Feasting on FETISH: Installment number 3

Two scenarios in Orlando Ricardo Menes’ Fetish.

In the first, nature—nature in the speaker’s childhood taking on mythic qualities. But also the nature of friendship (without giving anything away); the nature of language (without giving anything away).

In the second, history—the weight of family history within the history of an island nation.

Victoria María Castells and Dan Vera add their voices to the chorus.

 Victoria María Castells on “Sal”

The poem “Sal” shows the conflation of nature, language, and culture for two sixth-grade outsiders, a Cuban immigrant and his only friend, the dark-skinned tomboy Sal. Throughout the poem, there is a preoccupation with exact classification, where the pines in the kitchen of Sal’s grandmother are clarified to be “wild pines—Epidendrums,” the official horticultural grouping. The exact descriptions are at odds with the speaker’s imperfect English as a boy, “the frito-bandito talk Miss Jones called uglier than spit on dirt.” Unintentionally on the teacher’s part but characteristic of the work’s theme, language is again tied to the earth.

In this swampy environment, undomesticated nature is bleeding into the physical setting. The kitchen is described as a “greenhouse” overflowing with plants, and the playtime outside of the shack takes place as if in a mystical landscape. The sense of foreignness is transfigured into the bog, through the wild lists of the evocative and unfamiliar, accounts of drinking “bromeliad water” and diving into “oölite ponds”. Compound words also conjoin agriculture and animal life, with phrases like “centipede vines,” “hog pail,” “alligator pear,” “fingerbone twigs,” “fig crickets,” and “cock’s-spur toes”. Youthful imagination and physical immersion turn the two alienated figures into a natural part of the surroundings, with an inclusivity reflected in this bonded world.

The expanded titling is not kept to only physical objects. “You’re mine now, Sal said, I the boy/ you the girl,” and gender is switched through the power of assertion. With his red lips and wig made of moss, the boy is no longer restricted to one gender or idiom, or even his identity as a human being. The physical union that follows is described through scientific jargon, “tender parts of orchids— stigmas, anthers, ovaries,” as if Sal and the speaker are pollinating. Only after this transfer does Spanish appear in the physical descriptions, for seesaws, bamboo, trees, and mangroves. The boy travels under “ficus roots—jagüey,” in contrast to the earlier Latin identification of Epidendrums. Gender, ethnicity, and wildlife meld into an entity best expressed through a heterogeneous lexicon. The poem ends as the speaker “snaked miles through aquifer,” until he hears “corúa birds coo the dawn gru-gru, gru-gru.” The corúas speak, and immigrant speech has been assimilated into the wild.

Victoria María Castells is a Miami, Florida native. She earned a B.A. in English from Duke University and is an MFA candidate in Fiction at McNeese State.

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Dan Vera on “Elegy for Great-Uncle Julio, Cane Cutter”

“Hoy no llego al futuro sangrado de ayer.”

“Today did not arrive bloodied by yesterday.”  Silvio Rodríguez

And yet today does bear the stains of the past.

Orlando Ricardo Menes' “Elegy for Great-Uncle Julio, Cane Cutter” retells the story of a pilgrimage to Cuba and visit to long-lost relatives.  Menes opens with the story of a family separated by politics.  Part of the family left Cuba after the revolution and part of it stayed.  The speaker travels to Cuba, to Tío Julio's bohio, the simple earthen home of the Cuban countryside, to meet the figure from childhood stories, to meet him “in the flesh,” to pay respects to blood family and in some way create a wholeness where separation has long existed.

Like all elegies, it is filled with great sadness, which pervades every inch of the poem.  Everywhere is evidence of time's passage: the “wilted clippings of Fidel glued to the bedposts” and the “Soviet tractors” rotting in the sheds beside the cane fields.  This is not the polished surfaces of the revolution's public quarters but the rough-hewn and collapsing space of the daily laborer.

I was struck by many notes here that are breathtaking in their simple directness: Tío Julio's wife, who offers coffee and an invitation to a meal, revealing the enduring and painful hospitality of those with meager and rationed resources.  The cigar box opened to reveal old photographs of family members long gone – evidence of previous generations that are a priceless trove for exiled children who grew up with little access to family histories.  The weight of the experience is such that the speaker can bear it no more, begs pardon, and departs over “rutted canefields,” tripping “over pits of memory.”  He is left with his “false promises” which he does not enumerate but I believe refers to the pilgrim's inability to capture peace or resolution in the face of such tragic history.

In its specificity this poem is for the numberless Cuban families sundered in the last 50 years by revolutionary history and geopolitics.  But in one sense, like all stories of the returning children of refugees, Menes' elegy serves for all those who are a product of departure and exile.  In this way it speaks to the larger and ongoing human experience of loss and longing.  Indeed this poem is an example of how every exile, [in truth every arrival] is in some way born out of tragedy, out of separation and loss.  One discovers this somehow, even in the midst of a happy childhood, that one's parents left something behind, something they cannot communicate.  One grows up with the knowledge that there are conversations and relatives that are not available to you. 

It's hard for me to recall another poem by a Cuban poet, on or off the island, that has more powerfully told that heartbreaking story.  This isn't poetry of victory.  It does not argue politics or history.  It bears witness to the real pain in history's wake.

Although over one million Cubans have left the island, no one has escaped the hardship and scarring tragedy of the last 50 years.  Menes' “Elegy for Great-Uncle Julio, Cane Cutter” is an elegy to a severed body and a dismembered people.  The speaker in “Elegy to Tío Julio” documents the cleave points between history and home.  These are places poetry is meant to plumb.

What Menes finds in the poem isn't a resolution but a revelation of the miraculous persistence of family ties and their ability to wound, to haunt and to ground us in our helplessness in the face of history.  All the protagonist can do is bear witness to the fracture between Cubans on the island and in the diaspora.  For more than fifty years the story of Cubans has been one of brokenness and longing.  Menes is unafraid to explore these depths; he chooses to remember.

Dan Vera is a writer, editor, and literary historian living in Washington, DC. He's the author of two poetry collections: Speaking Wiri Wiri (Red Hen, 2013), the inaugural winner of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize, and one of Beltway Poetry's Ten Best Poetry Books of 2013, and The Space Between Our Danger and Delight (Beothuk Books, 2008). His poetry appears in various journals, including Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry, Delaware Poetry Review, Gargoyle, and Little Patuxent Review, in addition to the anthologies Divining Divas, Full Moon On K Street, and DC Poets Against the War. He's edited the gay culture journal White Crane, co-created the literary history site, DC Writers’ Homes, and chairs the board of Split This Rock Poetry.  LatinoStories.com named him a 2014 Top Ten "New" Latino Author to Watch (and Read) saying "In Speaking Wiri Wiri, Dan Vera shows us why he is earning a reputation as a talented, sophisticated poet who is a master at playing with words.  This collection, his second book of poetry, is a dazzling display of language and emotion."

Feasting on FETISH: Installment number 1

The poet and critic Barbara Claire Freeman once wrote:

“The generic convention of the book review is monologic; however nuanced and subtle, the constraints of the form typically allow the inclusion of only one perspective.”

She was introducing a collection of 23 short texts, each responding to a different poem by Brenda Hillman from her collection, Pieces of Air in the Epic. In other words, a collective review—published in issue 33 of Jacket in 2007.

That review served as a model for what Letras Latinas Blog will be presenting here, albeit on a less ambitious scale, but in the same spirit. But rather than publish all the pieces at the same time as was done in Jacket, we are going to roll them out 2 at a time.

We’ll be responding to 10 different poems in Fetish, a collection by Orlando Ricardo Menes, published by University of Nebraska Press in 2013, and winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.

Thade Correa on “Fetish”

In “Fetish,” Orlando Menes’ poetic vision lifts the veil separating the natural and the spiritual, the colonized and the colonizer, the body and the soul, etc., by a delicate rendering of an Eleggua that the poet glimpses standing curiously—and dangerously—close to the altar of Our Lady of Regla Church in Cuba. Eleggua—a trickster god of the crossroads in the Cuban religion of Santeria, often portrayed as a child—is known as the “Way-Opener.” Normatively, the presence of such a figure in a Christian sanctuary would be anathema, but not so in this case: in Cuba, the native spiritual tradition has not been entirely displaced and crushed by the colonizer. The Eleggua has endured, and stands as a holy object among other holy objects, shattering the authoritarian myth that the sacred belongs only to the Western world. Menes’ poem pays homage to this endurance as well as to the Eleggua’s subtle shattering of cultural hegemony. 

Like the fetish of Eleggua itself, Menes’ poem is a magical verbal object, a way-opener that offers a glimpse at a psychic crossroads where the grim realities of cultural and spiritual conflicts and their historical contexts are not mended or collapsed into an undifferentiated unity but rather collide and so give birth to a radiant gesture of compassion for the Outcast. That is to say, the poet does not attempt to resolve the tension between the pagan fetish and its postcolonial environment but rather elegizes and praises the Eleggua as a symbol of all that which survives oppression. Despite its presence in the sanctuary, the fetish is not at home where it is, and so the poet wishes to take it back with him to an even more alien (and presumably Midwestern) landscape, “where snow / & hail fall from brittle clouds / that phosphoresce the night sky.” The tenderness that pervades the last lines of the poem in which the poet addresses the fetish is heartbreakingly moving:

Don’t fear. Snow is coconut flakes,

hail rock candy. I will paint

gouache jungles with aquatint vines,

         ochre ceibas, orchids that grow

in gessoed moonlight, your lair

of Spanish moss by a bay window

where you will eat red papaya,

drink rum, sun like an iguana

on a yagruma tree.

The landscape of the new home that the poet wishes to grant the Eleggua will be far from comfortable and familiar, and so the poet offers the activity of his own imagination to the fetish to make up for this alienation. In a stroke, the poet’s devotion to the fetish transforms the bleakness of a Midwestern winter into an endless tropical summer.      

However, this act takes place only in the imagination and the fetish remains standing where it was first glimpsed. Presumably, it’s still there, still alien, still Other. Yes, it’s true that “poetry makes nothing happen,” as Auden wrote. Yet in spite of this, Menes’ poem affirms that both poetry and love are way-openers, and that the activity of the human imagination, which fuels both endeavors, can and does transform and transfigure the downtrodden and grant new life to the oppressed. It’s also true that poetry

makes anything happen. It only depends how deeply one is able to dream.

Thade Correa hails from Northwest Indiana. He received his M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame (2013), having previously studied at the University of Chicago (M.A., 2010) and Indiana University, Bloomington (B.A. 2006). His poetry, translations, and essays have appeared (or are forthcoming) in various venues, including Poetry City U.S.A., Vol. 4, Bird's Thumb, The Ostrich Review, Actuary Lit, Prime Number, RHINO, Asymptote, Paragraphiti, Ibbetson Street, The Aurorean, and Modern Haiku. In 2012, a collection of his poetry garnered him an Academy of American Poets Prize. A composer and pianist as well as a writer, he currently publishes his music with Alliance Publications. Currently, he teaches writing and music at Indiana University, Northwest and HGS Music Studios, respectively.

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Nayelly Barrios on “Village of the Water People”

        

In Orlando Ricardo Menes’ “Village of the Water People,” the narrator is in search of spiritual renewal. He looks for this, according to the poem’s epigraph, in Western Cuba. The opening stanzas of the poem expose the reader to the rugged landscape through which the speaker treks in order to reach a hut in the mountains. There is an interesting mirroring of the speaker’s spiritual thirst and the horse’s thirst for water in the fourth stanza, “I almost fall / when my horse races to water” (38). Right after this, the speaker is met with the woman they are in search of, Marilú, who feeds him, “grassy coffee, coconut cakes, juicy mango slices” (38). The manner in which the speaker describes Marilú makes it clear that she is a curandera, or spiritual healer. In her hut, which is decked out in lit candles, lithographs of saints, and clay saints, the speaker drinks a concoction out of a calabash cup. Marilú explains that her hut is where individuals come to heal, and that he must drink, “in sips / and slurps. No rush, no quaffs, she says, let the taste linger...” (39). The speaker never reveals from where he traveled, but I am reminded of the contrast of this idea of no rushing: a city life. Perhaps the speaker has traveled from a city where he has not dedicated time to his spirituality, hence this need for spiritual renewal. The speaker seems to be so far removed from just relaxing that Marilú has to teach him. He says she takes his hands and shows him how to slowly intake the liquid from the calabash. The intake of the concoction is followed by prayer as Marilú runs her hands over the speaker. In the fourteenth stanza, the speaker begins to experience the spiritual healing, “I’m a believer, she says, / but just don’t know it” (39). There is a sense of confession, and burden seems to be lifted from the speaker, “My image in the cup told her secrets” (39). After this confession, he is told to “submit, be reverent...feel the grace of wet earth / on your feet, rain’s tingling mercy on your skin” (40). Marilú advises the speaker to allow himself to become one with nature, the same nature that just before this experience tired him out, or perhaps the nature from which he is escaping which has driven him to this spiritual renewal. He is then carried out of the hut by strong arms where “water people hold hands, / pray in a circle, drink from the sky...” (40). As he enters this moment of spiritual hyperawareness, I wonder how much of this experience is merely a mirage or hallucination, but perhaps that doesn’t matter, because there are multiple manners in which one can come into a personal spirituality. In the penultimate line in the final stanza of the poem, the speaker says, “I take small soggy steps, join the circle, / sit in a puddle, hum a hymn, spider lilies in the wind,” (40) and we know that, whether real or imagined, he has entered to the place he yearned for.

Nayelly Barrios is a Rio Grande Valley native. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Puerto del Sol, Boxcar Poetry Review, The Paris-American and elsewhere. She is co-editor and co-founder of Ostrich Review.