AN ISLAND OF COASTS
(for a symposium panel called "Writers Of-Color" at San Francisco State University)
Being caught in the middle of many middles, I am intrigued by the term "of-color" as a sidelight to the edge. There is an avant garde aspect to not fitting in. To searching for whatever truth you equate yourself with while remaining outside the expected curve. As a writer with a Latino last name, as a performer interested in the non-linear, as enigma within my own escalated sense of self-housing, as wordsmith involved in the alchemy of emotion...I find myself questioning where territory allows habitation. Where my interest for self-discovery begins to include the world.
OARS
No row built on mirror ships
No hard boiled sticks
No harmony hits into the head
The weapon for change - directions of time
Flaps welded by shatter
No push on a babble
No made up come-onia
Towering over
No Torres
A Spain of PoMo times
In cloaks of No
In blinds of Madrigal
Constellating by the bay
In all the same ways
Curtain to lake
Am I
My hands pass through
Night veils
No
Smudgy pap draggin'
No 'nother drift
And all the same
At times - ignored
As if
I didn't existed
I try and understand the world around me by creating one inside. An impossibility that I approach with what I'd like to think is centuries of hot-bloodedness, running through me. This is where I embrace the Latino in me and run with what I imagine. The image of a nomad traveling across an urban desert, setting off oasis-bombs along the way.
These thoughts fly out at breakneck speed before I access what they mean. Invariably, a lot of unformed junk comes out...some of which remains, to haunt or nurture its creator. Unformed becomes off (of color becomes of) by location of form (location of color)...logic becomes logic by calling it logic, one line in poem contains logic searched for...one gesture in performance becomes the entire performance.
As a Puerto Rican New Yorker, I've only recently come to accept a certain sense of responsibility concerning any talk about "my people". I used to think that kind of approach to your work was terribly self-important, but of course it's where you find yourself. After writing and performing work about the world around me, it's time to understand the one inside. An island within an island...the Puerto Rican within.
the power of an intelligent minority
withers in the passing heatwave - the pissing tongue
I'm louder than the sun
but if there are no ears - than
I am my own day
Maybe by now you can tell that it's hard for me to be confined to one beat. I choose to address my human complexities with the same energy I use walking the streets of Manhattan. Being a product of this labyrinth, I grew up surrounded by non-linear reason. There's just so much to look at! This is one reason I became fascinated by The Futurists.
I love their romance for what was supposed to be the future. As a graphic designer, I really dig the plasticity of their typography. The use of negative space, which makes the viewer complete the picture, poster, the word. I like the layering of work which allows for multiple interpretation. Not a computer-age Photoshop layering which is such a visual assault...but the depth of layers in void, how that works onstage, or in the thought process. A hole left unfilled by whoever sees it. Negative space is overlooked, especially now in this over-information age. Thanks to the strip-malling of America, everyone/thing is beginning to look alike. There's a lot of loudness without any volume.
Sometimes I do feel like I'm louder than the sun...but sure enough, I wonder where the ears are. Finding yourself in a position where you'd like to survive as a writer, all one can hope for is to cultivate some ears.
Doesn't explain the salsa music in my bones and how I get off on rhythmitizing the language I speak-to jump from the jazz of Gerard Manley Hopkins into the fantastic organisms of Khlebnikov, while holding on to that clave beat. Metamorphosis is what I'm best at, which is why I gotta learn to slow down. Mercury is my fleet-footed salsero...both god and metal. I can liquefy at a moment's notice, which is why it's hard to pin me down. Sounds like self-boasting to me. Sounds like...he says.
Is there humor in invention? Scientists are wacky, so are poets, so are Latinos. For that matter, so are of-color writers. I think anyone finding themselves out of the expected curve is probably off-center...or...are WE centered and is everyone else...UN...? I'd like to think so, and maybe that's what this panel is about.
Invention is the cornerstone for liberation. How, as writers of color, we use invention in our hybrid between Spanish and English. See, but the minute you start saying something like "we" you assume a lot for many people. That's my problem with being grouped into anything...which is why I continue to contradict myself. You can see a lot more insides from the outside, but you can do more with your outside by being inside...
To have found yourself on the inside of the outside...is a dizzying spell.
truth - a poem I remember
everytime I hear him speak
I leave you with this poem, reprinted from Longshot Magazine (www.Longshot.org). It's a memory of a moment with my father...about growing up and not fitting in. Which to me, ultimately, is what the Avant Garde is about. Thank you for your time.
I WANTED TO SAY HELLO TO THE SALSEROS BUT MY HAIR WAS A MESS
We were driven to the airport after performing
the night before, at a Hispanic Festival in Columbus Ohio.
A salsa band from California
and a poet from New York -- both Puerto Rican
except for my hair.
I had gone too long between hair cuts...
undecided, after a life of short hair
whether I had what it takes to look good with long hair.
Did I possess the physicality to balance
my scrawny calves -- which magnifed
with every pound I imagined...if I had long hair?
After years of Tang milkshakes & individually wrapped
american cheese slices, would my non-existent upper-body strength
hold up to what I'd always envisioned?
During this indecision, it grew quickly
into one lump.
My hair, represented
a non-barrio dryness, unkept...almost
hippie-like, something that just
wouldn't sit too well with the busload
of Boricuas I was riding with.
Here were traditional Puerto Rican Men,
from 20 years of age to 60 -- very well groomed
with gold-watches and wisecracks.
Here I was, feeling out-of-place as my
very non-Puerto Rican glasses kept slipping...
I was having thoughts of fitting in or not.
If you even have thoughts
of fitting in or not, you don't.
my beard may be trimmed
but my hair is disheveled
in my head
is my entire conundrum
The rear-view mirror exposed a rear view
of who I was supposed to be in this Latino Age.
All because of my hair...adding to my previously
mentioned, generally non-Puerto Rican look.
Thing is, I'm the first to not want to fit in --
anywhere! When the moment you're in -- stops
to surround you -- with memory and cologne
you take whats around you -- as immediate past
smiling into the future -- flowing into the ebb.
On a bus ride with my brethren
us Latinos -- we are gracious in our handouts.
Unconscious demonstrators of our plight -- whether real
or imagined. It's convenient to have purpose
if there is plight...
old Salseros never die, they just find another beat.
I'm from here they're from there
we're brought to the middle of the land
to show what the edges are like
each coast represents
an island of coasts
obscure
revolving around myself
I can see
each of my coasts
staring me back
in the rear-view mirror
an island of who I am
unsteady --
against the land I'm in
: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :
Puerto Rican men are all my father, there's
no getting around that I can't help it -- I know
it's not true, but the brain tells me
what the music won't.
And the music tells me
now -- what my mother used to then, silent --
as the morning he died.
All Puerto Rican men
are Salseros with impeccable timing,
just like my father -- finally
taking me for a grown-up haircut
the day before he died.
Little ten-year old mop-top
spending the afternoon with dad, first and only
time -- meeting his grown-up friends
at my uncle's store -- I need to use
the bathroom, I said.
He winked at the men
and told me where it was.
I turned on the light -- all four walls
the ceiling and parts of the floor
were covered with pictures of naked women.
There wasn't an empty space
anywhere...centerfolds, playmates, legs
and hips and who knows what -- a sea of flesh
and glossy eyes watching me pee.
I finished quick, and came back to my father.
He said, How was it. I said, Fine. They all laughed.
As we left for my haircut he gave me a wink.
Letting his guard down for a second,
just like --
all Puerto Rican men, and I used to believe
I wasn't one because I was in touch
with my feminine side -- each of my hemispheres
fully occupied -- unlike
the uneven beauty of my father.
I discovered that -- this world uncovered
is like the soul
of The Puerto Rican man -- occupied
by the weight of his balance between
I
and
land
...but my vision blurs as my glasses slip.
I'm in regression -- against any liberation
that's happened to the species
since the day he died.
I refuse progress
because then -- everyone will have caught up to me...
and where will I be!
I'm here
as a Puerto Rican Man of New York Soul...
representing my people
by being who I am, confused
and alienated by my own soil -- which has now
become my hair.
