Maria Mazziotti Gillan & Jennifer Gillan, Editors,
Unsettling America:
An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry

Jack Foley

Unsettling America is a powerful anthology full of good work. There are, by my count, one hundred and forty-four poets in the book, and the range of ethnicity is wide.

Here are some samples from the Contributors Notes: Gloria Anzaldúa "explores her Chicana tejana background"; Helen Barolini is "of Italian ancestry"; Carole Bernstein "is descended from Polish-Russian Jews"; Kimberly M. Blaeser is "of Ojibway and German ancestry; Joseph Bruchac "is a storyteller and writer of Abenaki, English, and Slovak ancestry"; Cheryl Clarke "is an African American lesbian poet"; Gregory Djanikian "was born of Armenian parentage"; Lisa Suhair Majaj "is a Palestinian American"; Janice Mirikitani is "a Sansei (third- generation Japanese American)"; Debi Kang Dean "is a third-generation American of Korean and Okinawan ancestry"; Hamod (Sam) "has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry.

A good anthology creates a sense of community among the people included, and Unsettling America accomplishes this goal with considerable skill. Here is "We Never Stopped Crossing Borders" by Luis J. Rodriguez:

We never stopped crossing borders. The Rio Grande (or Rio Bravo, which is what Mexicans call it, giving the name a power "Rio Grande" just doesn't have) was only the first of countless barriers set in our path.
We kept jumping hurdles, kept breaking from the constraints, kept evading the border guards of every new trek. It was a metaphor to fill our lives—that river, that first crossing, the mother of all crossings. The L.A. River, for example, became a new barrier, keeping the Mexicans in their neighborhoods over on the vast east side of the city Don't speak Spanish, don't be Mexican—you don't belong. Railroad tracks divided us from communities where white people lived, such as South Gate and Lynwood across from Watts. We were invisible people in a city which thrived on glitter, big screens and big names, but this glamor contained none of our names, none of our faces.
The refrain "this is not your country" echoed for a lifetime.

Crossing borders is precisely what Unsettling America is about. In her excellent Introduction, co-editor Jennifer Gillan describes a "position of in- betweenness," a situation in which writers "must struggle to articulate the complexities of their experiences while they confront legal, education, and cinematic systems that attempt to define their experience."

"We chose poems," Gillan says, "that directly address the instability of American identity and confront the prevalence of cultural conflict and exchange within the United States...we hope to highlight the constant erecting, blurring, breaking, clarifying, and crossing of boundaries that are a consequence of the complex intersections among peoples, cultures, and languages within national borders, which themselves are revised constantly."

Her eloquent words interestingly recall those of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America appeared in the original French and English translation between 1835 and 1840. In America, writes de Tocqueville, "Continual changes are...every instant occurring under the observation of every man"; there is "universal tumult," an "incessant conflict of jarring interests"; "everyone is in motion." As these quotations suggest, "the instability of American identity"—its "unsettling"—is an old story, but it is one which is continually hidden under the rhetoric of stability and constancy, a rhetoric which has furnished many a politician with comforting platitudes.

Unsettling America is divided into four sections, "Uprooting," "Performing," "Negotiating," and "Re-envisioning":

[T]he cultural dislocation of both immigration and relocation [is present in] Uprooting; the representation and performance of American identity in Performing; the articulation of one's experience, as well as the labeling of those experiences by others, in Naming; the uncomfortable position of in- betweenness as both American and Other in Negotiating; and the rethinking and re-imagining of American identity in Re-envisioning.

In keeping with the editors' vision, poems are constantly echoing one another, reflecting back and forth, as themes criss-cross and take on new shapes throughout the book. The concluding words—which are properly celebratory—are by co-editor Maria Mazziotti Gillan and are from her excellent poem, "Growing Up Italian":

                   I celebrate
        my Italian American self,
rooted in this, my country, where
all those black/brown/red/yellow
olive-skinned people
soon will raise their voices
and sing this new anthem:

Here I am
        and I'm strong
        and my skin is warm in the sun
        and my dark hair shines,

and today, I take back my name
and wave it in their faces
like a bright, red flag.   

                   and the heavens opened, birds sang,
and the trees and the ladies spoke
with wondrous voice. The power of the glory
of poetry—was at last mine.