american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

Poems of Migratory Agency
MIGRATORY AGENCY 127
In a review of Walcott’s The Fortunate Traveller, Helen Vendler
suggests that using more than one language in a poem is foolhardy.
After questioning Walcott’s use of patois and his alternations between
“high” and “low” diction, she says that multilingual poetry embodies
“a macaronic aesthetic” that “has never yet been sustained.” She goes
on to acknowledge that even though Latina/o poets write in “a mixture”
of English and Spanish, “neither language gains mastery.” For
Vendler, multilingualism “may accurately reflect their linguistic
predicament, but the mixed diction has yet to validate itself as a literary
resource with aesthetic power” (“Poet of Two Worlds” 31).
Vendler’s stance on multilingual poetry may be indicative of many critics,
but her desire for a “mastery” of one language is undesirable and
impossible. The exclusion or erasure of one language via the “mastery”
or primacy of another in a poem is an illusion. A language is often
haunted by the other languages it seeks to exclude as are cultures and
countries haunted by those groups of people they seek to master. 5 Such
is the source of rebellion and the eventual erosion of structures of
“mastery.” Further, I hope to show that the use of two languages is a
“literary resource” with dynamic “aesthetic power” and poetic agency.
It is clear that neither language “gains mastery” in Tino
Villanueva’s “Nuestros abuelos” due to the skewed power relations it
depicts. The poem suggests that when one language gains mastery,
suffering and oppression come shortly thereafter. Villanueva’s first
book, Hay otra voz Poems (There Is Another Voice), appeared in 1972,
and his book Scene from the Movie “Giant,” which comprises a long
poem rethinking the malicious perspective on Chicana/o identity in
the 1956 film Giant starring James Dean, Rock Hudson, and
Elizabeth Taylor, won the 1994 American Book Award. 6 In
“Nuestros abuelos” (Shaking Off the Dark 1994), Villanueva’s
systematic language choices create a sophisticated sociopolitical
framework. His linguistic choices produce a means for understanding
the history of Chicana/o migrant laborers, in this case the struggles
borne by current Chicanas/os’ abuelos (grandparents/grandfathers).
Villanueva’s poem shows Chicana/o subjects split not only between
languages, but also between their bodies and the actions their bodies
perform. Consequently, they are agents fundamentally separated from
the objects and results of their actions. They do not, in Marxist terms,
have any control over the capital they create for others. 7 Even so,