Son of a Poet

Son of a Poet

          - for Danny 

The son of a poet enters this world quietly, glistening with blood and amniotic fluid, peers out from half-closed lids with ancient wariness.

The son of a poet curls into the arms of a mother who sees metaphors in the shiny dark eyes of her boy, lineage of song in his tiny palms. 

The son of a poet already knows about loss and grief, the phoenix of love spread across his tender flesh like the shadow of an old tattoo. 

This male child soaks up languages no longer spoken from the milk of his mother’s breast. 

He hears too much, too soon, and can’t forget – anything. His small body hums with the confusing voices of ancestors. 

At three the son of a poet might call the first snowflakes he sees angels come down from heaven. 

At seven, the son of a poet weeps behind the sofa over the casual massacres of history.

At ten, music calls him, that fierce language remembered from the watery thrum of his mother’s voice.  

At twelve and thirteen, he watches his mother slumped over blackened pages, witnesses the terrible spilling of ink like slit wrists. 

He chews Thai peppers like a sacrament, baptizes his tongue in fire so it can speak the truth.

At fifteen, sixteen, the son of a poet endures taunts while fury rises up like a fever, seeps out to extremities of fingers, toes, hair, erupts into a rage that demands reparations for what’s been stolen. 

He learns about violations of the soul, how to turn a father’s slur with wry shrugs. 

He learns about laughter hammered out of betrayal, wonders why that’s so hard to understand. 

Mistakes make him writhe with shame, but the son of a poet never makes the same mistake twice.

At eighteen, the son of a poet walks out into the world forged like iron, melted like lead, brilliant as beaten copper.  

He travels far away from his mother, finds new teachers, tests mind and body as if neither will ever wear out.  

In this world, the son of a poet waits tables, rides the bus home with the night shift, the sleepless, the homeless. Spirits watch over him, hero of his mother’s best rhythms, drum beat of her heart. 

He survives love and the death of love.  He plunges his hand into his own chest, pulls out musical notes and medicinal incantations, brings his love back to life. 

Keeps walking toward the perfect language, just out of reach.

The poem his mother never thought she could write.

            - Deborah A. Miranda


About this poem (and my creativity-drought-experiment):

People are asking me for more commentary about my creativity-drought-experiment here on the blog.  Where are all these poems and pieces coming from if I'm in the middle of a dry spell???  What's the secret???

When I realized that I hadn't been writing at all, for a very long time, and did not feel any springs about to burst forth, I took one step that has turned out to be very useful: I started journaling again.  I used to journal daily, but again, it was almost involuntary - I could not NOT journal - yet, for a couple of years I hadn't even been doing that.

So I started journaling as a way to be able to say "at least I'm journaling."  It doesn't feel good.  They aren't GOOD journal entries.  I do them on my laptop, quickly, and to be perfectly honest, they are quite often WHINEY PIECES OF CRAP.

I write them anyway, keep them in a file on my laptop and, until beginning this experiment, I never looked at them again.  I don't date them.  I barely title them (give each one a semi-descriptive title or sometimes, lazily, just the first sentence as a title).  I mean, this is MINIMAL.

I've been doing that for the last few years.

Another thing I continued to do: participate in the timed free-writes I assign any current poetry workshop.  I do those in longhand, but keep the notebooks (and I had to buy notebooks rather than use writing pads, because I'd lose the pads or tear off the pages, and that wasn't allowing me to squirrel things away.)

Finally, if a word or phrase causes me to pause and say, "That sounds like a poem," I TRY to write it down in my notebook.  Even just the phrase.  Sometimes, I have time to freewrite using that idea.  That goes into the file unedited; good, bad or ugly.

Today's poem began with a chance conversation with one of my colleagues at W&L.  On December 28, 2011 (2011, folks!!!), Ed Craun said something to me about "the sons of poets" and I sat down at my computer, bashed out a paragraph (one long unbroken, unpunctuated, unedited freewrite) and sent it to him. 

Then I put it into a word file, moved it into my freewrite file on my laptop, and DIDN'T LOOK AT IT AGAIN UNTIL THIS MORNING.

Basically, I write crap, but I SAVE IT, and guess what?

It isn't all crap.  Sometimes it isn't all crap.  

So during this drought-ending-experiment online, I have been going back through journals and freewrites and making myself pick one to work on each morning.  Sometimes it takes half of my 1 to 1 1/2 hours of writing time to just choose one that doesn't suck too badly.  (That's key: I wake up, make tea or coffee, and HIDE AWAY FROM MY LIFE to write for one full hour.  Sometimes, on a lucky day, I get 1 1/2 hours.  This means, of course, GETTING UP AN HOUR EARLIER THAN USUAL.  Even when I haven't gotten enough sleep already.  Ugh.)

Why post it publically on my blog?

A couple of reasons.

First, public posting is a way to hold myself accountable.  Even if no one reads my blog, I IMAGINE that someone is reading my blog, and *I* am reading my blog, so I have made a contract to deliver something to that blog daily.  As I noted a few days ago, I cannot always keep that promise, but I give it a hell of a try.  That's good for me.  For my writing muscles, for my self-esteem, for keeping my committment to myself as a writer.  I wasn't SURE it would work out that way; I had to try it to learn that this daily exercise was working.  Now I know that it does provide me with motivation, so I'm even more likely to keep the promise.

Secondly, I have a book out there that I am also committed to promoting - for the important information in that book, for my tribe, for my publisher (whom I adore, Heyday!), for the Indian students, grad students and writers out there who have put their faith in me.  Blogs promote books, keep a writer's presence in the world fresh, snag new readers, and all sorts of other wonderful things.  Bad Indians cannot do all the work of lifting by itself, simply by existing.  Someone needs to advocate for it.  That someone must start with me.  Others can help - and you do! - but the primary responsiblity is on my shoulders.  I need (want) to be accessible, findable, meaningful for the readers of my book.

Thirdly, when a writer's blog is stale and not updated often, people googling that author for information are, to put it politely, UNIMPRESSED by that blog, and that trickles down immediately to the author and her book.  My colleagues Lesley Wheeler (The Cave, the Hive) and Chris Gavaler (The Patron Saint of Superheroes) both model the effectiveness of updated, fresh blogs for me in very inspirational ways.   If I am going to have a blog, I need to make use of it, use it to maintain contact with readers and researchers, use it to keep Bad Indians out there and viable.  Otherwise, my blog could actually do more harm than good.  Yikes.

Fourthly, I took part in the Postcard Daily Poem project last summer, posted them all to this blog, and it DID NOT KILL ME. In fact, I have a few good starts out of it that I'll continue to work on. 

HERE'S THE THING.  I know that posting daily writings on my blog is risky.  I KNOW that these pieces are not fully formed, not finished, not my best work.  I know that somewhere, some writer is laughing at what I put out there because I left in a cliche or missed the boat entirely.

That's okay.  That HAS to be okay.  No matter what, I am still exercising more control over my writing life than in the past few years.  And hey - revision is made for risk-takers.  

So that's the basic scoop.  I am writing to save my creative life.  I do not want to be another creative writer whose juices are dried up by the relentless pounding of academic concerns. Teaching full-time while having a full-time life as wife, mother, grandmother is NOT A WRITING-FRIENDLY SITUATION for many of us.  I used to feel very smug about my ability to write through anything (and inappropriately smug, since writing seemed to be a force of nature which came to me as an obsession rather than a gift - NOW who's sorry?!), and now I am one of those people gasping for words.  I was very resentful and very angry about that for a long time.  

Eventually, I had to put that resentment away and DO SOMETHING about the actual problem.

There you go.  Messy and not at all scientific.  But it works for me.  Hope this helps some of you out there too.

The Chronology of Truth

Elissa Washuta

Debra Magpie Earling

Ernestine Hayes

Yesterday I took part in a panel on the use of non-fiction by Native women writers at AWP. The panel was organized by Elissa Washuta, lecturer at the University of Washington and member of the Cowlitz Tribe,  and our panelists were Debra Earling (Bitterroot Salish tribe), and Ernestine Saankalaxt' Hayes (Tlingit).  It was one of the best discussions about the power of storytelling I’ve ever had with other Native writers, and my appreciation for these women and their work just fills my heart.  What a gift Elissa gave us!  The session was full of stories and gems, like Ernestine’s wondrous phrase, “Truth chronology” when responding to a question about narrative structuring of events.  There is a chronology to the truth, she said, a truth chronology which transcends temporal chronology. At least that’s what I heard.

So, what does writing non-fiction, as part of a multi-genre collection, mean for me as a Native women?  Well, it means that I have long since been seduced by the power of language to craft and change and save and, yes, when captive in the wrong hands, destroy.  It means that I learned early on to use words and story to keep myself from disappearing in a colonized world that didn’t need one more Indian child seen OR heard.  It means that I have learned to use whatever talent I possess with language as a weapon to fight for my tribe and our Ancestors, as a ceremony to praise our culture, our people, our history, and as a tool to do what I can to craft a future for us as we move forward into the 21^st century. 

Nowadays, I use language to keep my tribe from disappearing.  In large part because of my sister Louise Miranda Ramirez’s passionate pursuit of tribal recognition, her efforts to re-establish cultural knowledge, and her persistent (and as yet unfulfilled) push to have a small piece of our tribal homeland returned to us, I have found my way into the work of my life.  “Every time you publish something, every time you speak somewhere, re-tell a story found in some archive, I log it into our records,” Louise told me early on in my grad school career.  “I add it to the documentation for recognition.  I put it in the Tribal Newsletter. Your work makes us visible and real in the eyes of this colonizer’s government.”  My sister was letting me know that my work as a scholar was an extension of my responsibilities as a tribal member.

I have long been deeply suspicious of the entire tribal recognition process, and the past twenty years have only made me moreso.  This is a grueling story for another time; long story short, the process is hideously expensive – we are talking millions and millions of dollars per tribe – and the bureaucratic governmental wringer that the United States puts non-recognized Indian tribes through reminds me of a rapist being put in charge of supervising a rape victim’s court testimony.  But Louise and I understood long ago that we have found our place in this struggle side-by-side, each doing what she does best, as a compliment to the other.  Although we both had a contentious heart-bond with our father, it was with gratitude that Louise turned to me once and said, “The best thing our father ever did was give us each other.”  As usual, she hit the nail on the head.

So, while Louise works toward federal recognition (among many other goals she has for The Esselen Nation) I have turned my attentions as a scholar and poet to work that addresses my responsibilities as an Esselen tribal member.  I realized that our tribe’s story is scattered, fragmented, chopped up, strewn around the world in museum collections, library archives, family photo albums, newspaper morgues, anthropological publications, field notes, crumbling Mission records, and half-forgotten tape recordings of men and women whose voices wait for us to find them, and listen.  In order to re-assemble or reinvent a tribal identity, California Indians must be detectives, poets, theorists, dreamers, mosaic artists – in short, storytellers. Without a story of our own, I understood that The Esselen Nation would in fact become extinct, whether our bodies continue to exist or not.  Unfortunately, the story we have inherited is not a story which honestly represents us and is rarely, if ever, told by members of the Esselen Nation.

This was the impetus behind Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir – in which I used the multiple sources listed above, and multi-genre writing to pull our story back together.  As I’ve stated elsewhere, when too many pieces of a broken thing have been removed or are too damaged to reassemble, we are not just faced with loss.  We are also being given an opportunity to transform, to remake ourselves.  In Albuquerque at the Indigenous Book Festival, a Cahuilla woman told me that in her culture, potters are obligated to reuse the broken shards of pots to make new pots.  Obligated.  That’s a good word for how I felt as I uncovered or encountered the many shards of my tribe’s history: obligated to honor and re-integrate them, by whatever means necessary.

With non-fiction, for example, I can take a story from my grandfather about that light he used to see as a kid working as a vaquero on the Carissa Plains, and, with some research about that actual light – which turned out to be an airplane beacon on Mt. Diablo, 150 miles from him – write about the ways we are called back to our homelands and the power of those homelands and places of emergence.  The story is there – I knew that my grandfather’s fascination with that light was about something deeply moving for him.  I can hear it in his voice on the old tape recording, and feel it in his use of words.  But without the non-fiction research, I never would have known why.  Or explored my own fascination with the yearning for return, for xulin, a kind of taking back.  We might think that research – that academic , intellectual, analytic act – would make my grandfather’s story less personal, less heart-felt.  But it actually brings my grandfather and his story closer to me, more accessible, gives me ways to understand his fascination for a light located on one of the peaks in Ohlone creation stories might have also been a longing for home.

Recently I thought long and hard about another story from my book, the one about Vicenta Gutierrez, and how a non-fiction format was the best way to honor both the story and the voice of the young woman who told it.  Here’s the story, told by Isabel Meadows, the Carmel Indian woman who deposited her stories with ethnologist J.P. Harrington:

April 1935.

Vicenta Gutierrez, sister of El Huero Gutierrez, when a girl went to confession one evening during Lent, and Padre Real wanted to grab her there in the church.  And next day, nothing could be seen of the Padre there, and he was never seen again.  He probably fled on horseback in the night.  Some said he fled to Spain.  He was a Spaniard.  He grabbed the girl and screwed her.  The girl went running to her house, saying the padre had grabbed her.

I had a lot of questions about this story.  Why does Isabel Meadows tell Harrington this story about a girl named Vicenta who is raped by a priest?  And why retell this story one hundred years after the crime? Why give room to these particular destructive powers when trying to harness the creative powers necessary to create our mosaic history?  I knew these are questions that people would ask, even members of my own tribal community. 

There are, at least, four main acts of cultural work that this story performs.

1. It spotlights and gives voice to an act of colonization that is, to this day, under-reported.  Statistics tell us that 34% of Native women are raped sometime in our lives; 1 in 3!  and 80% of the rapists are non-Indian.   As Sarah Deer says, “[contemporary] Native American women suffer the highest rate of sexual assault in the United States,” yet when she travelled into Native communities,

advocates tell me that the Justice Department statistics provide a very low estimate, and rates of sexual assault against Native American women are actually much higher.  Many of the elders that I have spoken with in Indian country tell me that they do not know any women in their community who have not experienced sexual violence.  (456)

At the same time, prosecution against rapists of Native women are notoriously non-existent.  Last year, I read “Dear Vicenta,” the letter I wrote back to Vicenta Gutierrez in which I told her, “it happened to me as a kid,” at a reading of young Native students recently.  Afterwards, a young Native woman approached me.  She handed me a folded piece of notebook paper, said, “Thank you,” and left.  When I opened up the piece of paper, I saw that it was a letter.  It read, “Dear Professor Miranda: it happened to me as a kid, too.”  Clearly, Vicenta’s story is relevant to Indian women today. 

2.  I believe Isabel’s telling of Vicenta’s Story acknowledges rape as a colonizing weapon, and in fact asserts that rape of indigenous women is a crime.  Vicenta not only names names (“Padre Real”), but her speaking out about the rape calls attention to rape as a crime, and works as a call to action from her community.  Given the centuries of rape as a colonial weapon, and the generations of raped Indian women who came before her, Vicenta’s loud protest at the violation of her Indian body is nothing less than amazing.  I did some research: I located the young woman Vicenta Gutierrez in Monterey census records, established that she lived in Carmel during the 1835-1840 era of a priest named Jose Maria Real; I learned that he did, indeed, abruptly leave Carmel and was, in fact, the subject of several gossipy letters by other priests who noted that his ‘relationships’ with Indian women resulted in many children who bore his name.  Let me be clear: these priests were more concerned with the breaking of priestly vows than in the well-being of the Indian women and children.  In that time and place, when California Indians, especially women and children, were legally being sold as slaves, the rape of a native woman was almost an oxymoron.  If you were a native woman, you were a raped native woman.  You were available to be raped at any time.  So “telling” typically brought on more abuse, not justice.  And still, Vicenta told.                     

3.  The story preserves Indigenous women’s knowledge about being female, colonized, survivor.  The women of Vicenta’s community – including Isabel’s mother, aunts and friends - heard and remembered her story, but the oral tradition of our community, for many reasons, did not seem to have a viable future.  Isabel seemed to intuit that, in a perilous time, Vicenta’s narrative had to enter into the written realm, leave the community of Indian women, in order to return to us someday – as it turns out, almost two hundred years after it happened.  To me, this means that Isabel herself knew the power of story, and believed in our survival; she trusted that Indian women would, somehow, continue - and she knew we would need this story as part of our education as women.  Isabel learned about this kind of education from her mother, who learned it from her mother, and on backwards into time immemorial.  She passed on that inheritance in the only way she could: by making a white ethnologist into her stenographer!

4.  In this way, Isabel’s story also serves as a teaching device for Vicenta’s descendants, Isabel’s descendants, for contemporary California Indian women – for me, my sisters, our daughters, our granddaughters.  Through the vehicle of Isabel’s words, we are engaged in a very indigenous practice:  that of storytelling as education, as thought-experiment, as community action to right a wrong.  Isabel preserves and praises Vicenta’s brave act.  She exhorts the Indian women who will one day read Harrington’s notes to also speak out against injustice.  This has happened to other women, she says: they resisted.  You can resist too.

So my non-fiction response to this story, which in Bad Indians is a long letter written directly to Vicenta, gives me ways to have a kind of conversation with a young Carmel Indian woman who, like me, faced violation and resisted the silencing about violation our culture demanded.  It gave me the opportunity – and the responsibility – to enter into the education of other Indian women, and myself.  The ways in which I researched materials – finding Vicenta in an old box of my mother’s Xeroxed materials that included an 1836 Monterey Census, locating Vicenta in mission records, matching up her timeline with that of Padre Real, looking at Real’s documented relationships with other Indian women in the correspondence of other Franciscan priests in the area at that time – it all worked together to allow this conversation. 

Interacting with Vicenta’s story (which is what a non-fiction approach allows) makes me part of the thread that goes back over 100 years to Vicenta, and forward for hundreds more years into the lives and education of future Indian women.  Perhaps this is part of what Ernestine Hayes means when she says there is a chronology of truth: truth has its own time.  I know that I am grateful beyond words for this story.  It’s a kind of homecoming and belonging which I could never have predicted. 

Isabel, I feel certain, knew all of this, and acted on it.  She knew her responsibilities, knew they extended far, far into the future, beyond what she could see or imagine.  She knew storytelling was the vehicle that could go there.  She understood about Ernestine's Truth Chronology.  And she's still teaching us all these years later.  Nimasianexelpasaleki, Isabel!

BEING INDIAN AT AWP

I'm not naming names here, and I'm not picking on anyone personally.  But when non-Indian folks tell me glowing stories of the California Indian land their families OWN, complete with the grinding bowls and arrowheads and other artifacts they 'find' there, something awful happens to my stomach, my whole body curls up in a fist, and I have the sensation of baring my teeth in a snarl rather than smiling as I try to find the quickest escape route out of the room.  Inside I am pleading, 'please don't tell me this please don't tell me this please don't tell me this I am going to eviscerate you on the spot.' 

I don’t flee because I am afraid of conflict.  I don’t flee because hearing these stories hurts like hell.  I flee because I know there is only so long I can control myself.  I know that if I stay, my anger and my grief and my loss will literally throw itself at this person talking to me, and I will flay them alive.

This is being Indian in this country where we are artifacts, we are exotic, we are somehow here (so you can tell us these stories) and yet not here (so you can totally ignore the fact that you are talking about land stolen from us, taken from us, while we were being killed off or missionized or relocated or simply locked up). 

Yes, I am having a ‘primitive’ reaction.  In another panel, a non-Native used that word and said that he felt the land “like a primitive.”  Really?  On a panel with an Indian woman sitting right there, and he didn’t re-think the use of that word?

Here’s the thing.  Telling me about ‘owning’ that land, and ‘finding’ those ‘artifacts,’ is like saying, “Oh, you know that Mercedes my grandfather stole from your grandfather?  I’m still finding all of your grandfather’s stuff there – you know, his tools and his treasures, family heirlooms, stuff he meant to leave with you.  I really enjoy looking at them and knowing that it’s all mine.”

It feels like that.  Only worse.  

And don't get me started on writers from California who talk about being Native Californians.  Just don't even GO there.

I’m at AWP in Seattle.  Going to a large conference like AWP means seeing all kinds of wonderful people that I don’t get to see in my small-town, small southern liberal arts university environment.  Lots of Indians at AWP this year, more than I’ve seen in many years, and we are delighting in seeing one another at panels, in the hallways, having coffee, crossing streets.  It’s an Indian love-fest, that’s for sure.  And because I am rooming with Chickasaw Linda Hogan, a beautiful soul who has taken me in with her friendship and her deep kindness, I ride her coat-tails when other, more well-known Indian writers approach her to say hello.  Yesterday Kimberly Blaeser waved to us at the panel where Joy Harjo was reading, and afterwards we all stood around laughing and taking pictures.  Indians, as other Native people often say, laugh a lot more than we look stoic.  And I was total fan girl, asking folks to pose for photos.

Sherman Alexie's shoes: SHINY

Kim and John Purdy, a retired Native Lit professor who was one of the first to publish me (when he edited SAIL), invited us to have lunch with them.  As we walked out, John noticed Sherman Alexie checking in at registration; we hallo'd him, he turned around, and Linda immediately pounced; she told Sherman that he owed her an email, starting a hilarious comedic routine about porn and unusual sexual positions.  This is how Indians tease one another.  It was so much fun to watch.

So there are good, soul-feeding moments about being Indian too.  As I sit here in my hotel room drinking coffee, and Linda sits propped up in her bed across from me, working on a poem, I am reminded that Indians laugh, and tease, and cherish one another in fiercely alive ways.  We keep each other going.  We ease the sting of those small acts of colonization that find us at unexpected moments.  We connect across barriers seen and unseen.

Yes, we do.  Stolen land and all. 

Here's to Hope

We're sitting in the Pike Street Market Pub on a Wednesday afternoon, my son Danny (aka 'Daniel' in grad school) and I.  His class has fortuitously been cancelled on the very day I fly in from Virginia for a conference.  We've just walked along the waterfront under a semi-sunny sky, breathing in the smells from my childhood, adolescence, young adulthood - salt, kelp, tar, exhaust, the fry oil from Ivar's dockside restaurant where I remember the salmon fish and chips as some of the best junk food of my life.

As usual, Danny and I order our drinks with consideration.  A brewmeister himself, my son knows about beer.  He is a poet when he speaks of the making, the ingredients, the colors and subtle flavors, the carbonation, the foam, the many and varied containers, the alcohol content, the history of beer-making, and stories behind it all.  

As usual, the waitress cards him, though he is nearly 25; I tease him that he no longer looks 12 years old, he's moved up to 15.  "It's 'cause I shaved this morning," he laughs, stroking his nearly bare chin, "all ten hairs!" When his beer and my cider arrive, we toast one another with pleasure.  It's a rare day together, and we both know it and cherish it.

After an intense conversation about the state of our country and the world, governments and leaders, pope and money, religion and creeds, Danny concludes by telling me his own personal philosophy: that everything is connected via the planet, our bodies, and the cosmos, that we are part of something grand, magnificient, in which religion as we currently define it really does not play a part, the vastness is so much greater than what that word can imagine.

I look at him sitting there, my Classics major, my atheist, my ethical, loving, fiercely honest son who inherited so much of his Esselen/Chumash grandfather, but also so much of his Germanic/English Miller forebears.  And I say, "I am so proud to have you as my son."

And Danny looks right at me and replies, "I'm so proud to have you as my mother.  You got knocked down, and got right back up."

Just freeze that moment.  I'll take it with me to my grave as one of my prize possessions, the kind you CAN take with you.  Sometimes parenthood completely blows my mind.  How these beings we birthed with so much work and hope and fear and ignorance somehow grow into themselves, into humanness, recognizing their connectedness to the greater whole.  What a blessing it is to witness, to be part of that:

Here's to hope.