american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

142 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
He claims to “descend / into dangerous abysses of the future” and
sounds desperate when he says, “I want to believe / whatever problems
we have, time will take / its course, they’ll be endured and consumed.”
Unlike his uncle, the speaker lacks faith. The poem concludes
with him imagining following his dead uncle into a church, watching
him “kneel before La Virgen De Guadalupe, / bloody lips moving
slightly.” While the uncle’s “great gray head [is] poised in listening,”
the speaker concludes “considering the words faith, prayer and
forgiveness, / wishing, like you, I could believe them.” The speaker
thus expresses his lack of faith in poetry, in community-based action
(as prayer can be either communal or private), and in human goodness.
Whereas Pérez-Torres claims that the poem has an ambiguous
ending (Movements 83), I see a clear conclusion but an ambiguous
future for the speaker. There is, I think, a glimmer of hope left due to
his belief in the power of language. In the poem, language is capable
of joining generations even as it simultaneously highlights the rift
between generations. At the conclusion, the speaker-poet affirms the
power of the word—“a prayer on my lips bridges years of disaster
between us”—and thus affirms the potential poetic agency of the
migrant’s language.
If the model for community activism and the roles of poetry have
changed from Uncle Baca to J.S. Baca, it may be due partly to a
change in what Pérez-Torres calls the “process of affirmation.” This
process, he writes, occurs on a personal level in Baca’s poetry whereas
much Chicano Movement poetry was driven by a “desire to organize
a community for political action,” which is in some ways similar to
Black Arts Movement poetry. In contrast, Baca’s is not protest poetry
or organizing tool; as Pérez-Torres points out, it is more complex,
and it “represents a retreat from mass political movement, a reflection
of the political situation during the Age of Reagan” (Movements
11–12, 47). The poem is thus elegy to the tactics of the Chicano
Movement and testimony to a more fragmented political reality; as
such, its skeptical, fractured voice reflects this uncertain, but nonetheless
palpable, agency.
The gap between Baca’s and his uncle’s poetics represents a
dilemma for poems of migratory agency and it also represents one
between notions of the poet’s role in Latin and North America. The
Latin American testimonio tradition helps elucidate this divide. John
Beverley defines the testimonio as a story “told in the first person by
a narrator who is also a real protagonist or witness of the event he or
she recounts, and whose unit of narration” is “a significant life experience”
(24). A testimonio, then, is a “narrative of real historical actors”