From Latina poet to Latina Playwright: Cordova on Delgado

Back in 2010, we were pleased to announce Diana Marie Delgado as our third Letras Latinas Residency Fellow. More recently, we announced our sixth, Cristian Flores Garcia. It's a happy coincidence, given that Letras Latinas Blog would like to bring attention, when possible, to what's happening in the world of Latino/a theater, that Diana Marie Delgado, in recent years, has been devoting time to honing her playwrighting skills, in addition to her poetry (she's also a CantoMundo Fellow). What follows is piece penned by Texas-born, NYC-based writer Steven Cordova, on Delgado's recent theater exploits. ---FA

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Diana Marie Delgado was the 2010 recipient of the Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship, and it would seem she hasn’t put her pen down since. Her manuscript, Late-Night Talks with Men I Think I Trust, was a finalist for the 2012 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize; her play, After the Fire, was finalist for the 2011 La MaMa ETC's Ellen Stewart Emerging Playwright Award. And yet another play, Desire Road, was given a staged reading at La MaMa Galleria in NYC in 2011 and can be found in a recent issue of PALABRA Magazine. You might be getting the idea by now that Delgado has been at serious play with the play, and she has.

Now, a play is a story and a story can often become a play—except when it’s in the hands of a poet as imaginative as Diana Marie Delgado. Or to put it another way, both the play and the story are forms which progress in a linear fashion: first we get a bit of rising action, then a climax and then, finally, a denouement. But in the case of After the Fire, both forms are being given a more original treatment in which the action and the climaxes are largely those of language and poetic turn, of enjambment and a fresh perspective on an all too-familiar subject.

I say “are being given” because After the Fire has had two staged readings in New York City in the last two years, and Delgado, always poised and articulate during the Q&As that have followed both performances, acknowledges that the play is still very much in development. She and her creative partner, director Charlotte Brathwaite, have reduced the number of characters, for instance, from five to three. What thankfully hasn’t changed is the playwright’s approach to her subject matter. More about subject matter in a bit; right now I’d like to address Delgado’s approach.

While Delgado is certainly not the first poet to venture onto the playwright’s stage, she is the first I know who is doing so now, today, a post-MFA-in-writing-world in which writers often develop their work in “workshops.” Given the often genre-specific nature of such enterprises, Delgado’s workshop partners have probably suggested (or, if not, they’ll soon suggest) that she tell a story with a more traditional beginning, middle and end. Or that she give us more quotidian information about the play’s characters.

Delgado has nonetheless stuck to her literary guns, giving us, for example, this kind of character manifest: 

ANGELA: Sand at the bottom of the ocean.

THE OLD WOMAN: Arthur’s dead mother.

ARTHUR: a kite brought down by a gale.

And I think one of Delgado’s reasons for being so admirably steadfast is After the Fire’s subject matter, which centers—centrifuges—around a dysfunctional family and the always-risky territory of sexual abuse.

Subject matter of this nature is, after all, completely reliant upon something we can never completely rely upon, memory. The kind of memories that After the Fire takes on comes back to us with no clear beginning, no clear middle and no definitive end. They come back to us, instead, over time, offering new bits of information and new revelations. And they fracture our sense of time, these memories, they disjoint our sense of what happened first and then what happened after that. It sounds like a dream, doesn’t it, all this uncertainty, all this constant shifting around in time and place, in perspective; and, indeed, Delgado’s working subtitle for After the Fire is Un Sueño, a dream. Delgado, through the character of Arthur sums the phenomenon up this way, “Childhood’s fuck’n  trippy. No matter how many people you tell, it’s the one place only you can visit.”

Delgado says she tends to write a lot, to “overwrite, then go back and select for inclusion in the play only those passages which strike her as most strange (dream-like?), the ones, in particular, she herself doesn’t understand. But fear not, you will find a great deal of understanding in After the Fire: understanding of other people, of their complex motives and their dreams. And you’ll get a story, too, just not one that comes at you the way most stories do. Or at least I have left both staged readings feeling relieved that I hadn’t once again been presented with another case of the-good-guys-versus-the-bad or, worse, a night full of easy moral judgments. Instead, I left happy in the knowledge that there is a writer—a heroine—at the center of las llamas, and that I very much look forward to seeing how that heroine stokes this, her own entrancing fire.   

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Steven Cordova is the 2012 first-place winner of the International Reginald Sheperd Memorial Poetry Prize. His first full-length collection of poems, Long Distance, was published by Bilingual Review Press in 2010. He has a short story in Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing (University of Wisconsin Press) and an essay in The Other Latino: Writing Against a Singular Identity (University of Arizona Press). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Diana Marie Delgado on Marie-Elizabeth Mali: A Book Review

Marie-Elizabeth Mali, Steady, My Gaze (Tebot Bach, 2011) paper, 80 pp., $15.00

          It has been said that perception is directly linked to the psychic motivation of the observer. In this regard the numerous references to God, both literal and indirect, in Marie-Elizabeth Mali’s debut, Steady, My Gaze, demonstrate the book’s commitment to a journey undertaken in order to better explore the limitless relationships one can have with God and the Self, and how these relationships intersect and interact.

      Broken into four sections, the full-circle narrative takes the reader through the speaker’s  concrete and metaphysical origins; the speaker’s Self in relation to a marriage; and finally, through a dialogue with the mind during a seven-day meditation retreat. The poem "Habrienta / Hungry", opens the book in Spanish and returns as the final poem, serving as a framing device whose double-mindedness haunts the entire book.

         In the first section, The Questions Themselves, we find the speaker defining herself through metaphors grounded in nature and religion: “I’m from seeking God like the last pear on the tree in October,” in the poem “Origins” and later in the poem “The Questions Themselves,” “Some days I’m my own private congregation.” This segment of poems demonstrates a longing to break, subvert, and reorganize the physical boundaries of identity: 

                                 Always the surprise when I step

                                 on a dance floor, salsa playing,

                                 side eyes thrown my way, tightened

                                 hold on their men, the why that white girl

                                 dance so good? My dance partner’s slow

                                 nod, his come on girl, show me what you got. 

                                            “Ain’t Nobody’s Business”

This poem, like many others, demonstrates Mali’s assertion that identity is important, even when transmogrified. And it is with this reverence toward the scrambling of Self (as I like to imagine it), that the speaker is liberated. What Mali then encourages is a Self that includes nature, religion, politics—the collective unconscious as expressed in all humanity. It takes confidence to do what Mali does; acknowledge that a speaker’s identity off the page often informs what does and doesn’t make it onto the page; that race, gender, and identity are important—

           Not surprisingly, most of the speaker’s formulations about the nature of God come in the form of inquiries. This strategy serves as a buffer, a way to take a critical stance against an entity without accepting direct ownership of it. The effect of this technique is to ask the reader or to lead the reader to ask, “Where is God, really?” and, later, in “What if God is the cat who bats prey about the room and grunts with pleasure” and then again in “The desire to please turned river of red: still God?” This technique, though apropos when dealing with multitudinous concepts, reflects little risk.  At the same time, however, the title poem, Steady, My Gaze, moves against this trajectory, embodying a straightforward approach that topples Mali’s neutrality and introduces the reader to a braver, more assertive voice.  This poem, ultimately, dissolves the aforementioned apprehension in that it serves as a material invitation to the Real, a time for absolution and truth:

                                                This female body, bound

                                                by want and hunt, rotting

                                                flophouse, movable casket.

                                                Bleeding, I run. A storm gathers.

                                                Lightning antlers to the sea, trees

                                                shudder leaves to the ground.

                                                I will lock racks with God.

                                                Find yourself another

                                                woman to wound.

                                                What man doesn’t wreck

                                                fights for each breath

                                                until God finishes the job.

            The following section, I Celebrate the Husband, portrays a self more firmly identified and ready to explore new beliefs. It details the quandary of a woman faced with the question of how to separate past violent experiences with men from her current relationship, a dilemma both vital to understand yet unquantifiable. In spite of the inherent difficulties, Mali manages, “to open myself to my husband I have to / remember he is not the man who raped me / nor the men who have tried.” It is this type of redirection of the mind that stands out in this collection—again and again. It is the poet’s maneuvering through surface thoughts and immediate feelings that ultimately allow her to establish a higher and more authentic emotional self.  

The final section of Mali’s collection, Silent Retreat, further reflects the speaker’s preoccupation with the mechanism of Self as seen through the mind. Mali uses minimally titled poems “Day One” through “Day “Seven” to illustrate a seven-day rendezvous of the Self—with the Self. This last section, though fluently connecting with and continuing previous motifs, slows the expansiveness of previous sections in an effort to meditate and meet the mind where it is at. Though gracefully accomplished, the exuberance and drive experienced prior is lost. Metaphorically, the last section is an unexpected docking of a ship.  And because this ship once led you through beautiful and unexpected terrain—you want more. This, in all honesty, is probably not a bad thing. Instead, it is testament to the talent and strength of the speaker.

   

           Steady, My Gaze is a book that challenges ideologies about the Self and God. It is a book about identity both on the page and off of the page. And when Mali says, “Give me your hand. Let’s shatter the idols between us,” you want to. You do it because you know the journey of the self, as she has portrayed it, is one of the most earnest journeys, one that heals and moves all of us toward compassion, acceptance, and truth.

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Diana Marie Delgado, poet and playwright, grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. A graduate of the poetry programs at the University of California-Riverside and Columbia University, she served as Poet-in-Residence of Northern New Mexico College and was awarded the 2005 James D. Phelan Award in Poetry from the San Francisco Foundation. Her work has appeared in the Indiana Review, North American Review, the Journal of Chicana/Latino Studies and Ploughshares. The recipient of the 2010 Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship, she was awarded a month-long stay at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota. Her poetry collection, Late-Night Talks with Men I Think I Trust, was a finalist for the 2012 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, and her short play, Desire Road, will be given a public reading in the Summer 2012. She is a member of the CantoMundo and Macondo writing communities. You can follow her at the blog, Pom-PomRituals / Tiny Umbrellas.