, raised
my brother and I with a strong consciousness of Spanish culture and other Latino
cultures. He traveled to Mexico and several South American countries for work,
and always brought back stories, trinkets, and slides of his photographs. Through
the slideshows from his travels, I became aware of Latino and indigenous cultures
in other countries at a young age. I also became aware, through my father, that
the U.S. had invaded Mexico and Central and South America numerous times, and
that our nation had slaughtered people, taken them over, and stolen their land.
I never saw any of this information in our history school books. Spain has its
own horrific, bloody history of killing, taking over, converting and stealing
land in the Américas. As Latinos, many of us are mestizos/as, and I was raised
to see myself as one with all Latinos. My last name was originally an Arab name,
and I recently learned that it was one name, among many, that was assigned to
Sephardic Jews who were forced to convert during the Spanish Inquisition to
survive.
LV: Much of your imagination is
preoccupied with the borderlands, with the displaced peoples of the Américas….
How did you arrive at this place?
CC:
This preoccupation with the borderlands began when I was young. I still have the
many postcards my father and godfather sent me from Mexico and other Latin
American countries, but I was taken with Mexico in particular. I learned more about
the Mayans and Aztecs in a Latin American Culture class in high school and I
was fascinated.
When I was 31 years old and at a stage of deep
transition in my life, I finally listened to the voice inside that kept telling
me I needed to visit Arizona. While I was there, I got an offer to housesit by
a woman who owned a B&B. “I know you want to move here,” she said. I felt
that I was being called to move to Tucson. I flew back to DC, quit my writing job,
sold and gave away my things, and within 6 weeks, I was living in her house. That
was the beginning of my life in Tucson, getting to know the people and issues
of living in the Sonoran desert, close to the border.
I saw the stark differences between Nogales, Arizona
and Nogales, Sonora. I saw Sells, the town on the Tohono O’odham reservation.
The poverty was stark and hard to take in. Even though he doesn’t write about
those places specifically, Luis Alberto Urrea’s writing in Across the Wire honestly captures what life on the border is like
for many who live there.
In 2001, I left Tucson and returned to DC after my
father died, but I’ve never let go of the borderlands, of Arizona and Mexico,
and the attention we need to pay to the people, the land, and their issues.
Arizona and Mexico live in my heart daily. I sometimes feel as though my soul
is still hovering over the Sonoran Desert, looking for home.
LV: The title of the book evokes the
idea that poetry is both communion and communication with the ancestral, that
poetry is not an act done in isolation but rather an act of communal
undertaking. How do you see the title of the collection speaking to this larger
theme of poetry as community?
CC:
The
original title of the book was Cave Walk,
which is the title of one of the poems I wrote while living in Tucson in the
1990s. In her innate wisdom, one of the book’s editors, poet Pam Uschuk, told me
that I needed to change the title because it didn’t fully capture the
manuscript. The new title came about as I having coffee in DC with Francisco X.
Alarcón and my husband Ricardo Villalobos after the end of the Split This Rock
poetry festival in DC in March 2012. I was eager to show Francisco the painting
that would be on the cover of the book, a painting by LA-based Chicana artist
Aydee López Martínez. The painting is of a woman in a white dress walking
barefoot, surrounded by skulls floating in the sky. Francisco asked me what the
title of the painting was. I told him “In the Company of Great Spirits.”
Ricardo said “That’s the new title of your book!” and Francisco almost jumped
out of his seat, saying, “Yes, yes, that’s it!” Pam suggested I take out the
word “Great” and with Aydee’s blessing, the new book title became In the Company of Spirits.
For me, writing is a communion and communication
with my ancestors, and the ancestors of the land where I live and have lived. This
communion comes through at times when I’m alone writing. I use meditation, yoga,
poetry and brainstorming with words that appeal to me to help me connect with my
own spirit and ancestral spirits as I write. I’ve also found that writing with
others is incredibly powerful, so in that sense, writing in a group is a communal
undertaking.
The title In
the Company of Spirits, I hope, opens the door to the theme of poetry as
community, as you suggest. The community, for me, includes my poet and writer
friends in person and via the internet, the spirits of my ancestors and the ancestors
of the land, and the spirits of writers who have gone before me, living and
dead. We keep them alive when we read their work and follow their inspiration.
LV: At times there seems to be a thin
veil separating the various speakers in these poems. I am thinking of poems
like “A Homeless Woman Speaks,” and “Hermana in the Sky,” just to name a few
examples. At times it almost becomes difficult to separate the various voices
inhabiting the landscapes in this collection. The voices become a single
spiritual guide that help us navigate these violent spaces which are separated
by time and space but interwoven together by this single voice, voice of a
multitude of voices. Was this play with voice intentional on the part of the
poet?
CC:
This is a wonderful question. A part of me wishes it were intentional, but I
can’t say that it is. I rarely plan to use a specific theme or voice when I sit
down to write. My writing is much more organic in the sense that the voice and
topic of the poem is what arises in that moment. Using different voices is how
I write. It’s my hope that the voices come together in the collection as you’ve
described, as a “single spiritual guide.”
LV: “I have a monsoon wish:/ Let the
rains wash away/ the boots of the border patrol/ so they step in flooded sand/
because I’m tired of la migra/ who walk with feet of rock.” These lines from
“Border Ghost of Sonora,” can be interpreted in two ways, one in which the
border patrol agents lives are in jeopardy (because of sudden rain and the
possibility of flash flooding) and the other—for me—is where the rain seems to
wash the feet of these harsh figures, to turn these feet of rock and the
surfaces they walk on into a more tender substance by the washing or erosion
from rain….Can you share some words on this?
CC:
I’m glad you shared this interpretation with me, because I’ve never seen it
like that, and now I understand that it can come across this way—that in the
poem, the border patrol walk upon a more tender substance because of rain.
Actually, if you live in the Sonoran Desert, you
know the danger of monsoon season: a dry river bed of sand can become a raging
waterway within minutes. People lose their cars and drown every year in Arizona
during monsoons because they think they can wade through or drive through a dip
in a path or a road. This was the idea of the “monsoon wish” in the poem—that
the border patrol walking with heavy boots and stepping into “flooded sand” could
be taking a dangerous chance with their lives. My intention was more violent
than the idea of washing or erosion from rain, but I see that I could have made
that more clear in the poem.
LV: There are poems of testimonio
here. But there are also poems which blur the line between the political and
the realm of the spiritual, the poet “sings to hold god in [her] mouth. Even
while hearts are nailed to the fence, [she] hear[s] the cadence of each beat.” By what elements of her craft (the lyric, the
image come to mind when I think of your work) does the poet intersect the
spiritual elements of poetry with the political consciousness of the
testimonio?
CC:
Well, the first thing that comes to mind is the quote “The personal is
political,” which became a rally cry of the feminist movement (not attributed
to one person) and has since been used for different political and social
movements. The reverse is used as well: “The political is personal.”
For me, the political is personal and spiritual, and
there’s no getting around that. The spiritual can’t be disconnected from
political/social consciousness. For example, our political vote reflects our
social consciousness, that is, how we care about our society and the people who
make up that society.
When it comes to the craft of poetry, you’re right—I
use the lyrical and images to intersect spiritual elements with political
consciousness. In a few of my poems, the narrative reflects that blending. But
I find that the lyric and imagery are the best, most natural ways I can marry
the spiritual with the testimonio.
If I were to write a poem about García Lorca and his
execution, for example, I don’t know how I could separate the spiritual death of
Lorca—what his emotional, surreal poetry and plays mean to the Spanish people—from
the political/social context of his execution, which happened because he was
gay and because he was outspoken about the Fascists. I would naturally weave
lyric and images in the hopes of creating a spiritual testimonio, but a
testimonio all the same.
LV: You are one of the moderators of
the Facebook page Poets Responding to SB 1070, which was founded by this year’s
judge of the Letras Latinas Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize—poet Francisco X.
Alarcón. How has Francisco X. Alarcón influenced your poetry? What are some of
the other literary “ancestors” found in your work?
CC:
Francisco is a magical poet and soul, and I’m honored to know him and call him my
friend. I knew some of his work before becoming involved with Poets Responding
to SB 1070, but read much more of his poetry as I got to know him. Francisco
has a way of making the spiritual manifest in everyday life, as our ancestors
did, and this is reflected in much of his poetry and the way he sees the world.
His poetry reminds me time and time again to return to the spiritual, to the
idea of oneness, and this concept has blossomed in my own work as a result of
his influence.
In addition, Francisco’s poetry and approach to life
remind me that fighting for a cause can overwhelm me with frustration and anger
if I don’t stay balanced by invoking the spirit of oneness and the wisdom of our
ancestors.
I use a quote from Francisco’s poem “From the Other
Side of Night” to open the last section of my book called “Beyond Language.”
Francisco easily expresses the unspeakable and the unknowable, and this
particular quote from his poem exemplifies that:
this
life
condemned
to
oblivion
here
nobody knows
nor
will know
of
the sea
we
carry within us
of
the fire
we
ignite
with
our bodies
from
the
other side
of
night.
To answer your question, the literary ancestors or poets
whose influence you may be able to see in my work include Federico García
Lorca, Anne Sexton, Rosario Castellanos, Claribel Alegría, Joy Harjo and Demetria
Martínez.
Then there are some of the poets I’ve been turning
to for inspiration: Lucille Clifton, Cynthia Cruz, Chris Abani, Jericho Brown,
and always, Neruda.
Thank you for this opportunity, Lauro. It’s a
privilege to be interviewed by you.
