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Article Excerpt
Published over twenty years ago, Emplumada (1981), Lorna Dee Cervantes's first collection, was very well received; critics thought it marked the "threshold of a new phase for Chicano literature" describing a "world simply built by feminine ancestors" (Madrigal 137; Saldivar 87). Her work was groundbreaking because of its multiplicity and specificity of voice: it included female, Chicana, and working-class perspectives. Her second collection, From the Cables of Genodde: Poems on Love and Hunger (1991), also received literary prizes (among them the Latino Literature Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize), but was not so widely reviewed, nor has it been written about as often. (1) Perhaps one reason for the lack of critical attention to From the Cables of Genodde has to do with its departure in style from Emplumada. Where her first collection was very forthright, the second is slippery. Its range is broader and more self-consciously literary at the same time that it is adamantly Chicana, female, and working class. This self-conscious positioning of poetic voice, however, is not apparent on the surface of the collection; indeed Cervantes's careful development of deferral as a poetic strategy resists the claims of certainty that often shape readings of politically engaged poetry.
This strategy of poetic deferral is created by both poetic form, the manipulations of enjambments and of the apostrophe, as well as content, the structuring tropes of love and hunger that embody recurring cycles of want and fulfillment. This deferral of certainty helps conceptualize historical loss and portray the absence of a clear, unbroken relationship to the past; yet rather than monumentalizing the dead, the poetry reimagines the significance of such a loss. Further, as structuring and thematic tropes, love and hunger offer a model of reading that values the evolution of meaning over time and encourages points of connection that are contingent and constantly revised, rather than fixed and permanent.
Cervantes's continual stylistic deferral, most explicit in her manipulation of enjambed lines, reveals a prevalent postponement of meaning, desire, and certainty that creates productive tensions and multiplicities of meaning. In From the Cables of Genodde, love and hunger define each other as mutually constitutive drives. The poems refuse the monologic and the certain in favor of the polyglotic and the open-ended. Cervantes's sustained formal and syntactical ambiguities shape a poetics of loss as a negative space, like that which forms the patterns and intricacies of lace, knit by "lint-faced mothers" whom she urges to "tat [their] black holes into paradise" (42). These black holes, then, represent the possibility inherent in the refusal to replace what is lost, opting instead to consider those gaps as integral to the cultural and aesthetic fabric. Absence is not psychoanalytic lack, but possibility. We need not replace that which is lost, but create art and subsequently meaning around it. Indeed, as this line suggests, love and hunger are the threads of connection that knit together a poetics of loss, a structure that maintains difference and absence within itself. This poetic strategy is central to conceptualizing how Cervantes can "claim canons [and] cannons" (44), not only a place in American literary history, but also a clearly resistant Chicana subjectivity.
In these poems solidarity depends not on a sympathetic sameness, but on an empathetic difference, developed in the formal strategies Cervantes employs. As a lyric poet, Cervantes explores the identificatory possibilities of the apostrophe, yet at the same time she resists an easy solidarity between reader and poem. The reader is simultaneously hailed by the poems' second person address ("you"), while pondering the relationship between the speaker and her subject. The reader's identification, then, is fragmentary and incomplete. The indigenous past invoked by Cervantes appears not as the promise of restoration, but as fragments articulated in relationship to a globalized range of myth and literature--the result of colonization, genocide, and the neocolonial relations of global capitalism. Her work resists a familiar hermeneutics that Norma Alarcon has identified and problematized, in which "the" indigenous woman functions discursively as a figure of resistance and spiritual renewal (251-52). This discursive strategy, which privileges the figure of the indigenous woman, most often the indigenous mother, runs the risk of erasing actual and contemporary indigenous women because it imagines a restored and restorative connection to the putatively authentic past. Instead of providing a clear relationship to the past and to indigeneity, Cervantes gives us fragments knit together by difference. Cervantes's poetry has the potential to revitalize stagnant Chicana/o nationalist models of political and social solidarity and action; it offers us a theoretical model for reading poetry and cultural texts that encourages a critical practice of plenitude, even as we consider the meanings of loss. As connective threads, then, love and hunger shape a model of reading that makes the fragmentary newly legible; the points of contact they engender are contingent, but they are no less compelling for being so.
Throughout Cervantes's works love and hunger are a mutually constitutive pair that shape an evolving poetics of loss. Together they transfigure the meanings of historically devastating experiences such as genocide and the geographic and cultural dispossessions that communities of color have suffered. In order to accurately map this traversal of poetic terrain, we must attend to the physicality of the poem, the particular and formal ways in which a poem reverberates within the reader, especially because Cervantes is a masterful poet, aware of aesthetic form and traditions, history, and the work that poets can do. If, as Sonia Saldivar-Hull has argued, Chicanas have developed feminist theory in the discursive space of the creative (in poetry, fiction, and drama), then careful attention to the writing itself is necessary to fully engage those theories as well as their literary articulations. (2) Close reading in this context becomes part of a politicized reading. Most critics focused on either the content of Cervantes's work or its formal qualities. (3) This essay explores both poetic principles of composition as well as "its effects on readers or auditors" (Brogan 930). Formal questions shape my engagement with Cervantes, as do questions about how these formal and structural elements are molded by individual and collective experiences of historical events.
In this essay I analyze a pair of poems first published in From the Cables of Genocide in order to map the points of connection and difference Cervantes develops through the tropes of love and hunger: "To We Who Were Saved by the Stars" and "Pleiades from the Cables of Genocide." Cervantes's poetics seek not consolation, but an expansion of the forms that separation and grief can take, across history...
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