Review: Dagoberto Gilb. A Passing West Essays From the Borderlands. Albuquerque, UNewMexico Press, 2024. Isbn 9780826366825
In his author’s Preface to a passing west Essays. From the Borderlands (link), Dagoberto Gilb identifies differences between short fiction like his 2024 New Testaments (link) , and the twenty-five essays at hand.
For one, fiction needs to be about itself, not the writer, and
Nonfiction, these essays are another version of my want to write prose with the constraint and discipline of poetry. To capture, to have been alert to images over ideas. That haunt and linger, slow down, alter perspective. Not to plot and advance political points, but to reach the art source of the brain, not the momentary rhetorical, political blah. The method: Small scenes over catchy endings, tight sentences and graphs over lots of pages.
Short fiction and essay share in common neither sells big numbers nor attracts major east coast publishers. I join Gilb in thanking University of New Mexico Press for publishing this arresting collection, a potpourri of Tom Miller-quality travel writing, food journalism in the vein of Paloma Martinez-Cruz (link) , parenting insights, and academic exploration. Unlike Gilb's fiction, the writer is the focus of each essay, making a passing west a personal memoir as it collects cogent observations on places the author’s seen.
There’s self-deprecating humor in the persona of “The Hexagon of the Conquest”,the masterwork gem of the collection. The writer's a rustic construction worker and cultural tourist, come to Sevilla to view the Archivo de Indias (link), Spain’s library of documents derived from the European conquest of America. He’s awed by the majesty of a research library, thinking it somewhat like the library of Alexandria would have been, had he been there back when.
He comes to Sevilla con papeles—bona fides that get him into the stacks to see for himself. He gets to lay lay eyes upon original documents. It’s a wondrous image to consider, the knowledge-hungry writer reading words from the first occupiers of Mexico.
I don't wait long for my request to ascend on the Gray cart. When the package is passed to me, I feel magic and mystery. I give a pause of deep respect as its weight is hefted to my time bound hands and I carry it to the table. A legajo is secured by one long, white cotton ribbon -- everyone must learn to rap and tie a legajo Just right, be professional. The design of its cover is classic highbrow European: the lettering, and old typeface in caps, archivo general de indias, Sevilla, and artwork A linocut etching of, in the foreground, soft naked boys dumping their bounty of fruit and bread from baskets, behind them a king probably, with two archbishops or Cardinals on either side of him. The box unfolds on all four sides, revealing the document inside, which also has a tie.
The magic disappears when the writer discovers paleography, an essential skill for archive researchers: His untrained, layman's, eye can’t read a thing!
When I look at any of the pages, I am looking at an artistic rendering of letters and words and sentences -- the margins, for example, all around are filled in by swirls that look like Infinity marks with yet an extra dimensional loop of emphasis, or swirls that are tight, dark tornadoes or loose, weak springs, or worms, or curls, or curlicues--every garnish and flare that is possible. The first letter in a sentence is not just a cap, it's dressed in the finest feathers and hat and shoes and gloves. If it's the first letter of a paragraph? The letter swoops off the sides of the page and swings up and over into empty space. You can only admire what happens within a text to an e or f or m or p or z just to name a popular few.
The Hexagon essay expresses the motivation of researchers and writers of place and identity when the author steps back from his unpleasantly unexpected confrontation with paleography to reason he hasn’t actually lost anything in his illiteracy:
Inches near an actual document, I am still so far away. From then. From time. From seeing clearly the colors and lines that might make sharper images in my mind. And if I could read any word, most, every word even, how much closer would I be then? How much less a dream, how much still like a “memory” that is as accurate as a two-year-old's, even a precocious one’s? How near must I get to be fulfilled? With what kind of eyes or seeing glass? What quantity of books, or detail from one in a library, in an archive, you're finally getting me there, wherever it is I want to go, whatever it is I want to learn?
Hence, keep walking, keep writing, keep eating.
Taco bell, Isla Vista Mexican food, “alfalfa sprouts in a burrito? ¡N’hombre, qué pinche desmadre!”
Fatherhood offers the writer succor and pride. He writes of his dysfunctional relationship with his own father and the second wife, while recalling a cross-country trip with a son headed South for his first job, a trip of warmth and love, a sentimental journey to places of the writer’s youth. Father and Son share a moment in their present that mirrors a moment in the writer’s youth with his own father, intimate and pedestrian at once. They stand near the lanyard to pull the whistle in a factory. It’s Son’s first visit to a factory, the place writer’s father worked when he pulled the whistle.
Although publication of a passing west essays, and Gilb’s companion collection of fiction new testaments, happened a year ago, I only recently got my copies via mailorder from Santa Ana’s and Orange County’s only Chicana Chicano Literature bookstore, Libromobile, it’s just in time for gift-giving season. Now’s the time to order your copies of these, for your own enjoyment and for the immense pleasure of sharing books that ought to be read and don’t often get that way.
Link to a passing west (University of New Mexico Press): https://www.unmpress.com/9780826366825/a-passing-west/
Link to New Testaments (City Lights Books): https://citylights.com/city-lights-published/new-testaments-stories/
Link to Libromobile: https://www.libromobile.com/
1 comment:
An important literary work that needs to be in the public consciousness. Your quoted excerpts masterfully illustrate Gilb's poetic prowess in "reaching the art source of the brain" in his essays, not always an easy task.
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