Imaniman: Sparked From the Communal Soul

Olga García Echeverría

This past December, three decades after the original publishing of the iconic Borderlands / La Frontera, Aunt Lute Books paid homage to Gloria Anzaldúa's legacy with the publication of Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands.

In this 205 page anthology, Aunt Lute Books notes that “award-winning poet ire'ne lara silva and Dan Vera have assembled the work of 54 writers who reflect on the complex terrain—the deeply felt psychic, social, and geopolitical borderlands—that Anzaldúa inhabited, theorized, explored, and invented.”

So, what do you get when 54 writers gather on the page to celebrate in verse and prose the visionary work of Gloria Anzaldúa? Imaniman, which means "their soul" in Nahualt, gives us "work that is sparked from the soul: the individual soul, the communal soul. These poets interrogate, complicate, and personalize the borderlands in transgressive and transformative ways, opening new paths and revisioning old ones for the next generation of spiritual, political, and cultural border crossers" (quoted from Aunt Lute Books).

US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera opens up Imaniman with an introduction that sings, “Anzaldúa lives on...”

She definitely does, not only in the poems, essays, and books she left behind, but also in the countless writers/artists who continue to be nourished and inspired by Anzaldúa's creative musings. Herrera writes about the anthology's voices and what they invoke: “I am moved by these inner and outer voyages...This collection is a signpost on the continuous journey of initial investigations into a borderless Cultura & new power-source, an inner one, in particular one drawn from the deep vision-work of Anzaldúa.”

Chicana Lesbian Visionary Emerging from The Sea
La Gloria Lives On! 

Back in 2015, when Imaniman existed only as visionary seedling, I interviewed editors ire'ne lara silva and Dan Vera about the inspiration behind the project and the type of submissions they were seeking. It was clear from that interview that they were not interested in academic articles or didactic discussions of Anzaldúa's texts. They sought instead works that were "accessible" and layered with "nuances of poetry." ire'ne lara silva stated, "We want the leaps of intuition and the wisdom garnered from the pursuit of art.” In other words, they wanted soul, literary pieces that danced and conversed and broke bread with Anzaldúa in communal and creative ways.

Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands has now been manifested and released. The pieces in the collection delve into the body, language/la lengua, hybridity, color/race, ancestral inheritance, the ever-bleeding and blooming borderlands, crossing-over manifestos, cultura as medicine, fluidity, sexuality, resistance, resilience, regeneración, and transformation. Despite it's non-academic approach, or perhaps precisely because of it, this is a great teaching source for Chicanx Latinx Studies, Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, and English departments (if they can in their own and desperately needed ways be transformative and shed Eurocentric skins and reading lists). Imaniman can be purchased at Aunt Lute Books and on Amazon.

In the last couple of days, I caught up with the editors again and asked them about their post-publication thoughts.

Dan Vera

“I've been delighted at the response to the anthology, not only form contributors but also the way in which people have gravitated to this contemporary voices engaging with Anzaldúa's legacy of transformative work. We had no way of realizing that just a few short months after its release the ever increasing climate of hate would cast the anthology in such a vital light. It feels in many ways that the anthology allows us to reconnect to this ancestral river of wisdom right when we all need to dig deep for the continuing struggles ahead. I hope Imaniman results in other such projects where contemporary writers can engage with the antepasados who guide us by word and example.”

ire'ne lara silva 

“In these times, Imaniman feels like a gift we made to ourselves without knowing how much we'd need it. A place where we could unabashedly speak our truth as border-dwellers, where we could speak to our realities without constraint, where we could fearlessly be all of what we are with our identities, our histories, our languages, our art, and our souls.”







Currently, readings from the anthology are being scheduled in various cities across the country. A book release reading was held in Austin on February 18th and featured contributors Carmen Calatayud, jo reyes-boitel, Jennine DOC Wright, John Fry, Victor Payan, and ire'ne lara silva.

Plans are also underway for releases in the Rio Grande Valley (TX), San Antonio (TX), and San Francisco (CA) in the next few months. Other cities with possible future readings include: Washington (Northwest), Pueblo (CO), Brooklyn (NY), and Chicago (IL).

There is, of course, also a Los Angeles reading just around the corner.

Los Angeles Imaniman Reading
Friday, March 10, 2017
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Other Books / Otros Libros
2006 East Cesar Chavez Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90033 

FB event link: https://www.facebook.com/events/771376459684809/

Featured Readers/Performers:

 Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016), a 2016-2017 Steinbeck Fellow, former Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grantee. She’s received residencies from Hedgebrook and Ragdale Foundation and is a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop. Her work is published in Acentos Review, CALYX, crazyhorse, and The James Franco Review among others. A short dramatization of her poem "Our Lady of the Water Gallons," directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com. She is a cofounder of Women Who Submit and the curator of HITCHED.

Iris De Anda is a Guanaca Tapatia who hosts The Writers Underground Open Mic at the Eastside Cafe every third Thursday of the month. Author of CODESWITCH: Fires From Mi Corazón. Radio host of 100 Segundos de Soledad on La Banda Elastica Radio. She forms part of the postpunk group bexox, as well as all female rock band The Bloody Gypsys. www.irisdeanda.com

Minal Hajratwala

(www.minalhajratwala.com) is a writing coach who believes you can Write Like a Unicorn. Her books include Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (winner of four nonfiction awards), Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment (poetry), and Out! Stories from the New Queer India (anthology). She is a co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective and a former Fulbright Senior Scholar.

Monica Palacios is the creator of solo shows, plays, screenplays, short stories, stand-up comedy, poems, essays, blogs featuring the Latinx LGBTQ experience. National and international scholars have critically engaged her work in academic journals, books, dissertations and conference panels. A highly anthologized writer with three new publications: Jota Anthology by Korima Press 2017; Practicing Transgressions by Third Woman Press 2017; and IMANIMAN: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands, Aunt Lute Press 2016. Monica has received numerous awards for her positive contributions to the Latinx LGBTQ population, most recently the Latinas in Pride Award 2016 from the City of Los Angeles. Palacios was honored by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for 3 decades of groundbreaking Chicana lesbian performance. Monica has taught at California State University Long Beach, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC Riverside, Loyola Marymount University, Claremont College, Pomona College, California State University Los Angeles and American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Currently her play Say Their Names is traveling throughout the U.S. and the United Kingdom with After Orlando, an international theatre action in response to the Pulse Nightclub shooting. She is touring with her solo shows, San Francisco Mi Amor!, Queer Latina Love & Revolution, and is developing her new play, I Kissed Chavela Vargas. www.monicapalacios.com

T Sarmina was raised in the Central Valley. A queer, xicanx child of migrant field workers, T writes with these identities intersecting at the page. They are a VONA SoCal alumna and earned their bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Mills College in Oakland. Their work appears in Coiled Serpent (Tia Chucha), ITWOW (Yellow Chair Press) and IMANIMAN (Aunt Lute). They currently live in Los Angeles and work at 826LA as the Writers’ Room Coordinator.

Victor Payan: http://www.victorpayan.com/

Olga García Echeverría is the author of Falling Angels: Cuentos y Poemas. Her work has been published in Lavandería: A Mixed Load of Women, Wash, and Words, U.S. Latino Literature Today, Telling Tongues: A Latin@ Anthology on Language, The Sun Magazine, Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzalduan Borderlands and is forthcoming in Jota by Kórima Press. She lives, writes, teaches, and shape shifts in Los Angeles.

This is event is FREE and open to the public. 

Anthology copies for sale at the event.

There will be free refreshments. 

Hope to see you there!

IMANIMAN Anthology: A Call to Poets to Reflect on Gloria Anzaldúa and Transformative/Transgressive Borders

Olga García Echeverría

 

I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot.

But I exist, we exist.

--Anzaldua

 

Sometimes when going through classifieds in literary journals, the process feels sadly like looking for a job. Can I get a witness? How many writers of color out there are guilty, like me, of weeding through the classifieds section of Poets Writers, for instance, and looking for the few ads that directly ask for work by writers of color? Or searching for those few Latina/o judges or readers who may (maybe) welcome more than a few token Spanish words in our texts?

Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes

without having always to translate...my tongue will be illegitimate.

--Anzaldua

These searches for pieces (reflections) of ourselves in the literary world are acts of desperation, qué no? Our desire to be visible in a world that largely renders our voices and stories invisible.
 

There are so many calls for literary work, most with a reading or submission fee. It's not in any writer's interest to send out work without first doing a little research to see if the journal or literary project is a good fit. This is not new advice for writers in general. We've heard the sob stories; it's hard being a writer. We've heard the warnings; expect rejection. We've heard the requirements; writers need to have tough skin. We also know that if we want to send out our work consistently, it's going to cost money, and this can get expensive, especially for poets/writers who don't have a lot of feria to begin with.

Yet, despite the challenges all writers face, we know there are other factors at play in the literary world. Race. Gender. Sexuality. Language. Because the publishing world continues to predominately nurture and promote White (mostly male) voices, it leaves the rest of us at a disadvantage.

When I do come across those few calls for literary work that speak to multiple parts of me, I get excited, like finding that one job ad that finally speaks to me. It makes me want to shout, "Yes! Gracias! Where do I apply?"

That's pretty much how I felt when I saw the call for IMANIMAN, an anthology that asks poets to reflect on the transformative and transgressive borders via Gloria Anzaldua's work. Thanks to ire'ne lara silva and Dan Vera, who are spearheading and editing this upcoming anthology, bilingual queer poets of color and poets of consciousness who have something to say about borders in relation to Anzaldua's work have an exciting opportunity—we can submit as the hybrid beings that we are. We can braid our languages and our genres. We can tango or dance a literary cumbia or two with La Gloria.

 

We are fortunate to have ire'ne and Dan with us today at La Bloga to share a little about this exciting anthology project. Before proceeding to our short interview, here is some important information related to IMANIMAN.

 

THERE IS NO SUBMISSION/READING FEE

 

We invite poets to submit either:
prose/poetry hybrids of 500--2000 words OR
poetry of up to 1000 words.

DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 1, 2016

IMANIMAN: Nahuatl for ‘their soul’

We are looking for work that is sparked from the soul, the individual soul, the communal soul. We will absolutely not accept academic writing. Our hope is that contributing poets will take the　opportunity to leap to unexpected places and speak to the kinds of syntheses that academic work　would need an entire book to explain and justify. This is the first anthology of poets writing on and about Gloria Anzaldúa's work. We invite you to be part of this celebratory exploration.

We are looking for work that directly addresses and/or is in conversation with Gloria Anzaldúa’s　work, life or conceptual ideas. The theme of this anthology is not "Why I love Gloria Anzaldúa..." or "This is how Gloria Anzaldúa changed my life..." but rather an opportunity for poets to reflect on the multiple ideas of borders/fronteras that Anzaldúa's work unleashed, and an opportunity to interrogate / complicate / personalize these concepts. Transgressive and　transformative borders can be of any kind—metaphysical, artistic, gender, identity, physical, ecological, sexual, sociocultural, geopolitical, etc.

You can read the entire call for submissions on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/anzaldua/

 

You can also read the call and submit via Submittable at Split This Rock: https://splitthisrock.submittable.com/submit/bcef37d9-c401-41c4-a7cc-87b48a268d3e



Foto of Anzaldua to Welcome ire'ne and Dan

Bienvenidos ire'ne and Dan. It's wonderful to hear about your project IMANIMAN. Can you please share what inspired this upcoming anthology?

ire'ne lara silva: A few years ago, I read a short lyrical essay by Emmy Perez that stayed with me, "Healing and the Poetic Line." that was published in the anthology, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line. And then in 2014, my last year as a CantoMundo fellow, Rosebud Ben-Oni invited me to be part of a presentation with her on the subject of the ocean. I wrote a short piece for it inspired by Perez’ form but was left wanting to flesh it out some more, particularly in reference to changing concepts of what the borderlands meant. I submitted a proposal to the 2015 El Mundo Zurdo Conference, organized by The Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldua, that would feature five poets presenting lyrical essays with their take on the borderlands as ‘la herida abierta’ as Anzaldua famously described it. Laurie Ann Guerrero, Dan Vera, Tim Z. Hernandez, Emmy Perez, and I read our essays at the conference, hosted at UT-Austin this past May. Powerful work. Such wide-ranging topics, so much emotion, and such passionate observations. While I was still reeling from the session, Joan Pinkvoss, editor and co-founder of Aunt Lute Books (and publisher of my short story collection), approached me about the possibility of an anthology expanding on the session’s theme. I didn’t have to think twice—I said yes! right away. Dan agreed to be my co-editor shortly thereafter and here we are…

Dan, how do you feel about being part of this project?

What's really energized me about this project, aside from it jibing with a commitment to honor a scholar thinker activist whose work saved my life, is that we find ourselves at a historical moment when we most need her wisdom and clearthought. I've recently been immersed in Anzaldua's magnum opus Light in the Dark/Luz en el Oscuro, which finally came out this year, and I'm struck at how prescient and necessary her writing is, how she speaks to our challenges of forging new identities and connections among our communities.

Yes, I love her quote that states that to survive the Borderlands, we "must live sin fronteras, be a crossroads." Is this part of the purpose of the anthology? To bridge a gap of some kind?

 

Dan: Our anthology is an attempt to not only honor [Anzaldua's] visionary guide to nepantla but also a way of introducing her work to a new generation. When she writes about the need to transcend older mestizajes for newer, more honest identities, I find myself wishing her wisdom was at the heart of all of our current conversations about the present and the future. And for Anzaldua, her poetry was the beginning of her exploratory work. You see it in her writing and this call that welcomes hybridity is just an honoring of her own praxis as a scholar healer.

 

I am excited about this enthusiastic call for hybridity in your project. It feels like a celebration of the hybridity we embody as Mestizas/os. Part of the guidelines also specify "no academic essays." Personally, I felt a rush of excitement when I read this because to me this translates into freedom, but I am thinking that some may argue that Anzaldua was herself an academic and that this is a bit of a contradiction.

 

ire'ne: Anzaldua may have been an academic, but Borderlands, her most widely known work, owes much of its popularity to its accessibility to the lay person. At the same time, its rich, multi-layered poetic language lends it to repeated readings and interpretations. That’s part of what we both want for this collection—not just the accessibility but the layered nuances of poetry—we want the leaps of intuition and the wisdom garnered from the pursuit of art.

 

Well, it's refreshing to see the call encourage those layered nuances of poetry and intuition. Usually, it's the academic voice that gets privileged over the poetic. But the opposite is true here.

 

ire'ne: Speaking for myself, I am a community poet/writer. I work a bread and butter job, sometimes two, and freelance as an editor and consultant to make ends meet. Without a degree or an MFA or the ability to spend my time at residencies, I’ve still managed to devote my time and energy to writing for the last 17 years. I don’t think my lack of academic affiliation makes my contributions any less worthy. Writers come to their own voices and sensibilities and stories by many different paths. That’s what I’m interested in hearing—the insights borne from living, from being, from loving, from struggling, from the body, from the heart, from the soul itself.

 

You make it clear in the guidelines that you are not seeking work that focuses on the topic “Why I love Gloria Anzaldúa” or “This is how Gloria Anzaldúa changed my life.” Instead you are seeking work that engages “the multiple ideas of borders/fronteras that Anzaldúa's work unleashed, and an opportunity to interrogate / complicate / personalize these concepts.” Help me clarify this for writers out there who, like me, want to submit but still may have questions about what to send. Here is a list of possible submissions to give our readers concrete examples of what is submittable. Please say, "Si" or "No" to each of the possible submissions. Awkward silences will be interpreted as, "No, please re-read the guidelines."

Could a submission be a personal letter to Anzaldua about the current state of a particular border (physical, spiritual, linguistic, cross-cultural, sexual)?

 

ire'ne and Dan: Yes!

Could it involve a personal exploration of the tongue as frontera in a bilingual home?

ire'ne and Dan: Yes!

 

Could it be an essay that explains why I love Gloria?

 

ire'ne and Dan: Silence. [Please re-read the guidelines].

Could it be a poem or an essay that is spun from one of Anzaldua's passages?

ire'ne and Dan: Yes!

Could it be a poem that does not in anyway mention Anzaldua, but that clearly touches on one of her many border concepts in both format and theme?

ire'ne and Dan: Yes!

Can I write an essay or poem about how Anzaldua changed my life?

ire'ne and Dan: Silence. [Please re-read the guidelines].

The first time I ever fell in love with a woman was in college. I was 18 and also falling in love with literature at the time. Anzaldua's work was instrumental in my evolving “new consciousness” as a bisexual mujer, as someone living in an “inbetween” sexual realm that often sparked suspicion and critique from people in both straight and queer circles. Can I write about this for your anthology?

ire'ne and Dan: Sí!

Can I submit an essay/poem about the border between the living and the dead?
 

ire'ne and Dan: Yes!

It is not stated in the call for submissions, but my assumption is that the braiding of languages is permissible and that not everything has to be translated?  

  
ire'ne and Dan: Yes!

Well, folks. There you have it--some concrete examples of what to send and what not to send. Gracias ire'ne and Dan for your time, insight, and for this wonderful project.

Here are the links once more for IMANIMAN

https://www.facebook.com/groups/anzaldua/

https://splitthisrock.submittable.com/submit/bcef37d9-c401-41c4-a7cc-87b48a268d3e

 

 

ire’ne lara silva lives in Austin, TX, and is the author of furia (poetry, Mouthfeel Press, 2010) which received an Honorable Mention for the 2011 International Latino Book Award and flesh to bone (short stories, Aunt Lute Books, 2013) which won the 2013 Premio Aztlan, placed 2nd for the 2014 NACCS Tejas Foco Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for Foreward Review’s Book of the Year Award in Multicultural Fiction. Saddle Road Press will be publishing her second collection of poetry, Blood Sugar Canto, in January 2016. ire’ne is the recipient of the 2014 Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award, and the 2008 recipient of the Gloria Anzaldua Milagro Award, as well as a Macondo Workshop member and CantoMundo Inaugural Fellow. She and Moises S. L. Lara are currently co-coordinators for the Flor De Nopal Literary Festival.

 

 

 

 

Dan Vera is a writer, editor, and literary historian living in Washington, DC. He's the author of two poetry collections including Speaking Wiri Wiri, the inaugural winner of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in various journals, including Poet Lore, Notre Dame Review, Cutthroat, and Delaware Poetry Review, in addition to various anthologies, college and university curricula. He's the poetry editor for Origins Journal, co-curates the literary history site DC Writers’ Homes, and chairs the board of Split This Rock Poetry. LatinoStories.com named him a 2014 Top Ten "New" Latino Author to Watch (and Read) calling him "a talented, sophisticated poet who is a master at playing with words." For more visit