american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

144 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
representative, in a line extending in the Americas from Whitman to
Neruda to numerous rappers. For Baca’s speaker, though, the imperative
to fight for the oppressed is still urgent, but the means to do so
seem inaccessible in an age of cynicism. Yúdice longs for the authenticity
of “non-mediated communication that testimonio makes
possible” (Rosman 128; original emphasis), but the speaker-poet in
Baca’s poem in fact suggests that the word—prayers, poems, testimonios,
stories—always mediates between generations and cultures, and that
without the word, any hope for “faith, prayer, and forgiveness” is lost.
Baca and the testimonio critics are skeptical of the poet’s role as representative;
however, U.S. Puerto Rican poet Martín Espada’s self-proclaimed
“poetry of advocacy” speaks “on behalf of those without an
opportunity to be heard” (Dick 29). For the former immigrant rights
lawyer, creating a global poetics of justice is a primary aesthetic concern.
Like Robert Hass, who has claimed—as discussed in chapter 1—that
creating images of justice and injustice is the best way for a poet to be
political, Espada is primarily concerned with the intersections of
poetry and justice. Espada’s “Mariano Explains Yanqui Colonialism to
Judge Collings” actuates a poetic agency that migrates between three
different discourses/languages, while simultaneously searching for a
voice that advocates for justice. This brief poem looks like a fragment
of a play:
Judge: Does the prisoner understand his rights?
Interpreter: ¿Entiende usted sus derechos?
Prisoner: ¡Pa’l carajo!
Interpreter: Yes. (45; original emphasis)
The courtroom dialogue features three voices, each of which
illuminates a primary space in migratory agency—often oppressive
U.S. institutional power structures (“Judge”), U.S. citizens who
mediate between presumably extralegal migrants and those
structures (“Interpreter”), and migrants who live outside those structures
(“Prisoner”). I argue, then, that the Prisoner has not broken a
specific law, but the system itself; thus, Espada’s title addresses the
encompassing context in which the migrant “prisoner” finds himself.
Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto explains that extralegal
migrants to cities in developing countries—which can be extrapolated
here to immigrants from these countries to the United States, where
they still live extralegally—do not “so much break the law as the law
breaks them,” so “they opt out of the system.” He continues that “it
is very nearly as difficult to stay legal as it is to become legal” because