american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

134 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
attempt to bridge” (32). In “Poema para los Californios Muertos,”
the speaker’s Spanish declarations of identity and solidarity insinuate
that there is a rupture between history (the world of absent presence)
and the contemporary North American cityscape (the world of concrete
presence). At the end of the third stanza, she says that only the
ghosts of the dead Californios should remain (“deben aquí
quedarse”) in this city, which points to a desire to honor her dead
ancestors as well as a fantasy of absolute separation between a white
Euroamerican present and a Chicana/o past. Later, it is clear that
there has been an erasure of history and that the plaque is but a superficial,
dishonest attempt to make that history positively present. All
that remains at the restaurant are “bitter antiques, / yanqui
remnants,” “the pungent odor of crushed / eucalyptus,” and “the
pure scent / of rage”; none of these presences, it seems, are “de los
Californios.” Their history is conveniently bracketed in a small
plaque—in effect a museum writ small, an image echoed in Alexie’s
“Evolution” and strangely, in scale, by the finger ring in Bly’s
“Counting Small-Boned Bodies.”
Cervantes’s strategies highlight the fissure between history and the
living present—even as that history has a palpable presence in each
unfolding moment—and between the language of collective ancestral
memory (Spanish) and that of her present life (English). Though the
migrant agent is able to move between both, her poem shows the difficulty
of finding a home in either. Cervantes’s speaker fails to carve
out a space between the two, for it is here that the most effective
poetic and political agency resides. The poem’s Spanish, though,
refuses to forgo a heritage of absence and loss and to submit fully to
the notion of “progress.” Moreover, Cervantes’s poem denies
American cultural progress spoken of in terms of the “melting pot.”
Some things, she suggests, do not melt easily. They may be largely
absent, but they ferment uneasily in “la sangre fértil” and they will
eventually manifest themselves in everything planted in the fertile soil.
The poem thus seems to say that in making “progress” you will reap
what you sow; if you sow blood (“sangre”) you will reap it as well.
The two poems discussed thus far use code switching to foreground
the sociopolitical and cultural experiences of the bilingual,
Latina/o migrant. But these poems’ primary figures of voice do not
comment directly on the relations between languages themselves.
Many bilingual poems (and a striking number of English poems by
bilingual poets) take as their de facto subject the cross-pollination of
languages and the cultures they inhabit. Is it any wonder that contemporary
poets (any poets, for that matter) take language itself as a