Chicanonautica: Quantum Santeria, Assimilated Cubans, and Other Latinx Manifestations

by Ernest Hogan

Since I write and have published quite a few short stories, I'm often asked to review story collections. This can be a problem.

Sometimes the stories are so diverse they send my mind soaring. They're a pleasure to read, but then I realize that I have to write it all up in concise way to give the reader and idea of what it's all about. Usually, saying something about each story would take too much space, and get tedious, giving those who read the review the wrong idea.

The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria by Carlos Hernandez is one of those books.

So I have to get clever. Look out, mi gente . . .

Carlos Hernandez not only writes the full range of SFF (that's Science Fiction and Fantasy, just in case you aren't up on all the latest abbreviations). We get stories that would satisfy the old school Hard Science crowd, does top-notch Latinx fantasy that blends into what some would call magic realism. And sometimes he does it all at once, as in the title story.

He gives us a large swath of the Latinoid Galaxy.

Ishmael Reed has often said of the Black Experience, “It's not a ghetto—it's a galaxy.” The same goes for Latinx (or whatever suffix we finally end up putting on it) Experience. The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria illustrates this. It's diverse without even trying.

The collection kept surprising me. There's a lot impressive speculating on up-to-date science, ghosts, Latin culture that is different from mine (Cubano and Chicano are very different things), but at the same time, familiar. And we get Latinx characters that are often educated professionals, the type of folk we usually read about in sci-fi . . . funny how in 2019 that's still something new.

The stories take place all over. And the Border comes up. Dare I evoke my vision of an Intergalactic Barrio? 

And the imagination fueled by Latinx culture and experience! 

There's this story, “The International Studbook of the Giant Panda” about virtual panda sex. Get your minds out of the gutter, pervs! It's done to save the species, a noble cause. It's still one of the strangest stories I've read in a while,and is stick in my memory. I'll have to bring it up when people say some of my stories to too far in that direction.

And it's just one of the stories.

Hey, Carlos, you got any more?

Ernest Hogan is writing, and trying not to be distracted by springtime in Aztlán.

New Book: Letters from Heaven / Cartas del cielo

Celeste is heartbroken when her grandmother dies. But everything changes when a letter mysteriously comes in the mail—from Grandma! As letters continue to arrive from the beyond, each with a recipe of a favorite food her grandmother used to prepare, Celeste consoles herself by learning how to cook the dishes.

Meanwhile, without Grandma’s Social Security check Mami needs to get a second job to make ends meet. Celeste has to quit dance lessons, and a bully at school gloats that she will replace Celeste as the star in the upcoming recital. To top things off, her friends think that she has gone crazy . . . dead people can’t send letters!

Soon Celeste realizes that all the recipes combined make an entire meal: café con leche, guava and cheese croissants, congrí, plantain chips, ropa vieja and flan. Can she really make a Cuban feast to celebrate her cherished grandmother’s life?

Published in bilingual "flip" format by Arte Público Press, this middle-grade novel celebrates the cultural traditions of the Spanish Caribbean while tackling challenging subjects, such as trouble with friends and the death of a grandparent. The book includes six traditional Cuban recipes with easy-to-follow instructions.

 “A tender depiction of a child’s acceptance of the death of a beloved grandmother and the cultural importance of traditional foods.”

—Kirkus Reviews

 “This delightful novel is a Like Water for Chocolate for young readers. Celeste rises out of her grief by replacing her sadness with el sabor of life, by living as her grandmother did, with love and flavor."

— Judith Ortiz Cofer, author of Call Me María

 “Add one girl who misses her abuelita to a handful of coveted Cuban recipes, stir in a pinch of magic and you get a heartening tale of love, loss and the healing power of family and friendship.” 

—Laura Lacámara, author of Dalia’s Wondrous Hair / El cabello maravilloso de Dalia

 “A poignant and uplifting story about the special bond only a grandmother and a granddaughter can share. Delicious and magical!” 

—Reyna Grande, author of The Distance Between Us

Letters from Heaven / Cartas del cielo

by Lydia Gil

ISBN-13: 978-1-55885-798-8 
For children ages 8-12 

Available now from Piñata Books, Arte Público Press

Review: Fidel's Last Days. Lydia redux. CSULA Meso American Conference Reminder.

Michael Sedano

Roland Merullo. Fidel's Last Days. NY: Random House, 2009.
ISBN: 978-1-4159-6120-9 (1-4159-6120-4)

Imagine Fidel Castro lying on his death bed, holding onto life’s last breath with a stubbornness that infuriates those enemies who fervently wish Castro dead at the hands of an assassin, not the respite of natural causes. “Oye, pendejo,” Fidel might think--were he a bit of a Chicano--“if you want me killed, write a pinche novel, ‘cause it ain’t happening any other way.” Which is what Roland Merullo has done. Write a novel, Fidel’s Last Days.

Fidel’s Last Days plays intrigue against intrigue. A Miami-based Cubano organization, fabulously wealthy and clandestinely professional, will infiltrate an agent, Carolina, onto the island. She will deliver a weapon to kill Fidel. There’s a traitor in The Orchid, but he’s known to its top men. Cynically feeding misinformation and partial information back to Cuba's security directorate puts Carolina and other agents at risk, sacrificial lambs to the cold-blooded goals of “Project Havana”. The top henchasshole is Carolina’s beloved tio, but ni modo on that. His plan heaps danger upon risk, depending on precise timing and movement, something’s bound to go wrong. Poor Carolina. There’s her desperate escape, but into Olochon’s cruel hands, just as Carlos himself falls into the delighted Olochon’s grasp.

Merullo’s writing ethos speaks with the most virulently anti-Castro, anti-Cuba voice you will read, whether from non-Cubano writers or Cubana Cubano novelists. For the former, Martin Cruz Smith, Havana Bay, or Daniel Chavarria, Tango For a Torturer and Adios Muchachos, Cuba provides local color, the background that frames everyday struggles to eat, get laid, pull off a crime. Cuba-origin writers like Achy Obejas, Ruins, Roberto Arellano, Havana Lunar, Leonardo Padura, Havana Gold and Adios Hemingway, Jose LaTour, Comrades in Miami, sharpen their axes with varying degrees of edginess sans obsession. In these, Fidel’s rotten presence looms at the edge of teenage prostitution, slow starvation, shortages of everything except unrelenting woeful suffering. Except for Jesus Diaz, The Initials of the Earth, with its sympathetic meeting with Fidel in a sugar mill. Across most novels, Cuba’s good and noble gente endure their suffering or find a way to get out, even if floating off for Florida in an inner tube, shark bait.

Not that shortages, economic folly, latent racism, repression, and political opportunism are not facts of Cuban society. Such flaws are inescapable caca heaped on the island, thanks to the US blockade. But some novelists use these conditions as material to grow a plot; for Merullo, these are the plot. For example, Achy Obejas’ character makes pragmatic advantage of regularly collapsing apartment houses; finding value in ruin, he scavenges valuable salvage and converts it to dollars. Merullo’s character sees these as part of a litany of metaphors that describe the rotten heart of Carlos' homeland, thus justification for an elaborate assassination plot and coup d’etat. When life gives you lemons, kill Fidel.

Not that Merullo hides his bloodlust motive in crafting a generally successful, suspenseful plot. And, perhaps, Merullo is not a blind hater, but merely a literary opportunist, an outsider much like Martin Cruz Smith, informed by locals with their own axes a-grinding. I’d love to learn who steered Merullo in the direction he leads the reader. Jose LaTour advised Smith, creating a beautiful novel with a flavor of authenticity, then wrote a parallel novel.

As in Havana Lunar, Fidel’s Last Days occur against a background of Cuban medicine. This isn’t the healing science of a recent rabble-rousing film but the medicine of shortage. Havana Lunar features a medical clinic lacking even aspirin to treat sick children, owing to the clinic’s location in a politically unreliable neighborhood where folks don’t rat out each other’s political shortcomings. Merullo is not as hard on his poor barrio clinics, such as Elena’s: “Although the shelves were not stocked with more than a week’s supply of the essentials—zylocaine, penicillin, aspirin, hydrogen peroxide—the nurses called on the patients in fair order, and, it seemed to Carlos, treated them capably, efficiently.”

Carlos happens to be Cuba’s Minister of Health, Castro’s personal physician, and a crony of all the good old boys. Carlos had been with el Comandante from near the beginning. But Carlos is not immune from political suspicion. Castro’s longer-tenured comrade, the quintessentially evil Olochon, heads D-7, internal security. Olochon relishes his job and his nickname, The Dentist, earned from his technique of pulling teeth with a “plumber’s wrench.” Ferreting out traitors to the state occupies Olochon’s days and nights, except when he’s got some traitor hanging in a cell waiting, wishing, for a coup de grace. At one point, Carlos expresses his belief to Fidel that Olochon goes too far sometimes. Fidel thinks Olochon is doing a fine job.

Olochon’s suspicious mien reflects, if not causes, the disheartening mistrust and political snitching that characterizes personal relationships witnessed in other novels, too. Carlos and Elena matter deeply to one another, yet Carlos fears letting her in on his role in the plot. “To protect her, he told himself. To protect her, and others. But, in fact, he was not truly sure of Elena’s political leanings. At times, quietly, she voiced criticisms—never of Fidel personally, but of the way things were done. And then, other times, he’d see her watching a television program that was pure propaganda, and there would be tears in her eyes for the great experiment that was Cuba.” For her part, Elena recognizes if Carlos is taken, Olochon will come for Elena and her family simply owing to her Carlos conecta. The limits of Cuban love begin at the ligature around one's throat.

Merullo wants readers to recognize a difference between Carlos’ contemporaries and everyday, less jaded Cubanos, like Elena. Olochon provides a focal point: “his anger had been like an ugly brother to Fidel’s, his ego like a twisted reflection of a twisted reflection. … there were those who claimed Batista had fled the country, not because of Castro or the sentiments of the Cuban people, but because of the boy who enjoyed killing. Olochon….the name was a sharp hot spike through the groin

Carlos’ view of Elena and her adult son, illustrates the depth of Olochon’s type of suspicion and the vast gap between lost potential and present decay. “Julio and his mother were real revolutionaries, real communists. They were, Carlos thought, what he had been at the beginning.” Earlier in the novel, a similar feeling intrudes on the hate fest for all things Castro, and for oneself. “The Revolution had been built on a concern for the pain of others. In the beginning the revolutionaries had killed, of course—without that killing they would still be slaves—but always in the name of a glorious future. Now, however, it seemed to him more and more that they killed in the name of a mediocre present, a status quo that kept so many Cubans wanting food, while a few, like him and Olochon, lived well. They had become the men they had once cursed.”

This conflict of past and present sets off a logic grown from Merullo’s depiction of Castro as an out of touch blowhard. Castro sits in the cabinet meeting and drones on and on, but only after each of the cabinet ministers have droned their glowing reports of fabricated progress, each minister quietly admiring the lying ability of a compañero. Does Fidel have to go, or should the assassin aim at Olochon’s evil? Ridding Cuba of el Comandante will destabilize the island, but killing Olochon will remove an evil blot on the island’s health. Fidel will die some day, but what if the director of D-7 ascends the throne?

It must have been a pleasure for Merullo to write Fidel’s death in the penultimate chapter. Without giving away the twisty ending from the final chapter, the Fidel-hater reader will re-read that paragraph with cascading frissons of glee. Ding dong and all that.

Sadly, a few small but glaring errors mar the otherwise involving suspense. There’s that matter of The Dentist’s yanking teeth one by one with a plumber’s wrench. I think not. A plier, a vise grip, a dental instrument of course, would do. But a plumber’s wrench is designed with one-way teeth that grasp a pipe across the circumference to exert counterclockwise force on a tube with ample clearance. Being somewhat of a handyman myself—I’m a regular carpintonto, in fact—I know my plumbing tools with an intimacy Merullo lacks.

Likewise, Merullo’s confusion of Cuban with Mexican comida. What happened to his local informant on this, quién sabe, but when Carlos takes Elena to dinner, they go to a restaurant whose fare illustrates not only run-of-the-mill privation but also an egregiously uninformed writer: “they turned down an alley, past a woman and small child begging and a man playing the Peruvian flute, then ducked into the large, noisy, popular Café Castro, where you could sometimes get a little chicken or fish with your beans and rice and tortillas”.

¡Hijole! That menu cries out for an editor or a fact-checker.


Artful News from Chicago



Hi All,

My studio building is having its annual Spring "OPEN STUDIO WALK" weekend on May 15-16, 2009. If you are in or near Chicago I hope you'll drop in and have a glass of wine and see some wonderful art. Art will be for sale!

More details and directions can be found on the Artists of Eastbank website - www.artistsoftheeastbank.com

J u d i t h e H e r n á n d e z
◘ Website: www.jhnartestudio.com
◘ Studio: 1200 West 35th Street, #35000, Chicago, IL 60609

Meso American Reminder

In Los Angeles, Cal State LA hosts the 2009 Conference on Mesoamerica. Continuity and Change in Mesoamerican History From the Pre-Classic to the Colonial Era. Click here for a PDF of this interesting event.

Lydia Considered and Re-Considered.

La Bloga enthused at the beauty, power, and pure drama of Lydia at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum.

Denver's John Keubler has an interesting answer to the question of how Octavio Solis' masterful teatro experience changed from its Denver debut to its exceptional El Lay staging. Click here (then press Esc when the site demands an email password) to enjoy Keubler's take on this wondrous play, including an LA Times critic's accusation Lydia is like a telenovela. Wha? Among descriptions I would hope critics studiously avoid is equating fluffy stuff like telenovelas with so fine an example of Chicano belles-lettres.

Now the play has found its way west to Center Theatre Group’s Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, where critical reception, perhaps because of all the hype, has been mixed. Los Angles Times theater critic Charles McNulty calls it “magical realism meets telenovela.”

I do not watch telenovelas, and I wonder how many telenovelas McNulty consumes along with a hot botana or two? For me, this sounds like beans rice and tortillas served at a Havana café, suspiciously uninformed. Ni modo. You'll enjoy Keubler's essay.

What's the word of the day? Catarro. May you not comprehend what this means, leastways, not as convincingly as I do right now. Damn.  Here's trusting my twice daily botana of Ciprofloxacin and Tamiflu are doing the trick, this second Tuesday of May. A Tuesday like any day, except you are here. Be well, gente. See you next week.

ate,

mvs

La Bloga welcomes your comments. Click the Comments counter below to add your notes to this, or any column. Be mindful that La Bloga welcomes guest columnists. When you have a counter view of something you read at La Bloga, or your own review of a book or arts event, click here to share your intentions to be our guest.

Review: Achy Obejas, Ruins.

NY: Akashic Books, 2009.
ISBN: 978-1-933354-69-9

Michael Sedano

As February wrapped up, Lisa Alvarado profiled Achy Obejas. Then, a few weeks later, what should fall before my eyes but Obejas' newly published novel of Havana, Ruins.

When I think back on Achy Obejas’ love poem to Cuba, Ruins, I feel compelled to remember Shakespeare’s “Bare ruined choirs” sonnet, with its closing line, “to love that well, that thou must leave ere long”. Cuba in fourteen lines.

Ruins is a 205 page novel, not a poem. But author Achy Obejas clearly wears her heart on her sleeve in writing about the lives of everyday gente in a Havana slum during 1994’s “Special Period” that nearly brings Cuba to ruin, and that “ends” when the government permits people to leave the island by any means necessary.

Although set against a backdrop of a nation’s slow starvation and material deprivation by its own government, politics is not involved in this absorbing story. Obejas’ focus is neighborhood life, of shantytown construction, bureaucratic indifference, shortages of all kinds, everyday black marketeering.

In a universe of ordinary privation, some people build rafts and take off, joining generations of names who left in earlier times. Other people buy or bully their way into small comforts and luxuries. A small number of people unconditionally subscribe to revolutionary purity, accepting privation as something to be equally shared by all. These are the people like Obejas’ central character, Usnavy Martín-Leyva, who seem to get more than their share of crap.

Ordinary privation requires stoic fortitude, or extraordinary measures. Usnavy refuses the latter with a moral indignation that blows up in his face when he discovers his wife and a neighbor woman soaking sheets of felt in spices and water to sell as meat to customers who will choose to believe the obvious sham. Authenticity is a running theme in the story; not just meat but antiques, cars, irons, and being truly Cuban.

Usnavy’s only failure of revolutionary purity comes from noble motives. He works in a government bodega and is supposed to distribute materials equally, first-come. But he bends the rules, hoarding food supplies for invalids and aged who shuffle into the warehouse store long after the fit and able-bodied have queued up looking for a little extra.

When circumstances and opportunity lead Usnavy to dip into the bodega’s supplies to help a childhood pal build a raft that floats to Miami, Usnavy’s shattered moral rectitude can no longer prevent his own pursuit of the dollar. The bigger his roll grows, the greater his neighbors admire him. Odd. Prior to his newly earned wealth—a delicious plot involving Tiffany glass and the book’s title—the rap on Usnavy is he is all salao. Escaping this sobriquet, and its imputed truth becomes a focus for much of Usnavy’s dealings. He is bound and determined to prove his dominoes-playing socios wrong. When he finally gains an upper hand on those guys, it’s as false a victory as the warmth expressed by the transgender son of an old pal. More authenticity theme play here, readers will enjoy it.

Usnavy’s story ends on an unhappy note, but not owing to his dollars. Despite his money, he’s been right all along. A person’s fate doesn’t reside where his boat lands but in his character. Once the moral dam has broken, Usnavy figures out a method for digging for dollars in collapsed buildings. He follows weather reports to be two hours ahead of the rain, then listens as the groans of collapsing timbers send residents fleeing but Usnavy forward. Digging the rubble to retrieve valuable salvage brings dollars, a big roll of them. If you have the dollars you have good shoes. That doesn’t prevent a person from being salao, and this is Usnavy’s final irony.

This is the same Havana found in similar novels of Cuba written from a United States base. Every such novel, it seems, has a highly literate character, sensitive to the feelings and needs of others, strong enough to resist temptations and advantage. Despite their outward support of the Revolution, literary Cubanos all wait for that magic moment they can cheer and applaud the fall of the dictatorship. For now, their admiration for Fidel comes with ritual overtones, the gente make jokes at his expense with practiced casualness. Obejas’ world sidles up on the jinetera subculture that occupies such novels as Havana Bay, Adios Muchachos, and Havana Lunar, but avoid the street, pursuing where such people come from. Usnavy’s fourteen year old daughter, for example, has grown to a perilous age in a dangerous place, her parents fear, something Obejas elects to keep ambiguous.

There’s a close kinship between Ruins and Havana Lunar. Akashic Books published them both recently. Both novels deserve a good reading, in tandem, they go so well together. Both take place during the same time period, with overlapping events—inescapably. Boat people, rafters, floaters, privation. There are other similarities; both, for example, mention the ersatz meat product, a textile sandwich. While Havana Lunar is a mystery with picaresque undertones, Ruins is sentimental novel of place and character. Given a spate of slow titles in recent weeks, it’s been two great weeks in a row. 

BORDER BOOK FESTIVAL CELEBRATES 15th ANNIVERSARY APRIL 17-19, 2009


With the idea of gathering stories, poems, memories, meditations and ruminations, the public is invited to send the BBF reflections, stories and artwork that reflect on the number 15. For example:

* 15 Reasons to Live in Peace
* 15 Favorite Books
* 15 Favorite Meals
* 15 Sacred Memories
* 15 Reasons to Love the Desert
* 15 Lessons I’ve Learned In My Life
* 15 Favorite Sayings or Dichos
* When I was 15. . .

We will gather the 15s as we move toward our 15th annual Border Book Festival in April 2009. We will share these lists and stories with you at the festival. So, put on your thinking caps, and reflect on the 15s!

Sounds like another great festival. But what really caught my eye is the festival's auction of a Diego Rivera lithograph:

The BBF will be selling a signed Diego Rivera print, The Fruits of Labor/Los Frutos del Trabajo during the festival. The lithograph was donated by an anonymous donor and is numbered #49 of #100. For more information on the lithograph or the Silent Auction donation, contact the festival.

To get the details on your 15 reasons, or para mayor info click here.

That's the buey it is, the final Tuesday of March, 2009, a day like any other day, except You are here.

mvs

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Review: Havana Lunar. Robert Arellano.

NY: Akashic Books, 2009.
ISBN: 978-1-933354-68-2

Michael Sedano

What a delight, after reading a string of uninvolving novels, to come across Robert Arellano's engaging "Cuban noir novel", Havana Lunar.

The Havana setting breathes life into this story of grisly murder and false accusation. The first person narrator is an idealistic medical doctor working in a neighborhood clinic. Lacking the most basic supplies like aspirin, the medico Rodriguez heals through bedside manner and decency.

Rodriguez' nobility is its own reward until a teenaged jinetera takes advantage of kindness to insinuate herself in his life. The novel opens with a detective surreptitiously searching the clinic for the sex worker's jacket. She's a suspect. 

Arellano keeps a smile on his fingers as he takes readers through a lively, twisting story that brings in the doctor's large tight-knit familia from a rural compound, the break-up of his marriage, his ongoing affair with a childhood friend, the ugly mole on his cheek that is the title of the book, the beheading of a local pimp and the doctor’s involvement with the teenie jinetera suspect.

Sexual tourism, inept social services, corrupt public servants, the loving familia, a portrait of Che Guevara that talks, give the novel enough color that the potential horror of the crime never infects the fun of the telling. 

Some of the fun is Arellano's, exercising his decided political slant against the revolution. The doctor regrets small privations like choosing between buying gas for the car or coffee for his cuppa, and he uses an old skeleton to evade enforced hitch hiker laws. But a children's clinic with no aspirin insults this deeply caring professional. The jineteras know he’s a doctor who does HIV tests on the QT, no government reports, and he takes no sex in return. Breaking his resistance is part of the whore's motive. The doc's a real sucker. The pimp's moves to get her back thrusts the doctor into captivity and torture, escape, a near-lethal confrontation with a crazed killer, and the corrupt policeman.

Contrast the city's constant struggle to the doctor's family compound out in the sticks on the local economy, liberated from the restraints of city bureaucrats. Granpa rules with iron fist, the women eat in the kitchen whether company comes or not. They laugh, eat well, all the kids are above average. This is the sentimental Cuba of shoulda woulda coulda land, but Arellano's point is well taken.

Arellano doesn't harp on the failures of Cuban socialism, not in a heavy-handed manner. Everyday ironies abound; a family learns that flour has come on sale. All gather excitedly around the table, real bread oven fresh! The food is ripped from their mouths. Rumors abound that saboteurs mixed glass into the flour. More irony, other rumors arise the government spread the rumors to suppress the black market for flour, they coulda eaten that bread.

As with so many other Cubano novels, the shortcomings of the revolution are well knit into the fabric of the story. Everyday details like enforced hitch hiking, or choosing between buying gas for the car or coffee for his cuppa, point up such novels like Havana Lunar can be told only in Cuba. Arellano's noir masterpiece belongs alongside Daniel Chavarria's Adiós Muchachos and Tango for a Torturerer.

Applause must go to Akashic and or Arellano for their common sense approach to English and Spanish expression. The languages are not italicized nor does Arellano offer much appositional translation. When a character says something in Spanish the expression stands on its own.

For slightly under 200 pages, Havana Lunar has lots to enjoy, everything a comic noir aficionado could hope for. Mejor, Havana Lunar need not be enjoyed in private; the publisher plans a coast-to-coast tour of readings, from March 24 at NYNY Bluestockings to May 8 at W. Hollywood's Book Soup. Many of the stops include Achy Obejas, signing her latest, Ruins.

Juan Felipe Herrera Poetry Collection Honored

The National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, announced March 12, named Juan Felipe Herrera's Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, along with August Kleinzahler's Sleeping It Off in Rapid City.

I note the publisher's and Herrera's support for Oracy, making this collection, hopefully, a trailblazer setting a standard for all published poetry: Beginning with early material from A Certain Man and moving through thirteen of his collections into new, previously unpublished work, this assemblage also includes an audio CD of the author reading twenty-four selected poems aloud.

Felicidades, Juan Felipe. You had it coming, ese.

Read Lisa Alvarado's La Bloga interview with Mr. Herrera here.

Poetry Collection Reviewed

La Bloga friend Rigoberto González expresses his joy at reading Kevin A. González' first poetry collection, Cultural Studies, noting the poet is "prodigal son, a creative writing degree in hand, come back to reconnect to the imagery of his youth". 

You'll enjoy the full review at the El Paso Times.


Nuyorican MTV Viewers Protest

Gente who partake of the plug-in drug have one more reason to abjure the device altogether. Consumers of what MTV has to offer find a recent episode so undigestible they've written a petition to have a program withdrawn and a new one produced to replace it. The group's petition links here.

We, the undersigned, call upon Viacom/MTV/MTV News to cease airing the episode entitled "True Life: I'm a Nuyorican" on the grounds that it is an unbalanced, negative stereotype affirming and unfair representation of who and what Nuyoricans are as a culture.

Furthermore, it is psychosocially damaging to youth and uncharacteristic of the values which MTV News claims to uphold.

Additionally, we call upon Viacom/MTV/MTV News to produce a new episode which represents the Nuyorican community accurately and references the Nuyorican Movement, this task is to be completed and aired by year's end.


Sandhill Crane Migration - A Wonder of the Natural World



Please enjoy a few fotos from a recent visit to Nebraska's Rowe Sanctuary on the Platte River: http://www.readraza.com/cranes/index.htm


La Bloga welcomes your comments and guest columns. To leave a comment, please click the Comments counter below. To be our guest with a column-length review of your own, click here to learn more.

Achy Obejas, Renaissance Woman, Cuban Style

ACHY OBEJAS

My Note:

Poet. Novelist. Translator. Teacher. Journalist. Achy Obejas is a bright light in our literary firmament, nationally and internationally. On a personal note, many years ago, she and I read with such glowing stars as Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Norma Alarcon, at a long-defunct women's bookstore, Jane Addams on Michigan Avenue, here in Chicago. Her work exudes a keen sense of humor, of irony, of compassion and is laced with the infinite small moments that make her poetry and her novels sing with the breath of real life.

THE BIO:

Achy Obejas was born in 1956 in Havana, Cuba, a city that she left six years later when she came to the United States with her parents after the Cuban revolution. She grew up in Michigan City, Indiana, and moved to Chicago in 1979. At the age of thirty-nine, Obejas returned to the island of her birth "for a brief visit and was seduced by a million things". The Cuba of her imagination and experience recur throughout her writings.

An accomplished journalist, Obejas worked briefly for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1980-81 and then for the Chicago Reader. She has also written for The Windy City Times, The Advocate, High Performance, and The Village Voice. Her coverage of the Chicago mayoral elections earned her the 1998 Peter Lisagor Award for political reporting. She currently is a cultural writer for the Chicago Tribune, where she has worked since 1991.

Obejas' poetry has appeared in a number of journals, including Conditions, Revista Chicano-Rique, and The Beloit Poetry Journal. In 1986, she received an NEA fellowship in poetry. Her short stories have also been widely published in journals and anthologies. Her novels include We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (1994) and Memory Mambo (1996), both published by Cleis Press. Memory Mambo won a Lambda Award, and her third novel, Days of Awe (2001), also won the 2002 Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction.

Although she has lived in the Midwestern United States since she was six, Obejas has always identified with Cuba. She says in an interview:

I was born in Havana and that single event pretty much defined the rest of my life. In the U.S., I'm Cuban, Cuban-American, Latina by virtue of being Cuban, a Cuban journalist, a Cuban writer, somebody's Cuban lover, a Cuban dyke, a Cuban girl on a bus, a Cuban exploring Sephardic roots, always and endlessly Cuba. I'm more Cuban here than I am in Cuba, by sheer contrast and repetition.

As an activist and writer, Obejas continues to explore her Cuban identity and experience, earning her an important place in the literature of the United States.

(Courtesy of Voices From the Gaps)

THE BOOK:


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

RUINS a novel of Cuba by Achy Obejas
$15.95, 300 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-69-9
Publication date: March 2009, A Trade Paperback Original, Fiction
A selection of Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers program

*Scroll down for 2009 author events

A true believer is faced with a choice between love for his family and the Cuban Revolution.

"Daring, tough, and deeply compassionate, Achy Obejas's Ruins is a breathtaker. Obejas writes like an angel, which is to say: gloriously . . . one of Cuba’s most important writers.”
--Junot Díaz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

"In the Havana of Ruins, scarcity can only be fought with ingenuity, and the characters work very hard at the exquisite art of getting by. The plot rests on the schemes of its weary, obsessive, dreamy hero--a character so brilliantly drawn that he can’t be dismissed or forgotten. A tender and wildly accurate portrait, in a gem of a novel."
--Joan Silber, author of The Size of the World

USNAVY HAS ALWAYS BEEN A TRUE BELIEVER. When the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959, he was just a young man and eagerly signed on for all of its promises. But as the years have passed, the sacrifices have outweighed the glories and he’s become increasingly isolated in his revolutionary zeal. His friends openly mock him, his wife dreams of owning a car totally outside their reach, and his beloved fourteen-year-old daughter haunts the coast of Havana, staring north.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1994, a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the government allows Cubans to leave at will and on whatever will float. More than 100,000 flee--including Usnavy’s best friend. Things seem to brighten when he stumbles across what may or may not be a priceless Tiffany lamp that reveals a lost family secret and fuels his long repressed feelings . . . But now Usnavy is faced with a choice between love for his family and the Revolution that has shaped his entire life.

ACHY OBEJAS is the author of various books, including the award-winning novel Days of Awe. She is the editor of Akashic’s critically acclaimed crime-fiction anthology Havana Noir, and the translator (into Spanish) for Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Currently, she is the Sor Juana Writer in Residence at DePaul University in Chicago. She was born in Havana and continues to spend extended time there.

Praise for HAVANA NOIR edited by Achy Obejas:

"[A] remarkable collection . . . Throughout these 18 stories, current and former residents of Havana deliver gritty tales of depravation, depravity, heroic perseverance, revolution and longing in a city mythical and widely misunderstood."
--Publishers Weekly

2009 AUTHOR EVENTS:

--Sat., February 21, 2pm--EVANSVILLE, IN--Barnes & Noble, 624 S. Green River Rd.

--Tues., February 24, 8pm--MIAMI BEACH, FL--Books & Books, 933 Lincoln Rd.

--Sat., February 28, 3pm--MISHAWAKA, IN--Barnes & Noble, 4601 Grape Rd.
*Cosponsored by the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame

--Thurs., March 5, 7:30pm--CHICAGO, IL--Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark
*Book release event

--Sat., March 7, 3pm--LAFAYETTE, IN--Barnes & Noble, 2323 Sagamore Parkway S.

--Mon., March 9, 7pm--MADISON, WI--Barnes & Noble West, 7433 Mineral Point Rd.

--Tues., March 10, 7pm--IOWA CITY, IA--Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St.

--Wed., March 18, 7pm--ST. LOUIS, MO--Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid Ave.

--Thurs., March 19, 7pm--CINCINNATI, OH--Joseph-Beth Booksellers, 2692 Madison Rd.

--Fri., March 20, 7pm--ASHEVILLE, NC--Malaprop's, 55 Haywood St.

--Sat., March 21, 3pm--DURHAM, NC--Barnes & Noble, 5400 New Hope Commons

--Sun., March 22, 6:30-8pm--WASHINGTON, DC--Busboys and Poets at 5th & K, 1025 5th St. NW
*With Achy Obejas (RUINS) and Robert Arellano (HAVANA LUNAR)

--Mon., March 23, 6:30-8pm--BALTIMORE, MD--Enoch Pratt Free Library (Central Branch, Poe Room), 400 Cathedral St.
*With Achy Obejas (RUINS) and Robert Arellano (HAVANA LUNAR)

--Tues., March 24, 7pm--NEW YORK, NY--Bluestockings, 172 Allen St.
*With Achy Obejas (RUINS) and Robert Arellano (HAVANA LUNAR)

--Wed., March 25, 7:30pm--NEW YORK, NY--92nd St. Y, 1395 Lexington Ave.
*With Achy Obejas (RUINS) and Robert Arellano (HAVANA LUNAR)

--Thurs., March 26, 8pm--METUCHEN, NJ--Raconteur Books, 431 Main St.
*With Achy Obejas (RUINS) and Robert Arellano (HAVANA LUNAR)

--Fri., March 27, 7:30pm--PROVIDENCE, RI--Ada Books, 717 Westminster St.
*With Achy Obejas (RUINS) and Robert Arellano (HAVANA LUNAR)

--Tues., May 5, 7:30pm--PORTLAND, OR--Powell's, 1005 W. Burnside
*Akashic All-Stars event with Achy Obejas (RUINS), Maggie Estep (ALICE FANTASTIC), and Robert Arellano (HAVANA LUNAR)

--Thurs., May 7, 7pm--SAN FRANCISCO, CA--City Lights, 261 Columbus Ave.
*Akashic All-Stars event with Achy Obejas (RUINS), Maggie Estep (ALICE FANTASTIC), and Robert Arellano (HAVANA LUNAR)

--Fri., May 8, 7pm--LOS ANGELES, CA--Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd.
*Akashic All-Stars event with Achy Obejas (RUINS), Maggie Estep (ALICE FANTASTIC), and Robert Arellano (HAVANA LUNAR)

--Sat., May 9, 7:30pm--SAN FRANCISCO, CA--Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St.
*Part of the "Writers with Drink" reading series

Contact: Johanna Ingalls/Akashic Books
232 Third St., Suite B404
Brooklyn, NY 11215
Tel: 718-643-9193/Fax: 718-643-9195
johanna@akashicbooks.com
www.akashicbooks.com

Lisa Alvarado

Review: Havana Gold, Leonardo Padura | Alltop | 8 Free Books

London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2008.
ISBN: 9781904738282

Michael Sedano

Publisher Bitter Lemon Press' temperamental webpage calls its offerings, "The best crime and romans noirs from faraway places." That's no idle boast. Mexico and Cuba, while not so far away from a United States-based reader, the publisher's London headquarters introduces a distinctively alien flavour to the pages of such novels as Rolo Diez' Tequila Blue and Leonardo Padura's Havana Gold.

Havana Gold is the fourth in a series called The Havana Quartet (Havana Black, Red, Blue), all published by Bitter Lemon. Leonardo Padura published several titles, including his Adios Hemingway with Canongate of Edinburgh, first reviewed at La Bloga by Manuel Ramos.

Padura is a superb writer and story teller.

Despite the relentless Britishisms of translator Peter Bush (or John King for Adíos Hemingway), readers who enjoy good detective tales will enjoy the story, the characters, and the small insights into today's Cuba. Unlike Padura's Hemingway mystery--also featuring Conde--and other Cuba-set mysteries, there is more story and less privation. For example, Skinny's mother always has a great meal featuring meat. As a side benefit, Padura describes the recipe with sufficient detail that an adventurous cook might lift the meal off the pages and onto a dinner plate.

The grim story casts Cuba in a no punches pulled framework. A high school honors teacher is murdered. A marijuana roach provides a clue to more far-reaching crime. The young teacher, it turns out, enjoys an active sex life with her students, petty street criminals, the headmaster, and uncounted others. Corruption doesn't creep in so much as it is taken for granted; the school's only half painted owing to someone stealing half the paint for personal gain, ho hum. Color lines remain in high relief, characters identified by skin color, or weaving it within the fabric of everyday conversation. Absence of consumer goods defines shopping--the teacher exchanges sex for a new pair of sneakers. These are the type of feature that make a work distinctively Cubano.

Padura's Conde character is a gem. Straight-arrow but driven to distraction by horniness. Conde's a writer who doesn't, and feels pangs of guilt and frustration about not writing. As a literate man, he sees his world through the lens of Shakespeare and other writers. Padura takes full advantage of his character to use allusion and literature-derived metaphor to describe the world while adding to the reader's enjoyment. Here a quick allusion to Prospero's revels speech, there something from Cervantes.

Although Havana Gold is not a travelogue like Martin Cruz Smith's Havana Bay, there's a rich sense of place infusing the novel with a sentimentality echoed by Conde's own sense of loss, his failure with women, writer's block, devotion to friends, both those still in Cuba and the ones who are "off". Still, I worry that too much might have been lost in translation.

Anglophone Americans laugh with the old saying about themselves and Britons being separated by a common tongue. Havana Gold strikingly reaffirms the truth of that, in some unpleasing reminders that this is a work in translation from Spanish into British.

Most readers have no difficulty looking past -our spelling where US English calls for simple -or. But how alien indeed to hear old friends--one a cop, one a doctor, one a paralyzed war veteran--remembering back when, as boys, they played baseball: the fresh air, a prized leather glove, striding out to take their position on the pitch. No, not the fastball, the field, the pitch.

The most strident idiomatic conflict develops out of the novel's key romantic interlude, the cute meet when Conde fixes a flat tyre for a beautiful woman. He makes a pass, she takes it for a quick six. She's just playing him along but he's head-over-heels in love. When she dumps him, his bittersweet farewell loses its tender reminder of their meeting, when our separate tongues get in the way:

He held her shoulders, stroked her thick, damp hair and kissed her gently on the lips. "Tell me when you need a tyre changing. It's my speciality."

That variant spelling leads me to hear the broken-hearted Conde pronounce four syllables, "spe-shee-all-i-tea," and the charm evaporates. Sadly, this comes amidst a magical moment where Padura's writing approaches his most masterful. The author sets up a beautiful parallel of Conde and Karina with Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca. Bogie/Rick laments about all the gin joints in the world she walks into his and plays that song:

"Don't think ill of me, Mario," she replied, also standing up.

"Does it matter to you what I think?"

"Yes, it does. I think you're right, we should meet up in another life."

"Pity about the mistake. But don't worry, I'm always getting it wrong," he said opening the door. The sun was disappearing behind the old Marian Brothers school in La Víbora and the Count felt like crying. Recently he'd wanted to cry a lot. He looked at Karina and wondered: why? He held her shoulders, stroked her thick, damp hair and kissed her gently on the lips. "Tell me when you need a tyre changing. It's my speciality."

And he walked down the porch towards the garden.

He was sure she'd call out, tell him to hell with everything, she'd stay with him, she adored sad policemen, she'd always play her sax for him, he only had to say "play it again", they'd be birds of the night, hungry for love and lust, he heard her run towards him, arms outstretched and sweet music in the background, but each step he took in the direction of the street stuck the knife in a little deeper, quickly bled dry his last hope. When he reached the pavement he was a man alone. What a load of shit, he thought. There wasn't even any music.

Conde's tough luck is the reader's gain. An inspired character from a masterful creator, even when read through the fog of the mother tongue. This definitely is a quartet well worth following for the full spectrum.

Internet Search News - Alltop, Chicano, La Bloga

Futurists in the 1970s predicted that (print) media would become so diverse and far flung that people would need to hire the services of media sifters who would consume voluminous amounts of information, filter it through the sieve of topicality, and pass digests along to consumers hungry for specialized knowledge. Fast forward to the 21st century and the world of RSS feeds and the Google.

La Bloga friend and compañera Sol Ruiz, alerted me to Alltop. This service is something like the filtering service those futurists were describing. Navigate to Alltop, type in a few key words, like chicano, and click: a page of chicana chicano blogs, including above-the-fold, La Bloga.

Alltop has a few kinks to work through; type "chicanas" and get no result, "mexican american" to produce "all the top Mexican news." Still, the chicana chicano page contains a wealth of fun, so happy browsing!


Hachette Give-Away for Fiestas Patrias Month

Here's how to enter La Bloga's give-away of this exquisite list of highly thought-of titles, and some great discoveries:

Dream in Color By Linda Sánchez , Loretta Sánchez ISBN: 0446508047
Gunmetal Black By Daniel Serrano ISBN: 0446194131
The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters By Lorraine López ISBN: 0446699217
Bless Me, Ultima By Rudolfo Anaya ISBN: 0446675369
Brownsville By Oscar Casares ISBN: 9780316146807
The Hummingbird's Daughter By Luis Urrea ISBN: 0316154520
The General and the Jaguar By Eileen Welsome ISBN: 0316715999
Tomorrow They Will Kiss By Eduardo Santiago ISBN: 0316014125

Each Saturday at noon Pacific time, La Bloga will post a set of questions related to the week's / month's La Bloga columns. Attentive readers will know the answers, capable researchers will quickly teclar a few key words in the blogger search field to produce the answers. Click the entry button, fill in your name and mailing address, and the first entry with all the right answers will receive in the mail the set of 8 titles. Note, the noon Pacific time gives coast-to-coast readers the same chance to win.

Sample question: What Leonardo Padura novels have been reviewed at La Bloga? Click here for your answer.

That's September's penultimate Tuesday. Fall has fell, Californians will dine al fresco one last time then we move inside. Time to chop down a few orange trees and eucalyptus, get that cozy fire going.

La Bloga welcomes your comments on this or any column. Simply click the comments counter below. Remember, too, La Bloga welcomes guest columnists. To inquire about topics, or to submit a fully developed review, announcement, other idea, click here.

See you next Saturday for our first quiz. We're giving away 5 sets.

mvs

Review: Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda

Sonia Rivera-Valdés.
NY: Seven Stories Press, 2001.
ISBN-10 1-58322-047-X
ISBN-13 978-1-58322-047-4

Michael Sedano

One reason I avoid back cover blurbs is I like to let a text speak for itself. Moreover, I’m often disappointed when high expectations meet a lesser actuality. Yet, I received a gift from an unexpected source, and, on opening the package, find myself turning a book around in my hands, ritually reading the book jacket while signaling my surprise and pleasure at what sounds like a scintillatingly lurid piece of fiction.

The gift is Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda, a 2001 collection of ten translated stories written by U.S. Cubana Sonia Rivera-Valdes. A gift to me from an enthusiastic reader, I have mixed emotions in approaching the book because of the back cover blurbs comparing this collection to Anais Nin. “Makes you forget the world around you . . . in human behavior-that which is not sanctioned by society," I’m promised. Nin is pretty hot, I think, but then comes the toughest promises yet. "Slyly heretical . . . most important book of stories since Joyce's Dubliners". By now my head is spinning. Can this book possibly meet such rising expectations? I thank the giver and promise her I'll put it at the top of my "to be read" stack.

Good things come to those who read, and now that I’ve read the nine stories, ten if you count the "Explanatory Note" as a fiction--which I do--I understand the blurbers’ hyperbolic enthusiasm. The stories, it turns out, are feminist, gay erotic literature. How was I to know? The characterizations “gay” “erotic”, absent from the back cover blurbs though perhaps obviously implied in "Forbidden" and the goddess Venus referent, strike me in the opening paragraph where Rivera claims her stories mask identities of true confessors of hidden shameful secrets. The shame, Rivera explains, comes not from criminality or social sanction, but "the way he or she has perceived and experienced it". So it sounds like hot stuff.

The buildup promises more than Rivera's translators can deliver. Or it might be that Rivera never put in the heat, and this is a fully complete translation.

Many of these stories mix hetero and homo sexuality with gay abandon. A woman first discovers she thrills at hairless skin when she kisses a body with passion. An older woman rejects a younger out of age, but relents in the end, leaves New York to Havana and the bedroom of her young friend and the friend knows all the words. A woman meets a Kama Sutra expert who entertains her for a weekend. The woman regrets he will not abandon his gay partner for her, but she expresses gratitude to know hers is the biggest yoni the Kama Sutra expert has seen. And stuff like this. Passionate. Funny. Weird. Sad.

The stories flow with economy and directness. Years and momentous events go by in the spaces between paragraphs. One sentence the character's a struggling factory worker screwing the boss to protect a co-worker's job, the next page she's a college graduate. Sensations, of course, control erotic literature. Here, sharing the thoughts and feelings of her characters, Rivera excels. The story of the enormously fat woman with the yeast infection and kidney problems that give a room-permeating stink provides a vivid reading moment. I wonder how the Spanish expresses the man's arousal as the fat woman slyly seduces him by spreading her huge thighs to fill his eyes and nose with her essence. A few stories later, Rivera refers to the same woman in so mundane a sentence that a reader is advised not to read the book in public, to avoid having to explain the surprised laughter. Or perhaps one should.

Rivera’s heterosexual stories aren’t entirely straight. Here the author blends sexuality with violence against women. I appreciate Rivera's restraint in avoiding the stronger treatment elected by other writers, America's Dream for one, although the dull relentlessness of one woman's story numbed me for a while after finishing the story. Yet, that afternoon I remember asking myself, "Self, why is that woman so stupid?" I don't think that's unkind, but perhaps the only response I'm capable of.

Rivera's translators have made her impressive. She's won awards so she may be. Her tales provide diversion best taken a few pages at a time. For example, I read Marta Veneranda over a month’s time, at lunch each day, a few pages at a time and much as I look forward to getting back to other activities, I regretted having to, as this meant closing the cover until another day. But I thought also, "Big deal. Exposés -- especially sex exposés-- should be more graphic, more exciting." I think of the sex in Villanueva's Naked Ladies for example, and regret Rivera's understatement. I had hoped for lurid prose and got elegant writing instead. Still, when I see "forbidden" I want forbidden.

Seven Stories Press makes it easy to sample the work, as you've noticed if you clicked on the links in the above, or the link in the title of this column. You'll find a Google Books-like fascimile of the work by visiting the publisher's website, or clicking on the links noted.

I hope others will find this collection and share their response, as I'd be interested for a broader point of view. I’m guessing a woman will approach the stories with a different purpose and a different opinion from a sixty-something man.

A ver.


Gente, there goes the final Tuesday in July 2008! Tempus fugit, carpe libros. In comes August, a wedding anniversary and birthday month.

mvs

La Bloga welcomes your comments and responses to this and all columns. Simply click the Comments counter below and write away. La Bloga welcomes guest columnists for those with extended remarks, or your own reviews of books, arts events, and related ideas. To discuss your invitation to be our guest, clicking here is the first step.

Adrian Castro: As the Spirit Moves Him

Adrian Castro, his spirit, his riveting poetry and stage presence graced us in Chicago at a recent Palabra Pura. Wise Fish is a must read and we're fortunate enough to have had a conversation with Adrian, featured below. But before that, check out some background information, what other people are saying about this breathtaking book and revel in an excerpt.

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Adrian Castro is a poet, performer, and interdisciplinary artist. Born in Miami, a place which has provided fertile ground for the rhythmic Afro-Latino style in which he writes and performs. Articulating the search for a cohesive Afro-Caribbean-American identity, Castro honors myth on one hand and history on the other. He addresses the migratory experience from Africa to the Caribbean to North America, and the eventual clash of cultures. Castro creates a circular motion of theme, tone, subject matter, style, and cultural history, giving rise to a fresh illuminating archetypal poetry. These themes reach their climax in their declamacion – the call-and-response rhythm of performance with a whole lot of tun-tun ka-ka pulse. He is the author of Cantos to Blood & Honey,(Coffee House Press, 1997), Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time,(Coffee House Press, 2005), and has been published in many literary anthologies.

He is the recipient of a Cintas Fellowship, State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, NewForms Florida, the Eric Mathieu King award from the Academy of American Poets, NALAC Arts Fellowship, and several commissions from Miami Light Project and the Miami Art Museum.

He has performed with many dancers and actors including Chuck Davis and African American Dance Ensemble, Heidi Duckler and Collage Dance, and Keith Antar Mason and the Hittite Empire. The New York Times Book Review recently selected Wise Fish as an editor’s choice saying, “Sinuous, syncopated verses about the Caribbean melting pot.” And “…even a cursory glance suggests his poems—which seem to be trying to dance off the page…would truly come alive on the stage. “Wise Fish” is a serious and seriously enjoyable contribution to our flourishing Latino literature.” Adrian Castro is also a Babalawo and herbalist.

E-mail: Oditola@hotmail.com

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Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time
Reviews

Bob Holman :
"From a e to ae aeeeee is how long it takes for a word under slow waves to dissolve to pure sound. This is the domain of Adrian Castro, el poeta salsero, whose Wise Fish is composed solely in Spanglishcubanotainocreole y la lengua del orisha. Castro lays out a groove deep as an ocean trench, and you flow with the go. Use the dorsal fin of the wise fish to comb the language free of snarls, tangles and knots. Now you got it, poetry's music. Open book, hear music."

Campbell McGrath :
"Adrian Castro is fast becoming our foremost poet of the Caribbean, that crossroad of the Americas whose multiple cultures and languages he knows and speaks so fluently. His poetry is ecstatic, drum-propelled, lyrically empowered, spiritually questing, restlessly exploring the flyways of diaspora and exile from Puerto Rico to Haiti to Florida, from Cuba to Jamaica to Colombia, yet the idiom it inhabits is purely American. For all his journeying Adrian Castro is never away from home, because, like the hermit crab, he carries it on his back."

Quincy Troupe :
"The poetry of Adrian Castro fuses Spanish, Spanglish, and various dialects of the English/American language in a dazzlingly lyrical way. Influenced by the poetry of Victor Hernández Cruz, who pioneered this fascinating linguistic mix and fusion, Castro's poetry breathes life into and pulsates through the nexus of many cultural crossroads: Cuban, Haitian, Puerto Rican, Dominican as well as that of a cross-fertilized United States. Castro's new work is laced with intriguing rhythms and a robust musical language that makes Wise Fish a powerful, fresh, complex collection from an increasingly gifted poet."

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MISA CARIBEñA
Verde de ver green was her eyes
where the story began
hidden among almendras
dates, twigs of olive dripping oil

The sting of salt pooling
around ambitious brows
La misa begun by 3 boats
(rickety in their raucous bouts with breeze)

*

?? How to proceed
when your script has been writ by others
declared to be in your best interest
without finding your best interest
…history
with all its difficulties
rises from incantation
like musk deep
in the earth…
--retelling
There’s a bundle of bridle memories
wrapped in white, deep red, then
black cloth
strewn like an old photo
we turn away from
--retelling
La liturgia can be bilingual
Latín con Yórùbá
Spanish y Spanish
English con Spanish
Spanish con Latin
Cubano con Yórùbá
someone
has to orchestrate this—

El Proceso:
Burn a collection of twigs (Amansa
Guapo, No-me-olvides, Vencedor, Paramí, Quita Maldición, etc…)
Filter to fine dust
Add dried quimbombo
Gather witnesses
Hang the white, red, & black cloth flag-like
Prepare herbal solution for bathing afterwards
Spread ash circular on the ground
Begin writing symbols to span the column from earth to other world
Symbols born from word

There are delicate songs
that web these worlds
A gourd with salted water
is waiting their arrival
When drops pool around fingers
sliding like rain
mist of spirits
arrive in chronological death
the sting of salt pooling
inside our gaping memory
For the future—
we place a table blanketed with pools of cups
fistful of flowers
candles
here they
los muertos
can swim
frolic
After this ash has been etched
we understand how the dead has been received

*

This is goodbye—
la gran despedida
circled by candles infinite
-- it can be a signature of sorts
-- una caja de muerto
the difference is we live
& we continue an odd embrace
rhythmic

It has been established that
life begins in the ocean
Indeed she who floats on a mantle of blue
sequined with stars & moonlight
is motherhood en persona
& the one chained at the depths who
no one has really seen
collects fragments of bone from
sand
the sound of water choca con hueso
welds the primal bond deep
in the unconscious
Here is where life begins
Here is where
we
began
with words on sand
(close to the tide)
you accepted
I accepted—

A kissed history has dug into the sand
trying to erase the echo of what was writ
You alone gnawing at the mystery
manifested seed-like in my hands
challenging all my efforts
They now have slid off unto
otra

I thought though in sand
impermanence would not victimize us
the crystals in your eyes
my eyes
sharp & crackling with hope
I thought my feet could shuffle scissor-like slide
side to side on sand
printing mysterious messages to you
(of love, of future, of promise)
I thought the bay pooling around our oath
the reflection of words crystalized there
floating
sinking
delivered with 3 drums bàtá to the origins
I thought they would become sand, then bone
I thought then maybe a child
now I realize
you thought
you thought…

*

??How to proceed
when your home itself
simple & predictable
is an abiku—
…Born transient
with scars from previous lives not
really indefinite
but transient
clenching fists of young frustra-
tion not
yet established alive…
“comb the language”
with the dorsal from wise fish
encrusted with coral
Filter the rhythm
music of
accents
“or else”
end up at the bottom of the sea
grinding bone con bone
busy trying to get born
again
in another place—

drops pool from salt
from fingers sliding like rain
unto the green
verde de ver green was her eyes
where the story begins again
hidden among almendras

un llanto gitano se oye
un llanto gitano dice
“Que no me lloren
que no me lloren
que tengan azucenas
una gitarra cajón y compás de bulerías
pañuelos verde y blanco
que me lloren así”

This is no secret:
we are children of death
Bundled bulky in history
one white
deep red
one black
textured hymns
ruffled by boats in their raucous breeze
fingering our skin
only a sense
that pools from salt
sand
water
from fingers sliding like rain down skin
unto green verde de ver
again
again
green was her eyes

Misa because there’s sand
Misa because there’s memory
Misa because there’s transformation
Misa because there’s fish
because there’s ritual
because there’s tragedy
Misa because there’s music
because there’s love
because we mix we survive reborn
Misa porque tu con yo yo con tu
todos mezclados—
Misa caribeña


INCANTATION FOR THE WORD (I)

Shi-shi shah-shah shi she-eeh
is the music of divination powder
Takatakatakataka
is the music of palm nuts conversing/(ikin)
Ikin can
speak of a certain matter burrowed in sand
Odù is the music of
Omolú is the music of
that speech

And we arrived with these pronouncements
circling a wooden tray
circling those signatures (who summon the true name of things)
like coded messages from birds soaked
with the dew of universe
archetypes & all
past present & therefore
future
many languages with rhythm & all
even tonal
circling a wooden tray
tray who circular implies
WORLD
And it is word who causes this dance
And there are rhythmic leaps into
the sweetness of abundance into
the iron crest of creativity
And there herbs who cause the invisible to manifest
And it is word who causes this dance
Takatakatakataka
is the music of palm nuts conversing/(ikin)
Yes we can initiate a dialogue between known &
unknown
between those who flow round jagged stones of ignorance
river-like
like wise fish
we can bring messages regarding history
the ineffable speech of music
the music of verse
vibration from spirits through ripples
rhythm residing deep among the lushness
An old beaded crown invokes the power of poem
-- in an incantation we can

Odù is the music of
Omolú is the music of
that speech
Shi-shi shah-shah shi she-eeh
shshsh!



Note on Text:
Ikin: Specialized & ritually prepared palm nuts used in Orisha/Ifa divination.
Odù: A divination verse from Ifa literary corpus.
Omolú: One of 240 odu Ifa. Literally “child of king”. Offspring of 16 major odù Ifa.

ONE IRONY OF THE CARIBBEAN

It is common knowledge:
these waters witnessed the meet between East & West

Those sullen sailors rancid with chorizo
talcum’d with salt & sea breeze
old gunpowder
the perennial scent of Spain flapping
among the crested flags
the debauched night of laud
the Moorish cumin
the Gypsy’s dervish

But Tainos had mango o guanábana
to hoist as flag
perhaps a carey & tabaco leaf as insignia
They used planks from siguaraya
o quiebra hacha
pine or cedar
(which perfumed at the same time)
while sailing to the Areyto plaza
And the Caribs
well they used bones with hatchet scars
for mere decoration
in effect a floating coffin

The triangle that ensnared freedom
corraled continents into a trinity of suffering
the ships which chiseled these shores
in effect floating coffins

They departed from these islands
in rafts at best
hammered & fastened from rafters
from dangling colonial homes
in Regla, Cojimar, Marianao,
Jacmel, Cap Hatien
the same homes built
by survivors of floating coffins
They built them
with the same wood which bolted their ancestors’ chains
The same wood glued with sugar cane sap
They used strewn army canvases for sails
the sails that pivoted
often in the wrong direction
A rudder fashioned from shovel
stained with the earth of a dead man
They launched it to sea
to begin anew
but in effect a floating coffin

A long time ago
they didn’t bury the dead
till the eyes were pecked by a mysterious bird
delivered to the heavens
so the eyes could oversee the body’s proper burial
It was then that
they buried the body
in a hollowed trunk of siguaraya,
quiebra hacha, pine or cedar
sometimes ceiba for chiefs & priests
They launched it to sea to reach home to
reunite with the others
they lauched it to sea
to begin anew
in effect a floating coffin

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1. There is a profound sense of spirituality and musicality in your work. Can you talk about the sources of that, how they're connected, and their influences on you? 2. What has been the role of Santeria/Lucumi in your life as it relates to your world view and how you work as writer.

I'll answer the first two questions simultaneously since I think they're related. One of the central themes in my work is the relationship between poetry and sacred writing/texts. In my case, the sacred texts include the verses from the Ifa literary corpus. Briefly, Ifa has 256 Odu (perhaps best translated as chapters, but not from a physical book).

Each of these Odu have hundreds of verses associated with them. Each verse has a structure, a theme, a message, a sacrifice, a teaching. These verses are studied and memorized by traditional Babalawo, of which I am, and in turn interpreted for people who seek divination. Since I study quite ardently and live Ifa and its verses, their asthetics, rhythm, narratives, teachings, inevitably seep into my poems. Another central theme of my work is migration, and its dynamics-- acculturations, mixes, musics, rhythms, foods, culture in general. I frequently use my Afro-Latino asthetics to interpret, think, and talk about these issues.

3. Specifically, what are the themes you feel tug at you, make you want to return for exploration more deeply? Why?

I often reinterpret myths, or attribute modern sensibilites to them. I think the story of humanity is exactly that of migration, and the inevitable mixes. To write about migration, is in a nutshell, to write about humanity and the most ancient of customs.

3. How does being a husband and father impact your writing?

Being a father has I think given me a wider perspective on what's important, on my actions of today, on the importance of cultivating for the fruits of tomorrow, to be cliche.

4. Who have been mentors/influences on you creatively?

Influences-- in poetry mostly Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Victor Hernandez Cruz. But of course one gets influenced even in a small way by everything you read. But these are the poets I keep going back to. Musically, I listen to a lot of drumming, Afro-Cuban music, Jazz, Latin Jazz specifically-- Irakere, Munequitos de Matanzas, Jerry Gonzalez and the Fort Apache Band, John Coltrane, Mario Bauza.

5. What's your take on slam poetry and popular schools of poetics as it relates to your own work and also as a vehicle for up and coming young poets?

I have never participated in a slam. I think they have there place. However, unfortunately many "slam" poems suffer from a lack of workmanship and editing. I think open mics and the slam scene are a pretty democratic and open environment which is fundamentally a positive thing, especially for poets in their early stages of development. The slam scene has also made poetry more accessible to audiences. However I think the downfall of that is people may get the miscontrued idea of what is poetry.

Lisa Alvarado