POEMS ARE NOT TATTOOS:
FRANCISCO X. ALARCÓN,
FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF NIGHT
(DEL OTRO LADO DE LA NOCHE):
NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
(UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA PRESS)
Jack Foley
the poor
signature of
my illiterate
and peasant self
giving away
all rights
in a deceptive
contract for life
--Francisco X. Alarcón, “The X in My Name”
In the Afterword to this important collection, Manuel de Jesús Hernádez-G insists on the “unity” of Francisco X.
Alarcón’s life and work. Hernádez-G asserts that this poet presents us with “a unified erotic and activist vision,” that Alarcón
has “a unified Chicano poetic voice, one that is both communal and activist.”
Whenever I come across such assertions of “unity,” I immediately begin to look for the contradictions, the “sub-texts,” which such statements seek to evade or deny. In Alarcón one does not have to look far. Francisco X. Alarcón identifies himself with the working class, yet he is the product of “elitist” institutions such as Stanford University; he identifies himself with the outlaw, even with the criminal, yet he is having mainstream honors heaped upon him: he was recently presented with the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement from BABRA, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association; he is a strong candidate for California Poet Laureate. This is not to say that Alarcón’s view of himself is in any way hypocritical or even inaccurate: only to say that it is complex, multiple. We owe Alarcón a debt not because he achieves some sort of dubious “unity” in his life and work but because he is able to live with the manifold contradictions of his nature and situation and can give them free and varied expression--can even allow them to comment on each other. “Being a Chicano gay poet who has crossed several social, cultural, linguistic, and sexual barriers, borders, and taboos,” he writes in “The Poet as The Other,” “I have experienced a life full of contradictions and differences....” In “Reclaiming Ourselves, Reclaiming America” he adds, “My face, my body, my soul are in constant turmoil.”
From the Other Side of Night stretches from Francisco X. Alarcón’s first book, Tattoos (published in Oakland in 1985) to new, not-yet-collected poems. It opens with the title poem from Tattoos:
poems
fill up
pages
tattoos
puncture
flesh
That is the entire poem. There is scarcely any “imagery” (though one feels something in that word “puncture”) and no “narrative” whatsoever: only two statements. Yet the juxtaposition of the statements opens up a number of questions. What in the world do tattoos have to do with poems? They seem to exist in utterly different worlds. Yet: do they? How can we find a connection between these notions? Are pages a kind of skin? (One thinks of parchment.) Are tattoos a kind of writing? Is a person who writes poems likely to sport tattoos? Are poems “elitist” while tattoos are “working class”? Is there a sexual element at work here? (Alarcón is an openly gay man.) Aren’t both tattoos and poems attempts at self-expression and the creation of beauty?
These various questions are not answered but posed. When he first began to write the work in Tattoos, Alarcón was told that what he was writing was not poems. He answered, “Yes, that’s right: they’re tattoos!” Alarcón did not wish his work to “fill up” pages. (Indeed, much of his work has been called “minimalist” precisely because it doesn’t “fill up” a page.) But he did wish his work to “puncture flesh”: to touch us, even to pierce us. (Born in Los Angeles, Alarcón grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico--a country of intense Roman Catholic imagery: one wonders if there is a slight hint here of the spear that “punctures” the flesh of the Savior. In the opening poem of Sonnets to Madness and Other Misfortunes Alarcón numbers himself among those who were born “marcado,” branded--the mark of Cain but also perhaps “tattooed.”)
The various “worlds” touched on in these questions suggest the complexity of Alarcón’s situation--and the necessary doubleness of his art, which exists in both English and Spanish versions. (His art is, like his identity, “mestizo”--mixed.) At times, as Alarcón suggests in “Un Beso Is Not a Kiss,” the English version does not serve the Spanish well. Sonnet XXIII of Sonnets to Madness and Other Misfortunes has
bailando combatamos la tortura
de la tristeza que sólo la locura
cura con manos llenas de fortuna
This is translated by Alarcón’s longtime translator, Francisco Aragón, as
dancing let us resist the torture
of sadness that only madness
with its plentiful luck can cure
The English makes a valiant effort to catch some of Alarcón’s intricate rhyming (“torture / cure,” “sadness / madness”) but it is unable to do justice to the central phrase “la locura / cura,” which finds healing (“cura”) in madness (“locura”). (It has been suggested that Alarcón is not a “curandero” but a “locurandero.”) Similarly, one of the primary themes of Alarcón’s work is the problematical relationship between the I and the we--and, even more importantly, the shift from the I to the we. There are certain words which haunt this poet: one is dark or darkness (“oscura”--another word involving “cura”) and another is “otro” (“other”). Sonnet X has “uno no es nada” (“one is nothing”) and goes on to assert that “un dia uno so tropieza con el otro” (“one day, one runs into the other”). At the end of the poem the poet is finally able to say “us,” which in Spanish is nosotros, a word affirming community by literally “including” the “other”: nos-otros. Conversely, a passage in “Plegaria de amor” (“Love Plea”),
que soy
el duelo
de tu melodía
is translated as
I am
the mourning
of your noon
There the English suggests a pun on “mourning/morning” which is not in the Spanish.
Interestingly, though Alarcón is an excellent reader of his work, he sometimes rushes through the English version of a poem and immediately moves on after reciting it. This may indicate nothing more than a poet’s lack of interest in a poem written some time ago--a constant problem for people who are called upon to read their work frequently. Yet it’s also possible that this poet, whose first language was Spanish, is a little anxious to prevent the listener from scrutinizing his phrases too closely. People whose command of a language is problematical will often speak quickly in order to prevent the listener from noticing their possible lapses.
Don’t mistake my argument. Alarcón is a fully functional speaker of English, and his poems are a great pleasure to read in both Spanish and English--a fact which is no small achievement of his work. Yet tensions necessarily exist, even in his recitations, and they are part of the fabric--the challenge--of his work.
From the Other Side of Night begins with a presentation of the poet as a “shadow” (another of Alarcón’s frequently-appearing words); he is a creature of “darkness”--a person whose very light (“luz”) must be described as dark (“oscura”). Alarcón does not in any way glamorize or justify criminal behavior, but, as he says, his “ethnicity, class origin, and sexual orientation” bring him to represent himself as a “fugitive,” a criminal “acusado de todo”:
I’ve had
to bear
the days
anonymously
like a shadow
slip
through the city
without raising
suspicions...
My crime
must have
been
as huge as
the darkness
found in
my punishment
above all
I’ve sought
the mute
company
of night
I’ve learned
to fake
nearly everything
but
still
when next to you
I’m given away
by the empty
pounding
of my heart
(“Prófugo / Fugitive”)
“Shadow,” “night,” “darkness” are all defining words of this period. “For a long time,” he writes in “Reclaiming Ourselves, Reclaiming America,” “I was a person without an image...How could I possible identify or associate myself with this body of mine when almost everything around negated me.” As the concluding lines of “Prófugo / Fugitive” make clear, the subject of this particular poem is the speaker’s guilt-ridden homosexuality. Yet Chicanos as a whole are also spoken of as “shadows” and they too are experiencing “a dark / and cruel / night.” “Whole peoples were forced to perceive themselves as the defective copies of idealized realities,” Alarcón goes on. “Vast territories of this continent were to be projections of imposed models from the ‘Old World,’ first ‘New Spain,’ and later, other European cultural models like the French and the British as well as the newer Anglo-American ones.” In “Patria” he describes his “gente” as
foreigners
in our own
native land
giving away
everything
they haven’t
yet stolen
from us
reduced
to shadows
carrying
inside
our eyes
a dark
and cruel
night
Yet to be Chicano and to be gay are not the same thing--any more than a poem is the same thing as a tattoo. Some of the work in From the Other Side of Night suggests that Alarcón’s own immediate family was none too happy with his sexual orientation:
my father
and I greet
each other
guarded
as if
sealing
a truce
on a
battlefield
we sit down
to eat like
two strangers
(“My Father”)
His poetry is hardly encouraged by his mother. In “Advice of a Mother” she says,
it hurts to see
you this way
wasting
your eyes
and your time
with those things
you call
poems
The poet’s problem in this early work is to find a way of speaking which can assert all aspects of his identity more or less simultaneously--despite the fact that these aspects may be in considerable conflict with one another. The poems are “minimal” in the sense that they depend on few words and on silence--they are elliptical and suggestive rather than assertive--but they are constantly alive with the tensions and sorrows of Alarcón’s life. He is not a writer who coldly calculates his merely formal possibilities. “I am a writer,” he told an interviewer, “who creates poetry in a fit of passion.” In his essay, “The Poet as The Other,” he adds,
What would we call that moment in life in which the precarious nature of our existence without warning is exposed and suddenly everything we accept, believe, take for granted, seems to succumb to the unrelenting questioning of our mind? For some, these are symptoms of what is known as mid-life crisis. For me, these are just some of the very conditions in which poetry frequently comes to me. As a Chicano poet who also celebrates being gay, I have come to realize that I write desde afuera del margen mismo de la sociedad (from the outside of even the margin of society), and that for some, even my own gente, I represent the ultimate Other.
Both the poet and others “weep” in Alarcón’s work.
The young Alarcón’s relationship with his grandmother, from whom he learned Spanish, offers him solace--“mijito / don’t cry / she’d tell me”--yet eventually his abuela “went far away.” He sees himself as an “Imprisoned Poet,” a “Natural Criminal”:
I am
a nomad
in a country
of settlers...
My crime
has been being
what I’ve been
all my life
Even the darkness of his skin seems to be in doubt: “I used to be / much much darker / dark as la tierra / recién llovida.” He sees the world as “tan real” (“so real”) yet himself, “deep inside,” “tan incierta / tan irreal” (“so uncertain / so unreal”). He longs to “set / [his] body on fire”:
I want
no memory
rather to embrace
every instant
to a frenzy
Various poems suggest a call to political activism (“Las flores son nuestras armas”) and to an increased exploration of his sexuality--which itself has its “dark” aspects:
with your gray hair
I’ve made now
a long rope
you tell me
wrapping it
around my neck
(“My Hair”)
Yet with Quake Poems and Loma Prieta (1989/1990: the word “prieta” means “black, dark”; the entire phrase means “dark hillock”) and even more with Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation (1992) the poet enters into an entirely new phase of his identity. The devastating Santa Cruz earthquake of 1989 is seen--rather amazingly--as an opportunity (“oportunidad”) for a transformation and a “healing” not only of the Santa Cruz community but of Alarcón himself. In a poem printed only in Spanish the lover is described as “víctima del / terremoto / del amor / y la pasión” (“victim of the / earthquake / of love / and of passion”). Instead of representing himself as the lonely, dark ego--the “ultimate Other”--Alarcón, in a moment of Whitmanic transformation, suddenly sees himself as absolutely everybody around him:
I lost my home
my china my store
I broke my arm
the back of my neck
I didn’t know
what to do
I ran I froze
i cried I laughed
I thought about
the children
I panicked I prayed
I was helpless....
(“First-Person Eulogy”)
“For once,” the poet comments, “this pronoun / I...included / each and every one.”
Personal transformation, an inclusive rather than an excluded I, an entry into a space which is at once historical and mythic, and an understanding of the poet as shaman are central facts of Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation, a remarkable book written in English while Alarcón was living in Mexico and published in the year of Christopher Columbus’s Quincentennial. In Mexico, Alarcón came upon a book written by another Alarcón--Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón (1587-1646). This Alarcón, who may have been Francisco’s ancestor, did terrible things to the Indians--who were also Francisco’s ancestors. But Hernando Ruiz also produced a book, Treatise on the Superstitions and Heathen Customs That Today Live Among the Indians Native to This New Spain (1629)--a book which preserved much of the very culture which the author and his conquistador companions were actively destroying. In a pantheistic moment--a moment in which he perceived the entire earth as alive--Francisco had earlier written, “Todo es un cuerpo inmenso” (“Everything Is an Immense Body”). For Hernando Ruiz, the Indians believe
that the clouds are angels and gods worthy of worship. They think the same of the winds because they believe these forces live everywhere, in the hills, mountains, valleys, and ravines. They believe the same of the rivers, lakes, and springs because they offer wax and incense to all the above.
Snake Poems represents Francisco X. Alarcón’s active entry into a mythic space which also offers the possibility of “healing.” At the center of the book is the magical Nahuatl phrase, “Nomatca Nehuatl”--roughly translated as “‘I myself,’ magical formula for personal empowerment found in most Nahuatl spells....” In a way, “Nomatca Nehuatl”is simply the Aztec equivalent to Shazam: a magical phrase which utterly transforms the speaker and brings him suddenly into a larger life--what Alarcón calls “this boundless / desire / of being”:
I myself
I, Quetzalcoatl
I, the Hand
indeed I, the Warrior
I, the Mocker
I respect nothing...
Come forth
spirits
from the sunset
from the sunrise
anywhere you dwell
as animals
as birds
from the four directions
I call you
to my grip...
come forth
knife
to be stained
with blood
come forth
cross my path
At this point Alarcón is no longer “víctima” of anything, whether earthquakes or love. He has arrived at a selfhood which has transcended the personal ego and which identifies itself with the active universe of Aztec belief:
I myself
the mountain
the ocean
the breeze
the flame
the thorn
the serpent
the feather
the Moon
the Sun
(“Nomatca Nehuatl”)
If, in “Mestizo,” he had written, “my feet / recognize / no border,” he can now assert not only the “borderless” but the “boundless.” “In order to understand history and be able to exorcize the past,” he writes in “Reclaiming Ourselves, Reclaiming America,”
We need to reenact all the misunderstandings, confrontations and contradictions, all the suffering and havoc brought about by the so-called “discovery” of this continent by Europeans...We need to bring back the deceased in order to continue living. We have to reclaim our suppressed tongues and spirits, our burned homes and fields, our slaughtered mothers and fathers, our enslaved sisters and brothers. By reclaiming ourselves, we will be reclaiming America.
It is precisely this “reclaiming” that Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation enacts. It is an attempt to redefine the Western tradition not by going to other traditions--to Buddhism, for example--but by finding positive but neglected elements within the tradition itself. (Alarcón points out that his “tonal”--his sign--in the Nahuatl tradition is the coatl, the serpent, a word which forms half of the name of the ancient god, Quetzalcoatl, “the feathered serpent.”) In “Reclaiming Ourselves, Reclaiming America” Alarcón asserts that 1492 marked the beginning of “the Conquest by Sword, Cross, and Grammar.” Snake Poems is one indication of the emergence of another sort of consciousness, “the liberating praxis of a new Mestizo/Mestiza...consciousness”: “a fluid ontology in which any notion of ‘self’ must include the ‘others’” and which avoids “neat demarcations like subject/object, human/nature, us/them, and other similar dichotomies common [to] Western thought and mythologies.”
In “Maternal Home,” Alarcón writes of his “canceled” childhood. Snake Poems opens him not only to the deep past of history but to his deep personal past, which, like the historical past, can be “reinterpreted.” Like the “buried” Aztec culture, the poet’s childhood suddenly comes alive: “let us arrive,” he writes,
as children
to this huge
playground--
the universe
This discovery of “the inner child” and of the possibility of canceling his “canceled”
childhood opens Alarcón into new areas of exploration. “We’ll only be free,” he writes in
Sonnets to Madness,
when we become
little boys and girls once again
who squirm with joy as we explore
the marvels, the wonders of the world
Alarcón’s wonderful children’s books arise out of this impulse--which has Christian as well as Indian resonances--to explore childhood. At about the same time, he also begins to write sonnets--a form which is quite different from the poetry he had earlier produced. These poems were collected in De amor oscuro / Of Dark Love (1991) and Sonnets to Madness and Other Misfortunes / Sonetos a la locura y otras penas (2001). Alarcón’s models here are Federico García Lorca (who wrote a book called Sonetos del amor oscuro) and Pablo Neruda. Neruda, says Alarcón, “liberated the sonnet in his book, Veinte Poemas de Amor y Una Canción Desesperada (Twenty Poems of Love and One Song of Despair) .” Alarcón’s sonnets are fourteen lines, unrhymed, and roughly hendecasyllabic; he refers to them as “versos libres.” The sonnets explore earlier issues in various ways; they are frequently--as sonnets often are--love poems, and at times they deliberately echo the language of earlier work. In the early “Raíces / Roots” the poet asserts,
I carry
my roots
with me
all the time
rolled up
I use them [me sirven]
as my pillow
The “Chicano Dedication” to Sonnets to Madness has
there are so many prisons, so many silences,
so many deaths forbidding my life--
my roots serve me [me sirven] also as pillow
Sonnet XVII of Sonnets to Madness brings together many of Alarcón’s themes:
we’ve stopped being monologues
black, moonless, starless nights,
books no one dared to write,
torn pockets, forgotten tombs
our waves overwhelm the jetties now,
raging rivers roar beneath our bridges
we’re summoned by the wind’s rebellion,
hurricanes surge from our chests
we’ve turned the road into a garden,
our scars grow inward
--like plants--and blossom words
tearing down prison walls we delve
into the forest like humming birds--
we drink the nectar from our mouths
(Sonnets to Madness, #XVII)
Earlier selves remain, and at times assert themselves, but the mastery of this recent work allows none of these selves to dominate the others. The concluding words of From the Other Side of Night are a kind of litany of earlier themes: cura, nos, uno, otro, la noche, even “wounds” (las heridas), a rich word which suggests personal and historical pain as well as those early tattoos which “puncture / flesh.” Each of these words/themes takes its place as part of an ongoing and constantly problematical music:
para curanos
uno a otro
--como la noche--
las heridas
to soothe
--like the night--
each other’s
wounds
Even “childhood” gets redefined here. It is no longer a specific time of one’s life but an active principle asserting a deep connection to the universe. Alarcón’s tender and imaginative abuela told him, “mijito / don’t cry,” but finally “went far away.” “Tlazolteotl” is the everlasting “Goddess of Love / Goddess of Death / Eater of Filth / Mother of All Seasons.” The poet prays to her,
Mother of the Rivers
cleanse your son
with waters flowing
from the Fountain of Youth
Mother of the Hummingbirds
dry off his last tears
kiss each aching bone
dress him in morning flowers
“We have to empower ourselves by bringing together what has been disjointed, by recognizing ourselves in others, by accepting and celebrating who we are,” Alarcón writes in “The Poet as The Other”: “Everyday we are witnesses of the annihilation everywhere of ancient and communal ways of life.” It is this process of self-empowerment and the achievement of communal modes that From the Other Side of Night documents in a rich and satisfying way. Indeed, the poet goes even further in his call for “a new eco-poetics grounded in a heritage thousands of years old that upholds that everything in the universe is sacred”:
For me, this new liberating Mestizo/Mestiza consciousness not only embraces “others” as equal and unique human beings but also calls for a new global awareness of the “oneness” of all living creatures and of nature as a whole. This vision of the “oneness” of all life is shared by many of the ancient Earth worshipping religions, the shamanistic spiritual traditions of Native peoples in the Americas, Siberia, and other parts of Asia. In the Western cultural tradition, “mystics” (saints, visionaries, poets, and other outcasts) have left moving testimonies of their own epiphanies and encounters with this “oneness” of all creation...Ultimately [the] poetic “self” dwells in the “collective” consciousness and/or sense of “oneness” with the surrounding ecosystems. When doing public readings of Snake Poems, I usually start by reciting a short invocation that comes from “Prayer to Fire” and burning of some sage and copal (tree resin). Since this ecopoetics is eclectic, I believe it should also appeal to all the senses...Then I ask everybody in the audience to join me in calling the four directions according to the Nahuatl tradition...[One] of the main purposes of this ecopoetics is to reconcile the internal split of many Mestizos (also felt by most people currently living on the planet) which is a direct result of the relentless world expansion of the West which involves conquering, colonizing, and exploiting indigenous peoples, their cultures and their lands.
(“Reclaiming Ourselves, Reclaiming America”)
If there is some sentimentality and even self-pity in Alarcón’s work, that is the case with most writers who attempt to reach an audience larger than that of the poetry coteries. (What is more sentimental and self-pitying than “popular song”?) “I knew I was different,” Alarcón writes in “The Poet as The Other”: “I had some intuitions about the personal and social consequences of this fact. Acting on this difference essentially meant transgression.” La locura / cura.
Jack Foley
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