Chicano Poetics Heterotexts and Hybridities Alfred Arteaga Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997 |
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Chapter Five: Beasts and Jagged Strokes of Color
Juan Felipe Herrera’s “Literary Asylums” concludes with the line, “Outside beasts and jagged strokes of color blur.” This is the ultimate statement of a long poem which is divided into three sections, “Writing,” “Reading” and “Being.” As a final line, it engages and eludes, yet does address the trajectory of thought articulated across its three sections. In one sense, the line responds to the poem’s general concerns about representation, perspective and subjectivity. In another and more specific sense, the line creates ambiguity, makes unfinalized sense critical of the project of authoritative representation. “Literary Asylums” is a Chicano poem: it interanimates voices along the national boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. As such, it simultaneously considers and performs “writing, reading and being” on the border, the site of a full complement of cultural conflict. Border verse makes lines of poetry from the competing lines of discourse that crisscross the border zone. Here, the articulation of discourse puts into play an articulation of being at the interface of two national languages. “Literary Asylums” and other Chicano poems play in a poetics of hybridization that calls to mind the quotidian cultural politics of hybridization in the material space of the frontier. What is at play is the formation of a Chicano subject coming to be amid the competing discourses of nation. By poetics of hybridization I mean to convey a dialogic poetics. Two nations are imagined in English and in Spanish and differentiate themselves at a common border, yet Chicano border space is a heteroglot interzone, a hybrid overlapping of the two. The material border and the discourse of nation contribute to a poetics in such a way that Chicano poetry advocates what a superficial reading of Bakhtin would lead us to think is an oxymoronic goal—a dialogic poetry. “Literary Asylums” is one such poem. But for now let me suspend explication of its last line and embark on a long detour through a consideration of meaning on the border.
BORDER SENSE Consider the border: in the imagining of nation, it is the infinitely thin line that truly differentiates the U.S. from Mexico. The absolute certainty of its discrimination instills confidence in national definition, for it clearly marks the unequivocal edge of the nation. Its perceived thinness and keenness of edge are necessary for the predication of national subjectivity, which defines itself as naturally occurring inside its borders and not occurring outside. The national subject is conceived as an ideal, so that individual differences are suppressed in order to envision a national type embodying only essential characteristics. The U.S.-Mexican border is perceived as the thin line of demarcation and ultimate edge of respective world views that foster two nations. In their differing the two nations are similar, for both formulate a self in exclusion of what lies across the line. The thin borderline cleaves two national narratives, two national monologues of ideal and finalized selves. So while the U.S. and Mexico differ by virtue of the content of their narratives, their common use of the border analogously structures their narrative lines. U.S. American and Mexican understand clearly how each other is constituted, and each uses the other as absolute foil to define the self. And because of this, neither national can adequately perceive the Chicano. The narratives of nation are finalizing monologues of self that suppress dialogue with others. To the degree that one is American or Mexican, one is deaf [gluxoj] to others whose structures of definition differ. The Chicano lives not so much beside a notional borderline, but rather, in material borderlands where discourse is not Manichaean but finely gradated. And because the thin and severe borderline is an essential component in the narrative of the nation, the notion of a broader zone, a borderlands, is incomprehensible, for to begin to conceive Chicano space is to begin to erase the nation. The national narrative is univocal and when confronted with Chicano hybridization, it is not only deaf to one language (English or Spanish), it is also deaf to the fusion of hybridization. It is as unequivocally deaf to another language as it is deaf to interlingual play. National world views [krugozory] incorporate narratives, such as history, which may at times seem novelistic but which when yoked to the task of the nation, they effectively function monologically. Chicano poetry presents itself as lyric and music, less interested in narrating the history of the nation than in hybridizing actively. Its metaphors for poetry are song; for the border, a wound; for Chicanos ourselves, there is the irony of self as animal, derived from the extremely inaccurate representations we are given. The border zone affords space for mestizaje, racial hybridization, and for floricanto, poetic hybridization. The border zone is the site where the intercourses of sex and discourse play at the making of the Chicano body and the Chicano subject.
A river from the Gulf of Mexico to El Paso and a wire fence from El Paso to the Pacific forms a line that is imagined to prohibit the transgression of language. Border police patrol the line, stop speakers and fix nationalities. Two nations cleave along its edge and configure themselves in languages they imagine to cleave there too. The U.S. and Mexico dream themselves in different languages and dream those languages as essential to the self as the land. English signifies American; Spanish signifies Mexican. This is clearly the case; it is demonstrated at border crossings every day. As Mexican Nobel Laureate, Octavio Paz observes, “We can all reach the point of knowing ourselves to be Mexicans. It is enough, for example, simply to cross the border…” (Labyrinth of Solitude 12). The ultimate authority to arbitrate at the borderline is fundamental to conceiving the nation. The more unyielding the line and the more absolutely it segregates, the better it is able to define the nation. A thin border is preferable to a thick one because narrowness renders its discrimination unequivocal. Broadness invites ambiguity and subjects difference to an unclear zone and to a gray scale. In addition, the absolute lack of breadth of the ideal borderline ensures that there can be no gray inhabitants, for there is literally no space in the purely imaginary construct. The logic of the thin border is the logic that fashions the ideal nation, national subject and national narrative. Border links to narrative through history, for the border is a historical line. It outlines, for example, the flow of U.S. imperialism, the ultimate extent of manifest destiny and the ebb of Mexican territory after the U.S. conquest. And the logic of the thin border is applicable to history, where a narrow, unequivocal historical line is seen as most clearly narrating the nation. Like the border, the line of history defines the nations. As Paz observes, “To become aware of our history is to become aware of our singularity” (10). The logic of the thick border, however, is quite different. As Gloria Anzaldúa observes in Borderlands / La Frontera, “A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of a unnatural boundary…. It is in a constant state of transition” (3). The inhabitants of the border zone who partake in messy cultural interplay cannot be contained on the narrow conceptual axis of monologic nationalism. Their physical presence belies the fantastically thin border; they blur the hard edged distinctions. They are ill defining and ill defined and cannot not become subjects in the same way as nationalists. They cannot because for them there is no metonymic link of nation, place, language, and identity. The tendency to monologize is the driving force of identification for those who imagine possessing one land, one language, one history, and one national narrative. But this is not the case for those rendered aliens in their own lands or aliens in other lands. For in the zone of repeated culture clash, it is unmitigated homogeneity that remains illusory. The thin border marks the thick border’s inhabitants a species apart, because, as Anzaldúa states, “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them…. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants” (3). The material border has a significant impact on the linguistic performance of the Chicano. Linguistic media contest at each articulation, always signifying something in terms of national alignment.Chicanos speak English. Chicanos speak Spanish. The majority do some degree of language mixing, some type of hybridizing. Some primarily speak the hybridized argot, Chicano caló. In each case, the choice of language, in its effect on subject formation, can be neither disinterested nor indifferent. Linguistic articulation is read as national articulation by those imagining clear national difference. And in the borderlands there is always the bilingual backdrop of English and Spanish at the same time. The Chicano utterance plays against that backdrop, interanimating bordered differences in the act. This is perhaps why interlingual play is so prevalent in Chicano poetry: it is valorized in a poetics of hybridization that foregrounds in verse the discursive interplay of quotidian speech. And in a sense, this speaking style defines the Chicano: intercultural heteroglot. To be Chicano is to negotiate difference; it is a process, an active interanimating of competing discourses. Chicano caló and hybridized poetics put into motion unfinalized selves, failing at monologue, falling outside national subjectivity. Dialogism makes for a continual coming to be.
BORDERLINE DEAF Perhaps the most concentrated narration of the Mexican character is to be found in Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude. Paz begins his project of defining Mexicanness with a look to the edges: to the border and to Chicanos. In the first essay, “Pachuco and Other Extremes,” Paz declares that the Mexican can know himself simply by crossing the border; for Paz the border is a thin one and across it, “Even the birds speak English” (18). The North American character reveals itself to him because across the shared border, every characteristic illuminates recognition of difference in himself. That is simple. What is difficult for Paz is to consider a thick border. The Chicano remains elusive for him because the narration of the nation is blind to the borderlands and deaf to the voices there. “Pachuco and Other Extremes” considers Los Angeles, the city with the most Mexicans (and/or Chicanos) after Mexico City. Its character, however, eludes Paz; he is surprised by “the city’s vaguely Mexican atmosphere, which cannot be captured in words or concepts. This Mexicanism… floats in the air…. ‘floats’ because it never mixes or unites with the other world, the North American world…” (13). There is something barely tangible in the city, something that resists both alignment with the North American and comprehension by the Mexican. Paz finds a more disturbing ambiguity evident in the Los Angeles Chicano youth. “When you talk with them, you observe that their sensibilities are like a pendulum, but a pendulum that has lost its reason and swings violently and erratically back and forth. This spiritual condition, or lack of a spirit, has given birth to a type known as the pachuco” (13). The pachuco is a borderland inhabitant. What Paz considers a “lack of spirit” could well be the borderland condition to which his nationalist perspective has rendered him deaf. It is clear that Paz considers vacillation in regard to the nation wrong: “The pachuco does not want to become a Mexican again; at the same time he does not want to blend into the life of North America. His whole being is sheer negative impulse, a tangle of contradictions, an enigma. Even his very name is enigmatic: pachuco, a word of uncertain derivation, saying nothing and saying everything. It is a strange word with no definite meaning; or, to be more exact, it is charged like all popular creations with a diversity of meanings.” (14) Paz’s abhorrence of the lack of definite meaning or of the diversity of meanings reflects a monologic perspective, a perspective that by definition suppresses hybridity. So while “Everyone agrees in finding something hybrid about him, something disturbing and fascinating,” Paz nevertheless finds the pachuco “a pariah, a man who belongs nowhere” (16, 17). The pachuco commits the sin of hybridization and of not affirming a national narrative. “He denies both the society from which he originated and that of North America. When he thrusts himself outward, it is not to unite with what surrounds him but rather to defy it. This is a suicidal gesture, because the pachuco does not affirm or defend anything except his exasperated will-not-to-be. …he is revealing an ulcer, exhibiting a wound. A wound that is also a grotesque, capricious, barbaric adornment.” (17) Suicide and the “exasperated will-not-to-be” are what the nationalist perspective sees of the impulse to hybridize. The pachuco’s discourse is ineffectual because “his hybrid language and behavior reflect a physic oscillation between two irreducible worlds—the North American and the Mexican—which he vainly hopes to reconcile and conquer. He does not want to become either a Mexican or a Yankee” (18). The pachuco and the Chicano are enigmatic for Paz but only as an aberration that can be ignored. For by crossing the thin border, Paz was able to define the nation: “We can all reach the point of knowing ourselves to be Mexicans. It is enough, for example, simply to cross the border…” (12). Alurista, the Chicano poet from Tijuana and San Diego, responds to this in the poem, “Pachuco Paz”: we can all reach the point Alurista first responds to “Pachuco and Other Extremes” by playing with the Mexican author’s name: Alurista takes Paz literally and offers a reading of “Pachuco Paz” as pachuco peace. The effect is to destabilize the Mexican’s identity by focusing on name as a discursive act that is open to interpretation. And that interpretation is ironic, running contrary to the literal peace, for Paz attacks the pachuco with wounds, suicide, and a name that says nothing. Alurista’s “Pachuco Paz” is double-voiced, first in the irony of Paz’s meaning, and then in the literal definition that infuses Paz’s name, that is, his self definition. The Chicano play with name-as-discourse is an act of dialogism; Alurista makes poetry of the refraction that breaks up the possibility of monologic vision. In effect, he recasts the Mexican’s trip to Los Angeles from a trip across the borderline to a move into the borderlands. “Pachuco Paz” works in its movement between two points, two chronotopes where subjectivity is worked out. The first is Alurista’s appropriation of Paz’s simple formula for self-knowledge, “We can all reach the point of knowing ourselves to be Mexicans. It is enough, for example, simply to cross the border….” The first eight lines of the poem point to the inability of the Mexican to read the Chicano. For in the Mexican national vision, placas (neighborhood specific graffiti) remain indecipherable, Chicano thought “floats” like an “atmosphere, which cannot be captured in words or concepts.” The second point begins at line nine, where Paz’s inability to perceive Chicano texts visually is complicated with the delineation of oral and aural texts. Not only can the Mexican neither see nor read Chicano words, but his conception of writing is inappropriate for approaching Chicano texts. The Chicano poem is music, rhythm and heartbeat, a festival of silence for those deaf to border discourse. The points contrast clearly: for Paz self definition occurs in the instant of border transgression, while for Alurista the where and when of selves happens in rhythm. For the Chicano there is no single flash of self-knowing, subjectivity is drawn out as in a musical performance. The nation eludes the Chicano who remains “hunting in our own land / nuestra tierra.” Alurista’s poetry puts into play the poetics of hybridization. “Pachuco Paz” juggles national languages and discourses in order to juggle Chicano space in the borderlands. It takes up its position through various relations with the ambient discursive hierarchies. That this occurs in poetry is ironic, given Bakhtin’s understanding of the poetic tendency to monologize. The tendency of verse toward monologism, toward the codification and finalization of national identity, this epic tendency, is confronted by the borderland propensity for dialogism. In the Chicano context, for some reason, a dialogic poetry prevails and it is the narrative of nation that is perceived to be monologic. From the borderland perspective, the narrative of nation is not novelistic, that is, it is not like Bakhtin’s notion of the novel, unfinalized and temporally oriented from the present toward an open future. Here, the narrative of nation is perceived in its capacity as authoritative line, as history (narrow line from past to present nation), as dead word blocks for the building of nation. Alurista emphasizes the form of the form, that is, he focuses on hybridization itself. The reader of his poetry must actively negotiate interlingual terrain, often ultimately having to write in order to read. Chicano poetry is active, or perhaps, interactive, because meaning is always coming to be in a dialogue between author and reader. In “Pachuco Paz,” for example, the reader must choose how to read Paz. The poetics of hybridization opposes finalization in principle, and the Chicano realization of that poetics opposes the finalization of national identity through practice, since finalization terminates dialogue, and dialogue, for whatever reason, is the dominant Chicano discursive relation to the world. Because of this, the active coming to be of Chicanos is played out in the poem: unfinalized, hybridized, dialogic. The tendency to read the Chicano dialogically opens the door to a broad range of readings. French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy considers racial hybridization in terms of discursive dialogism. In “Cut Throat Sun,” he ponders the Chicano’s mestizaje, that is, miscegenation from European and Native American sources. For Nancy the hybridization of race, like that of language, affects the Chicano notion of self. Mestizaje is a biological borderlands where bodies come to be in the competition among genetic codes. But Nancy is not interested in race as essence, rather in mestizaje as process. He views the mestizo as unfinalized subject and as such, difficult to discuss, “Reservation: Isn’t it already going too far to talk about mestizaje? As if mestizaje were ‘some thing,’ a substance, an object, an identity (an identity!) that could be grasped and ‘processed’.” What Nancy contributes to the consideration of the Chicano/pachuco/mestizo, is the temporal expansion of the borderland chronotope. While others increase the width of the border to a material space for the living, Nancy increases the aspect of time. “Mestizaje is always a very long, vast and obscure story. It is such a slow process that no one can see it happening. A single mestizo does not make for mestizaje. It takes generations—and more, an imperceptible drift towards infinity.” The unfinalizability of the mestizo stems not only from hybridity but from the extreme length of time that the process of mestizaje takes. The non-mestizo, the imagined racial pure bred, is finalized because there are no factors contributing to its coming to be. While the pure bred exists self-referentially, the mestizo is still making sense. “A mestizo is someone who is on the border, on the very border of meaning.” The mestizo is unfinalized and its meaning is not frozen because it is still becoming. In this sense, one cannot be a mestizo. From this perspective, when Mexico identifies itself as a nation of mestizos, it finalizes mestizaje in creating the national subject: Mexican but no longer mestizo. The Chicano too, in identifying the self as mestizo racial subject or as Chicano national subject, finalizes it. The Chicana border philosopher, Gloria Anzaldúa, provides a metaphor that recalls Paz and Alurista to the living border. In “The Homeland, Aztlán / El otro México,” opening chapter of Borderlands / La Frontera, Anzaldúa states: “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture.” (3) The border is an open wound bleeding between two nations. A third country (though not nation) and a border culture emerges in the active bleeding and the confluence of bloods. In short, the borderlands are the site for ongoing hybridization, where being occurs in the blood flow before it can be fixed in a scab. Anzaldúa’s metaphor of the border-as-wound, recalls Paz’s vision of the pachuco’s wound as “grotesque, capricious, barbaric adornment.” In their own ways, both Anzaldúa and Paz view the Chicano as flaunting the border. This flaunting is for Alurista the rejection of nation, who in his introduction to Nationchild Plumaroja again responds to Paz, “we do not recognize capricious borders on the Red Continent.”
BORDERLAND SINGING Lorna Dee Cervantes also addresses the border lesion in verse, “Let me show you my wounds: my stumbling mind, my / ‘excuse me’ tongue, and this / nagging preoccupation / with the feeling of not being good enough.” Cervantes’s poems often work out the relationship of writing and coming to be in the borderlands. Her first book, Emplumada, and the forthcoming Bird Ave, locate the poems’ enunciation in San José, California, her hometown and the Chicano center of Northern California. The poems chart the transgressing lines and contending trajectories that cross her home, often in the metaphor of border crossing, migratory birds. The titles of her collections tell of her use of that metaphor; both emerge from the vocabulary of birds. The Spanish title orchestrates a range of tropes that color the text: Emplumada, i.e., pen, feather, pen flourish, plumage. Bird Ave, on the other hand, functions as the straightforward street address, Bird Avenue, but also as ambiguous, interlingual play: Bird ave, i.e., Bird bird. Both titles point to the central metaphor of birds and their migratory crossings, and further, both assert an interlingual dynamic of English and Spanish in dialogue. While the migratory bird metaphor addresses the multiple transgressions of the borderline, it is the interlingual play that actually enacts the poetics of hybridization of the border zone. Cervantes’s poems play out such a poetics in their repeated pitting of discourse against discourse. Hers is a polyphonic poetry set in the material space of San José, a heteroglot poetry in which discourse engages alternative discourse. Her home is a site of hybridization where any articulation is infused with, marked by, discursive alterity. The lines of contention do not simply cross, but rather lacerate and pull apart, the border space. It is worth noting that her second collection of poetry abandons the bird metaphor for the virulent title, From the Cables of Genocide. An examination of Emplumada reveals Cervantes’s employment of the poetics of hybridization. Border transgression, north and south crossing, is the subject of two poems, “Oaxaca, 1974” and “Visions of Mexico While at a Writing Symposium in Port Townsend, Washington.” South is not only to Mexico but further to Mexico’s South, to the Native (and largely non-Spanish speaking) city of Oaxaca. “Oaxaca, 1974” enacts in interlingual dialogue the deafness of Mexico to the migrant Chicana, the inability of Mexican nationals to engage Chicano speech. While “My brown body searches the streets / for the dye that will color my thoughts,” “México gags, / ¡Esputa! / on this bland pochaseed”. In Mexico, Chicano discourse is only read as defect, a negation, with pocha signifying a weak, faded, lacking Mexican. “Visions of Mexico” first moves south to Mexico then north. In the section “México” communication is nonverbal, “When I’m that far south, the old words / molt off my skin,” “I watch and understand,” “We work / and watch seabirds elbow their wings / in migratory ways, those mispronouncing gulls / coming south / to refuge or gameland.” Chicano discourse is represented in a manner reminiscent of Alurista’s music, rhythm and heartbeat: for Cervantes it is music, rhythm, heartbeat, and animal: My sense of this land can only ripple through my veins “Visions of Mexico” moves north in the section, “Washington,” and significantly, North is not simply north of the national borderline, but north of the borderlands. In Washington, the Chicana again confronts a monologic world view: in the North, Chicanos are envisioned in stereotypes or not at all. “I heard them say: México is a stumbling comedy. / A loose-legged Cantinflas woman / acting with Pancho Villa drunkenness. / Last night at the tavern / this was all confirmed / in a painting of a woman.” Yet the purpose of the trek north is to gain writing skills, skills that when employed by the Chicana can express the ineffable and belie the stereotypes. there are songs in my head I could sing you Several of the poems wage the intercultural warfare of California on the pages of Emplumada. “Poema Para Los Californios Muertos” is a particularly potent criticism of the use of history on the border. The poem reacts in rage to a historical plaque that makes token reference to the Mexican inhabitants of pre-conquest California. “Yo recuerdo los antepasados muertos. / Los recuerdo en la sangre, / la sangre fértil” [I remember the dead ancestors. I remember them in my blood, my fertile blood]. “In this place I see nothing but strangers. / On the shelves there are bitter antiques, / yanqui remnants / y estos no de los Californios” [Yankee remnants and those not of the Californios]. The strongest condemnation of the deafness of others to the borderlands is “Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War Between Races.” After delineating a utopia of poetry and peace, “Poem for the Young White Man” describes a violent borderland where racial warfare abounds, where the poet/speaker is attacked. “I’m marked by the color of my skin. / The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly. / They are aiming at my children. / These are facts.” “Every day I am deluged with reminders / that this is not / my land / and this is my land.” In describing a situation unimaginable to the young White man, the poet acknowledges that their different world views are in conflict. Cervantes undermines the “truth” of the other’s views, yet simultaneously undermines and advances her own. “I believe in revolution / because everywhere the crosses are burning, / sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner, / there are snipers in the schools… / (I know you don’t believe this, / You think this is nothing / but faddish exaggeration. But they / are not shooting at you.)” The words “these are facts” and “you think this is nothing but faddish exaggeration” accomplish several things. First, they establish the veracity of the speaker and undercut the authority of the young man’s objection. But in addition, when read after the hyperbole of “sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner,” the objecting claim to “exaggeration” seems warranted. In other words, the poem has it ambiguously both ways. In Cervantes’s hybridized poetics, truth is not possible if one participant in dialogue is deaf; truth is constructed among the hearing and speaking participants. In California, truth is dialogic. It is no wonder then that in the homeland of Emplumada, where the Mexican and the Anglo-American are deaf to Chicano hybrid discourse, Chicano identity itself is extremely problematic. In “Barco de Refugiados,” for example, Chicanos are denied the thin borderline that has been crossed by so many other immigrants, from Puritan refugees at Plymouth Rock to Vietnamese refugees in Silicon Valley. That hard edged separator of nations is drawn out for Chicanos who are therefore never permitted to transgress cleanly, clearly. For Chicanos the refugee ship is “El barco que nunca atraca” [“The ship that will never dock.”]. And yet, as borderland inhabitants, we are afforded a keen sense of hearing. In “From Where We Sit: Corpus Christi” those of us who read hybrid verse can hear and understand those whom tourists, those inter-national border crossers, cannot. We are not deaf to the language of birds: We watch seabirds flock the tour boat. The tourist, the Mexican, and the young White man, are deaf to Chicano discourse; they can hear something but it must sound like the inarticulate growl and coo of beasts. “outside beasts and jagged strokes of color blur” Let us now return to the last line of “Literary Asylums” and conclude our detour through the border. Juan Felipe Herrera ends “Literary Asylums” in bright light; he is concerned with the quality of vision, with the sharply focused and with the blur. The poem extends through “Writing,” “Reading,” and “Being” and articulates a discourse of class. The borderland inhabitant is not merely Chicano, pachuco, and mestizo, but the “unrich” as well. And to the realm of the deaf, the Mexican, the tourist, the White man, Herrera appends the blind, the artist. Artistic representation is offered as metaphor for discursive relationships. In “Writing,” the first section, true writing and history are presented as the expression of the power of the rich. The rich view the work of the unrich as “verses from the colony of beasts.” The rich observe that the unrich “beast obeys the master’s wish” but wonders if given authority, “Will they still obey an invisible voice? Will the creatures be able to pronounce / the new language? / What words? What signs? What writing?” The vision of the poor as beasts seems clearly ironic, but in “Writing,” the beast-like character of the unrich is confirmed in ambiguous lines, “Obviously, unrich writers are not animals, not reptiles. It does not matter/ They are prowling at the master’s gate.” In “Reading,” the unrich reader and listener is described as “the conquered, the unkempt, the wounded, the forgotten…,” terms that recall Paz’s description of the pachuco as the pariah with a wound. Who is a beast and who has the authority to so call one? This is what is at stake in “Literary Asylums.” The poetics of hybridization asserts that “truth” and meaning are worked out in dialogue, but what sort of dialogue is possible with the visual representation of the blind yet powerful? And even if one can paint another as a beast, what does it mean? This is answered in the last line, albeit ambiguously so. In considering “Outside beasts and jagged strokes of color blur,” it seems that particular significance rests in the last word, “blur.” But in working toward it linearly, we are first confronted with outside.Outside is not inside and so is differentiated by a thin but absolute line. It is not so much another inside as it is the absence of inside. It is some zone beyond the margins of civilized humanity, the territory of marginalized human beasts. “Jagged stroke” either cut or paint color, that is, race or hue. If we posit “jagged strokes of color” as metonym for visual representation and metaphor for writing, then we enable at least two readings of the blur, the inside and the outside readings. The meaning of the last line from the inside perspective might be paraphrased as, “The poor and their depiction by the rich meld and cannot be differentiated” or again, “The images of the poor held by the rich are true.” Here the act of blurring reinforces authoritative representation: signifier and signified collapse into an existential essence, what is said, is. Such blurring underscores the belief in a harmonious correspondence between inside story and outside reality. It asserts the absolute accuracy of inside representation and obscures any question of turning the gaze back upon the project of inside writing or upon the slant of inside stories. The logic of this blurring is the logic of the thin border, for it rests upon the absolute distinction between inside and outside, a logic by which the blurring of others sharpens the view of self. It may seem ironic that the sharp edge border between the two is supported by blurry vision, but in that the logic of the thin border is monologic, this makes sense. For the monologic differentiation of self and other prohibits dialogue that would work toward dialogic truths. Monologic truth is deaf and nearly blind. It can therefore imagine others as beasts. The blurred images of beasts and the fuzzy hearing of growls and coos is the work of the single line. A reading from the outside, however, could be quite different. “Outside beasts and jagged strokes of color blur,” could be read from the borderlands as, “The poor and their self-depiction distort representation by the rich” or, “The self image of the poor belies the image held by the rich.” From the outside, blurring impugns the melding of signifier with signified and its consequent corroboration of the “inside” world view and instead, obscures that vision. It is a parallax view that undermines the absolute authority of any monocular perspective. Consideration of perspectival and contextual difference weakens inside claims for authority because it opens the possibility for dialogue. From the borderlands perspective, blurring dialogizes. There are, of course, more ways to read that one line of verse. But to consider other meanings for blur is to enter dangerous territory, where poets bay and a vague Mexicanism floats in the air. And there on the border of meaning, one might lose oneself.
© 1997 by Alfred Arteaga For complete text inclucing poems, notes, and works cited, see print version |