Primero— Felicidades to “La Bloga” celebrating its one-millionth reader in its 10th year. Orale, bravo, gracias fierce and loyal readers for your thoughtful, provocative, and wise comments. We look forward to many more years! One of the ways "La Bloga" writers decided to celebrate is by having a reunion in Chicago this July. "La Bloga" writers will be speaking at An International Latina/o Studies Conference, July 17-19th. If you are in Chicago in July, come and meet us. (click here for details)
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| Chicago, Illinois |
I begin this new
“La Bloga” decade writing on the work of poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and
playwright, Chris Abani.
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| Chris Abani |
Chris Abani’s
writing is an energetic, complex musical borderland crossing. No, he is not Chicano, just like many of
the beats and rhythms in the song “La Bamba” are not Chicano, not even Mexican
in the conventional, normative use of the term. “La Bamba,” like Republic of
Congo musician, Francois Luambo Makiadi (Franco), is not Chicano, yet both “La
Bamba” and Franco’s music are an interesting mix of Afro Latinidad.
A side
note: Last January, in my post,
“Twisting & Shouting Afro-Latino Musica,” I talked about Francois Luambo
Makiadi, better known as Franco, the music legend from the Congo. (Click here for the posting). Today, I
continue to write about African connections to Latinidad, specifically considering the writings of Chris Abani.
Abani is the
author of four novels, two novellas, six books of poetry. His most recent book
is The Secret History of Las Vegas (click here for the New York Times review).
He is Nigerian and also has British and American citizenships. For over a
decade, he has lived in Los Angeles, and this year, Abani moved to Illinois
taking a post in creative writing/English at Northwestern University.
His book, the
Virgin of Flames, offers readers multiple prisms of Los Angeles via its
inhabitants and their struggles with identity. Black and Iggy’s inner conflicts
create a vivid Los Angeles tapestry of cultural and gendered sexual
complexity:
With
an Igbo father and Salvadoran mother, Black never felt he was much of
either. It was a curious feeling,
like being a bird, he thought, swaying on a wire somewhere, breaking for the
sky when night and rain came, except for him it never felt like flight, more
like falling; falling and drowning in cold, cold water. When he felt the water rise, he would
morph.
“I’m
a shape-shifter,” he told Iggy once.
And
he was, going through several identities, taking on different ethnic and
national affiliations as though they were seasonal changes in wardrobe, and
discarding them just as easily . . .
Iggy
understood. He knew people often
said that—I understand—and it meant, Don’t tell me any more, I can’t hear
you. But Iggy, he knew, really
did. Time flies, he thought, time
flies and you never know where it has gone. He was thirty-six with nothing, except a spaceship that
didn’t fly and a bunch of paintings on the walls of the river to show for
it. Murals of Montezuma at his
local McDonald’s buying a Big Mac; mermaids draped on red couches, sometimes
with legs and a mighty python wrapped around their waists and dangling down
between their legs, sometimes with fish tails, with eyes of passion and fire,
eyes that could undo a man. There
was one of Charlie Chaplin as the Tramp heading off into the concrete
horizon. In another, an Aztec
priest held a young man bleeding to death while a car, gunfire spitting from
its windows, sped away into the city.
An Indian woman holding a gun and wearing a purple scarf stared
defiantly from another.
Hieroglyphics that he had created and whose meanings remained a mystery
even to him ran between the murals like frames. It seemed that as fast as he could paint them, the army
engineers (who’d built and maintained the river wall) covered them up; the army
and the bloody city council. But
somehow there were still many that managed to escape, and sometimes a homeless
person riding a bicycle or pushing a cart down the channel from a distance
looked like part of a painting, as though they had come to life; part of the
river’s memories and dreams . . .
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| East Los Angeles mural |
The
Virgin was important to the people here.
Not only as a symbol of the adopted religion of Catholicism, but because
she was a brown virgin who had appeared to a brown saint, Juan Diego. She was also a symbol of justice, of a
political spirituality. He had watched every year the procession to her, her
effigy carried high through the streets of East LA starting from the corner of
Cesar Chavez, held up, aloft, like a torch. (37-41)
Abani
does not flinch from painful truths his characters display. It is the job of the writer to sit in
meditation with them, unafraid to breathe in their every deep psychological cut
in order to exhale their words. These are characters whose loneliness and fear
mirror the society from which they come.
This is what Los Angeles has made.
Abani’s loving and respectful rendering, however, makes them and their
city beautiful. In his TED talk on
Humanity, Abani says, “We’re never more beautiful than when we’re most
ugly—that’s the moment we really know what we are made of.” (Click here to see Abani’s TED talk.)
Although I cannot speak (yet) on all of his literary works, from what I’ve read
so far, this quotation seems to be one main guiding force in his writing.
“La
Bloga” has mentioned Chris Abani before. In the “La Bloga” archives, I found
Manuel Ramos’ piece from 2008 (click here). Ramos listed Abani, one of the finalists for the Dayton
Literary Peace Prize for his novel Song For Night.
A
successful novelist, Abani is also an award winning poet, whose crisp
descriptions and elegant rhythms remind me of dirges, of song lamentations my
abuela used to sing so lovingly.
Here’s an Abani poem I know my abuela would have felt was her
story, her experience, her song:
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War
Widow
The
telephone never rings. Still
you
pick it up, smile into the static,
the
breath of those you’ve loved; long dead.
The
leaf you pick from the fall
rises
and dips away with every ridge.
fingers
stiff from time, you trace.
Staring
off into a distance limned
by
cataracts and other collected debris,
you
have forgotten none of the long-ago joy
of
an ice-cream truck and its summer song.
Between
the paving stones;
between
tea, a cup, and the sound
of
you pouring;
between
the time you woke that morning
and
the time when the letter came,
a
tired sorrow: like an old flagellant
able
only to tease with a weak sting.
Riding
the elevator all day,
floor
after floor after floor,
each
stop some small victory whittled
from
the hard stone of death, you smile.
They
used to write epics about moments like this.
Copper
Canyon Press
Wishing you all,
Queridas y Queridos “La Bloga” readers, a rich and most profound week!
