Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? Sofía Does.

Melinda Palacio

Sofía del Carmen Rodríguez Fernández 

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? Although she does not want to dwell on how much she will miss New Orleans, Sofia del Carmen Rodriguez Fernández speaks volumes on the subject.. Sofia has been in New Orleans for a year. Stars aligned when her husband was able to take a year sabbatical from the university of Mexico and she was able to return to the town that has bewitched her ever since she was a young girl. Her family calls the gulf of Mexico home, both the Mexican and U.S. inlets. Her mother is from Cuidad del Carmen in Campeche, and she has an aunt she used to visit in New Orleans, who later moved further south along the gulf of Mexico in Alabama.

            A year ago, one of the first places she revisited was Cafe du Monde. The assault of powdered sugar and hot beignets to her nostrils brought her back to childhood, to the first time she visited her beloved aunt, not realizing that the city of New Orleans would rise from that deep place of love that reminded her of the music-filled streets, the heavy air, the scent of jasmine, and the ever present Mississippi river.

            "Los recuerdos me llegaron de forma inesperada, muy intensos. La música en las calles y la gente bailando, el aroma a jazmín, el río, y esa humedad que sientes que te inunda el rostro, que lo llena todo. De la comida, recordaba especialmente los beginets, así que fui a buscarlos lo más pronto posible. Llegué al Café du Monde, y cuando me llegó su aroma, fué mucho más que un recuerdo, era como volver a nacer, encontrarme con todos los sentidos abiertos y ser yo, más que nunca. Me senté en una mesa donde habían dejado un plato de beginets intacto, aún caliente que yo tenía enfrente de mí. Y fue sentirme tan en casa y tan inesperadamente hambrienta de New Orleans, que antes que llegara la mesera a quitar los platos y tomar nuestra orden, yo había comido esa orden, y ¡pedí otra!"

            In a rare meeting of like minds, I had the pleasure of having lunch with Sofia at the Live Oak Cafe on Oak Street in New Orleans. The cafe is known for their live music and southern food. The place happens to be a favorite of ours. During our conversation, we realized we were both at Live Oak a few days before we met. During our lunch, we were regaled by the music of the multi-talented KatarinaBoudreaux.

Katarina Boudreax at the piano with Reverend Goat singing at Live Oak Cafe

             Sofia is also a painter. She's been a painter and a poet since childhood. For her, everything is a book, from the simple act of opening the refrigerator, to what she eats, to the table in front of her. I admire her passion and zest for life.

          

  In April, the Consulate of Mexico in New Orleans exhibited Sofia's poetry and paintings in a show tiitled, "Abrazada o lo efímero." My first introduction to Sofia's work were the two videos on You Tube. Now I own her first poetry book, Primera Forma, and have seen some of her larger paintings before they are cut from the canvass, rolled up, and shipped to Mexico City, where she and her family will return. As she told me about how hard it is to leave the city she has come to adore, I also felt the bittersweet sting of finding a new friend who will leave the country in a few days. Since my grandmother passed away, I have not had such deep, meaningful, and lively conversations in Spanish. Like Sofia's wish, I too trust that she will return to New Orleans.

            "Es muy duro emocionalmente. Ayer le escribía a un amigo que no podía imaginar lo que sería no despertar en New Orleans. Tengo mucha magia acumulada durante estos meses, espero que me ayude a vivir sin New Orleans, aunque de algún modo, la llevo dentro de mí. No sabía que se podía amar así a una ciudad. Confío en regresar."

Abrazada a lo efímero

 Sofia Rodriguez Fernandez

Mi cuerpo como río,

tejido de agua.

Secreto cauce que aguarda

la llegada de la primavera

para desbordarse

mudar sus orillas

agitar remolinos

inundar árboles.

Corre,

sin nada que perseguir,

busca

emociones por nombrar,

música eterna para varios universos

y su color.

No soy reportera del mundo,

tan sólo de mi epidermis

y los infinitos que la atraviesan.

Tengo ahora más de lo que nunca he tenido:

Mississippi River,

ese brote de inmensidad.

Su humedad me ha besado

brillan mis párpados,

brillan en la luz

que ha logrado filtrarse

por las alas de las libélulas.

¿Cómo podía haber besos antes de este río?

Eclipse lunar

en equinoccio de primavera,

los huevos incubados

y las semillas brotando tibias en el barro.

Duermo en la gran casa que flota en el agua,

el agua que dio forma y peso a los deseos,

que condensó los cristales hasta hacerlos soñar.

Con nubes arriba

y piedras abajo,

todo sucede sin suceder,

lo que amamos es un instante que desaparece.

Cuando despierto por la noche,

sé que hay algo importante

por descifrar,

imagino un colibrí perdido

volando en la bóveda de un alto techo,

su sangre golpeando al eco de esa cúpula.

¿Cuándo llegó ahí? ¿Cómo ayudarlo?

Nuestra vida es difícil de conocer.

Un jardín provisional

en constante mutación,

tierras húmedas donde el agua se detiene

creando un hermoso laberinto

de forma y temperatura perfectas,

para que el estudiado

misterio de la vida

que transita por las hojas sumergidas,

nos encuentre claras y magníficas

en vergonzoso ardor

y desvergonzada intimidad.

Pero aún tengo la noche,

un túnel que me atraviesa,

el paracaídas del cerebro al corazón

y gradualmente,

bocanadas de jazmín.

Siento que he vivido para llegar a este momento.

La lluvia resbala en hilos de plata

el puente cruje bajo mis pies

mientras el río cuida mi cuerpo

más allá de los límites de lo correcto.

Tengo lo necesario

el instinto se obstina en confiar.

Mujeres de agua

Mujeres abrazadas a lo efímero

mujeres que han perdido la razón

mujeres en bandadas de pájaros

mujeres de lo eterno

mujeres de lo sublime

mujeres que creen estar poseídas

porque no encuentran nada ni nadie

que pueda contenerlas.

Un cometa seguía volando en mi cajón

cuando lo cerré de golpe.

El amor nos da siempre

la libertad de fallar.

Lo que trae la marea/What the Tide Brings: A Review by Donna Snyder

Xánath Caraza’s stories in Lo que trae la marea/What the Tide Brings are formed of poetry, music, and the logic of dreams. Characters encounter an intermediary between mortals and gods. The line between life and death is breached. Stories emerge from the earth’s ocean and lakes or the rain that falls from the sky, and they remind us that water is the primordial fluid from which all life emerges, yet also the source of catastrophe, destruction, and death.

Caraza credits María Miranda Maloney, the founder of El Paso’s Mouthfeel Press, for encouraging her to write this collection, a change from her earlier prize-winning poetry collections. Since 2009 Mouthfeel has published twenty-five books by writers from Mexico, Uruguay, and throughout the United States, garnering recognition and accolades for itself and its writers.

 

Originally from Mexico, Caraza lives in Kansas City and teaches at the University of Missouri. On an international level, she teaches, serves as editor of literary and academic journals, performs, and publishes work in both English and Spanish. She has won honors in Central America, Europe, and the US. In this bi-lingual collection, she wrote each piece in Spanish, and then she, Sandra Kingery, and Stephen Holland-Wempe translated them into English. Spanish is a superb language for literature, with an innate rhythm and rhyme which can translate awkwardly, losing the natural poetry. I read the English translations which are beautiful in their own right, each line fluid and graceful.

 

Caraza’s stories vibrate with the sensuality of the female body as it moves through heat, reacts to a man’s gaze, responds to the rhythms of jazz, or fills the memory of a man being subjected to torture. Her writing is redolent of jungle, copal and flesh, the pungent taste and feel of food and drink, the gratification of tactile details. Color permeates her stories -- the flora and fauna of tropical Veracruz and the valley of Anahuac, the sea and sky in their various moods, the colors of cups, drinks, food, clothes, shades of skin. In “Scofield 207,” for example, everything that populates the story possesses a specific color. “Lunch Break” contains twelve references to color in its six brief paragraphs. The writer’s eyes are a prism that breaks the world into every vibrant hue, dazzling the reader, yet along with other sensuous details the myriad colors anchor us in an earthly world even while characters move back and forth between temporal planes, between reality and dreams, fantasy, and myth, between sanity and delusion. Sensuousness is not the only point to this book, however, which addresses refugees from political oppression and other topics of seriousness and depth.

Estimada Poeta Caraza in La Bloga House

The limits of time and space do not apply to Caraza’s characters. In “Nezahualcoyotl,” a pre-Columbian king and poet of the Alcolhua culture of Mexico appears in Barcelona, Spain. As he walks with the other character, called Venus, Nezahualcoyotl recites his poetry. The apprehension of language becomes a sense impression. Venus “felt poetry exude from [his] body. That was his aroma . . . that intoxicating essence . . . .” She is filled with emotion as “verses of his poetry were assaulting her.” The poetry becomes visible on her arms, then her entire body is “tattooed in poems.” Finally, her body disappears, leaving only words.

 

Caraza provides a dazzling lesson in synesthesia, the evocation of one sort of sense impression when a different sense is stimulated. In her stories, odors are colors, poetry a tactile experience. In “The One Behind,” Caraza describes a person as being able to see not only with his eyes “but also his skin, his ears and nose.” In “Water Passes Through my House, It comes to my House to Dream,” the narrator feels “musical notes soak into her being through the pores of her skin” and memory “hits her in the chest.” A breeze is described as pearly in “First Friday in Kansas City.”

Caraza stated in an interview that her “vision concentrates on female voices, their dreams, their struggles, life in general.” A woman’s voice relates all but one of these brief. These women make their own choices. They travel to foreign countries, as has Caraza. They recognize and embrace the mythic power of Man as King, Poet, and Seer. They encounter an intermediary between mortals and gods, between life and death, and demonstrate the gap between the writer’s existence and the fictions she creates. 

In some stories, characters are found reading or writing books with titles of Caraza’s own creations, underscoring the gap between the writer’s existence and the fictions she creates. The use of such metafictive devices forces upon the reader an awareness that the writer is really a writer, creating a separate, unreal reality that is fiction. In Caraza’s case, that fictional reality is both marvelous and terrifying. Caraza’s deft use of language immerses the reader in a swirl where disbelief is willingly suspended. Characters use seashells as a tool of divination, experience the supernatural, “dissolve from this dimension to reappear on the printed page.”

 

The great Spanish writer, Federico García Lorca, first explained the aesthetics of duende, inspiration born in darkness and anguish. The power of duende, a fascination with both death and great erotic desire, suffuses Xánath Caraza’s writing. Her duende, her eroticism and repeated invocation of death, terror, and cataclysm, and the power and authenticity of her language -- all dizzy the reader, precipitating a momentary experience of the sublime. Lo que trae la marea/What the Tide Brings liberates the reader from the sorrow or mere banality of existence.

Buy it from distributor

 

Buy it on Amazon

Mouthfeel Press website

La Bloga interview

Xánath Caraza website

Review in El Paso Times

 

 

La Guest Blogger Donna J Snyder

 

Believing that to give voice is an inherently political act, Donna Snyder offers free, weekly writing workshops through the Tumblewords Project which she founded in 1995. Until recently, she worked as an activist attorney on behalf of indigenous people, immigrant workers, and people with disabilities. Snyder has read her work in Alaska, Boston, New York City, Colorado, Los Angeles, and throughout Texas and New Mexico. In 2014, Chimbarazu Press released her collection Poemas ante el Catafalco: Grief and Renewal and Virgogray Press reissued her 2010 chapbook, I Am South, as a paperback book. Three Sides of the Same Moon is due from NeoPoiesis Press in 2015. She is a contributing poetry editor for Return to Mago.