WOMEN AMONG US: ACHY OBEJAS

(Achy Obejas, photo courtesy of Depauw University)

Achy Obejas is a brilliant, innovative, lyrical novelist and poet whose work is a motherlode of synthesis. She uses her solid background in journalism to report on culture, but with a poet's sensibility, using a combination of brevity and metaphor to animate across borders.

She was born in Cuba in 1956 and brought to the U.S. by her parents after the Cuban revolution at age six. She grew up in Michigan City, Indiana, with her parents expecting to eventually return to Cuba. Instead, in 1979 Achy moved to Chicago, where she has lived as an out dyke who writes with authority and grace on embracing multiple identities.


The biography up at her website states:

Achy's poetry and fiction have been published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Indiana Review, Story, La Gaceta de Cuba, Habana Elegante, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Best of Helicon Nine, Another Chicago Magazine, Abraxas, Antigonish Review, Bilingual Review, Conditions, Ikon, Interstate, Phoebe/George Mason University Review, Rambunctious Review, Revista Chicano-Riqueña, Sing Heavenly Muse!, Sinister Wisdom, Strong Coffee, Third Woman, and many others.

An award-winning journalist, she worked for more than ten years for the Chicago Tribune writing and reporting about arts and culture. Among literally thousands of stories, she helped cover Pope John Paul II's historic 1998 visit to Cuba, the arrival of Al-Queda prisoners in Guantánamo, the Versace murder, and the AIDS epidemic.

She writes regularly about Latin music for the Washington Post and about books for In These Times.

Her articles have appeared in the Village Voice, Vogue, Playboy, Los Angeles Times, MS, Weep, Nerve.com, Latina, Latin Girl, Poz en Español, The Nation, Out, Chicago Reader, The Advocate, Girlfriends, Windy City Times, High Performance, New City, Chicago Reporter, The Catalyst, Chicago, Chicago Sun-Times, Hispanic, La Raza, Hispanic Link (a bilingual national syndication service), and many others.

Achy's translation projects have included Maria Torres Piers' By Heart (Temple University Press); catalogue text for "Passionately Cuban," an art exhibition at the University of Albany, Albany, New York; catalogue text for the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria; Picturing Cuba (University of New Mexico Press, 2002) by E. Wright Ledbetter; and articles for the Chicago Tribune. She was recently contracted by the family of the late Cuban poet laureate Nicolás Guillén to produce a new translation of his work, including the classic "Motivos de Son" (the only authorized English version was previously translated by Langston Hughes in 1948).

During her career, Achy has received a Pulitzer for a Tribune team investigation, the Studs Terkel Journalism Prize, several Peter Lisagor journalism honors, two Lambda Literary awards, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, and residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale and the Virginia Center for the Arts, among other honors.

Her work has been translated into Spanish, German, Hungarian and Farsi. She has lectured and read her work in the U.S., Cuba, Mexico, Spain, Argentina and Australia, and has served as the Springer Writer-in-Residence at the University of Chicago and the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Hawai'i.

Achy Obejas is currently the Sor Juana Visiting Writer at DePauw University in Chicago.

Watch Achy Obejas read from her current novel Ruins at Galeria De La Raza in San Francisco on 14 January 2009:


QUOTES FROM ACHY OBEJAS:

“I like to think that a poem sort of floats above the banalities of things like calendars and clocks. And I like that space that poetry puts you in—where all logic is suspended.”

Not in Cars

dark danger in the shadows of the city city city driving
by the danger darkness urban building and the men men
that serve as girders beams the backbone of the danger
men in windows stories high indiscriminately lurching from
the speeding cars the freeway thieves that drop their
compliments their vile demands commands from rusting
cars on cracking crosstown roads twisting twisted shadows
grotesque mouths that vomit words like green white bullets
to the womyn on the sidewalks in the buildings not in cars

~~ from Sinister Wisdom #16, 1981

"It's just that sometimes other lives lived right alongside mine interrupt, barge in on my senses, and I no longer know if I really lived through an experience or just heard about it so many times, or so convincingly, that I believed it for myself--became the lens through which it was captured, retold and reshaped." ~~ from Memory Mambo

Llorona

cry sorrow sorrow
coming with your dried snakes charm
charming the crazed and
the innocent with your lyrical
lunacy
mystical
tales of the moon
you claim immortality
you
you think you'll find me there
docile
bewildered
the lost child torn from
you by demons that swirl and
burn amidst the golden
brown hair of your devil devil
child
oh cry sorrow with
your spells and the magic no
one doubts you own
the power that swallows everyone's
fantasies
you claim life forever
using scars for tears and a
noise noise that shakes
reverberates
beating all the passion
with a passion
the black sweet bruises and dark systems
wanting to wring them out of
me out of you
you claim life forever
again and again thinking
I'll be there steady ready
to take up the fight
of mother and daughter divided
unsatisfied forever
antagonistic cry sorrow
let your ovary
throb from the pain of my absence
I am the daughter the children
shredded castrated decapitated
in the arid desert
the blood red flames in your eyes
which serve as blinders
to keep you from seeing what
you wish not to see

take a white woman to lie
with you
clean smooth as
enamel
the veins plainly visible
through vinyl skin
rest your head on what
you claim so close to perfection
and take repose
rest rest
but when when all seems finally
quiet
there's a beat beat
a beat in your head
a pain in your abdomen

y
siempre
siempre por las
noches
there's that fearful wailing

~~from Sinister Wisdom #16, 1981

LINKS TO ACHY OBEJAS:

Achy Obejas website
Her MySpace page
Bio at Voices from the Gaps
Interview with Achy Obejas about Days of Awe at the National Yiddish Book Center

BOOKS BY ACHY OBEJAS:

Ruins, 2009, Akashic Books, ISBN-10 : 1933354690
This Is What Happened In Our Other Life (Body Language), 2007, Midsummer Nights Press, ISBN-10 : 0979420822
Days of Awe, 2001, Ballantine, ISBN-10 : 034543921X
Memory Mambo, 1996, Cleis Press, ISBN-10 : 1573440175
We came all the way from Cuba so you could dress like this?, 1994, Cleis Press, ISBN-10 : 093941693X

ONLINE WRITINGS AVAILABLE (Available at her website via Other Writings)

"My Own Private Cuba", an account by Obejas -- in both English and Spanish -- of her most recent visit to Cuba, published in The Chicago Tribune, 19 January 2002

"The End Of The Affair", an article by Obejas about Cuba and Alma Guillermoprieto's memoir Dancing with Cuba, published in The Nation on 15 March 2004

"From Havana With Love", an article by Obejas on how "A new generation faces Cuba's dark reality", published in The Village Voice in February 2001


[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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ME, LIZA, AND HERR ISSYVOO

(Christopher Isherwood; photo from an exhibition at The Huntington)

I tape the Rachael Ray show each day because, while I vastly enjoy her quick meal preparation tips, I usually cannot abide the rest of what she airs. Taping lets me fast-forward to the EVOO section, as I think of it.

This week, however, she's had Rosie O'Donnell on a couple of times, and I've been watching them interact, thinking about how much Italian and Irish immigrants shaped American culture and g*d bless us all for their contributions. Rosie is hawking a prime time variety special tonight. I hope it works. I grew up on variety shows and miss them. I also miss Hollywood musicals. Maybe once we fix the economy, stop the wars, and get us all health care, we can outlaw most so-called reality TV and bring back intelligent TV on a grand scale.

I heard this week they've canceled Pushing Daisies. Figures, they also canceled Dead Like Me and Firefly.


Rosie glowed as she announced the opening number would be with Liza Minelli. I was glad to see Liza not treated like a joke for once. It was hard to suffer through the whole David Gest debacle. I feel a special kinship to Liza Minelli because my mother felt a special kinship for Judy Garland and I more or less inherited cutting these women some slack. When I was 14, I was present at the birth of a hyperactive puppy whom I named Liza and who became my devoted companion for 15 years. I went to more than one Liza Minelli concert, back in my stomping dyke days (on the quiet, of course). When Rosie burst out into "It's Liza with a Z, not Lisa with an S -- " I knew all the lyrics. I have every Heloise book, and when I use the word "rawther", I imagine Liza as a frantic, neglected child trying to garner adult attention with hypervolubility.

Then in 1972, my senior year in high school, Liza won the Oscar for Cabaret. I drove to Wichita Falls, an hour away, to see it with an older woman I was soon to seduce. It was my first time to see an openly gay character on screen -- even though Cliff Bradshaw, as butchered by the screenplay, was a watered-down version of gay. I was electrified. The earth's axis tilted in a new direction.

It wasn't simply the queerness. It was the entire portrayal of a so-called decadent culture (but one I would have given my eyeteeth to live among) right before Nazis commenced their slaughter. And, in particular, it was how Art could be used to comment on what was happening, to laugh in the face of fascists, with survival of ideas if not individuals. My 17-year-old self could not shut up about it.

Also, when Liza as Sally Bowles sang about her former roommate Elsie (with whom she shared four sordid rooms in Chelsea), when she talked about the death of the druggie whore and how "the neighbors came to snicker", the bitterness of her voice flooded me with the realization that Liza was defending her mother. Standing up for Judy. Of course they gave her the Oscar for that.

My closeted English teacher, Miss Duff, informed me the screenplay was based on a short novel by Christopher Isherwood, who had in fact known the real Sally Bowles and lived in Berlin as an out gay man as Hitler rose to power. She also told me Isherwood had been friends since boyhood with W.H. Auden.

I knew about Auden. My mother had read me his poetry since I was a baby, and only a couple of years earlier, I'd read an article about him in The Saturday Review which hinted strongly that he was a Homosexual. I felt something like a divine hand, leading me.

Somehow I found The Berlin Stories at a library in that exceedingly rural, exceedingly fundamentalist region of North Texas.

There are some books whose opening lines create such emotion in you, it's possible you would wipe their memory from your brain in order to experience them for the first time again. Like:

"Tom!"

No answer.

"Tom!"

No answer.

"What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You Tom!"

No answer.

Or: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

Well, among those eternal openings for me is the plunge into The Berlin Stories:

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

I knew, in every cell of my body, what he was talking about. He was an Outsider, who accepted his exile but would not cede his dignity or his right to witness, and who was now exercising his right to tell the tale. He handed me a way to live, in that instant. I wasn't going to be Sally Bowles, and certainly not Elsie -- I was going to be the camera, the one who got out alive with a record to give the world later.

Thank you, Herr Issyvoo. Thank you, Liza, and Rosie, and Miss Duff. It's time for me to make a meal and go watch a variety show, thinking about the possibilities of cabaret and commentary. Thank you all, for not snickering.

(Christopher Isherwood, left, and Don Bachardy, a couple chronicled in "Chris and Don", in the early 1980s; photo by Jack Shear -- Zeitgeist Films)

[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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BOOKS ARE THE LOVE OF STRANGERS

(Traveler, image copyright by Houston photographer Cara Barer, shown at Pine Street Art Works)

When I was a child, I was home sick with asthma one school day out of five, mostly confined to my bed. Until age nine, this would be in a tiny trailer room with a vaporizer running. My mother was overwhelmed with my little brother, a household to run absent my father, my enraged and epileptic teenaged brother, not enough money, and her own serious health issues. If she made sure I had books, she could leave me on my own for most of the day.

She began reading to me the day after I was born. She'd bought a children's set of encyclopedias before my birth, during a time when money was more flush than usual, and sprinkled throughout each thick maroon volume were clusters of poetry deemed suitable for kids. Which, in the 1950s, was much more challenging literature than it might be now. Probably the first poem she ever recited into my newborn ears was "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes. I knew it by heart by the time I was five.


I vividly remember her voice expressively rendering "Wynken, Blynken and Nod", "The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat", "Solomon Grundy", "The Lady of Shalott", "In Flanders Fields", "Gunga Din", "Annabel Lee", "Casey at the Bat", "The Owl and the Pussycat", "O Captain My Captain", "The Swing", "Ozymandias", "Little Orphant Annie", "Stopping by Woods", "Sea Fever", "The Tyger", "Cremation of Sam Magee", and reams of Millay and Dickinson. For bedtime stories, she picked up A.A. Milne, the Villagers of Chelm, Lewis Carroll, Dorothy Parker's poetry, fairy tales, Just So Stories, or Shakespeare. No picture books or simple rhymes for me, I was already addicted to complex language.

When I reached school and the world of public libraries, I discovered horizons without end: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, Marguerite Henry, L.M. Montgomery, The Secret Garden, Harriet the Spy, Eleanor Estes, E.B. White, Beverly Cleary, Jim Kjelgaard, Wind in the Willows, Albert Payson Terhune, The Borrowers, plus thrilling series like Tom Swift, The Bobbsey Twins, Donna Parker, and those by Troy Nesbitt. We often moved three times a year, which meant a stream of new libraries to loot. Mama would go with me my first time to the library and, nearly always, persuade the librarian to allow me to check out as many books as grown-ups were allowed. Sometimes I had to audition for this access -- Mama would have me recite from adult literature, because memorization was a skill I had down cold. I'm sure the sight of a six-year-old declaiming with cynical passion these lines from MacBeth must have startled the old ladies who ruled the stacks in small West Texas or Louisiana towns:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

If a town had no library (which was common), if the school shelves were ill-stocked or I'd read everything on them (also common), I was allowed to raid Mama's stack beside her bed. I discovered Philip Wylie and Agatha Christie by age eight. The first gave me nightmares, the second introduced me to the permanent joy of mysteries. If those ran dry, I returned to the children's encyclopedia, not just to reread poetry which seemed to be how I had learned to think and speak, but also munching my way through the listings from aardvark to zyzygy. Books were my promise of a world where people had hope and beauty, enough to eat and communities who noticed them.

When I reached puberty, we had moved to a place where I began to make the first real friends of my life and I was able to plug into a rural culture where my mother's family had lived for generations before me. That school library was perhaps the sketchiest of any I ever saw, but a new town library plus the generosity of teachers enabled me to read more than ever. And to specialize in my reading. During the four years of high school, I covered the walls of my room with poetry by Auden, Millay, Whitman, Dickinson, Hart Crane, Rupert Brooke, Langston Hughes, Alan Seeger, and Rod McKuen. (Eclectic doesn't begin to describe it.) I read my way through the entire output of Mazo de la Roche, William Faulkner, Edna Ferber, Richard Halliburton, Willa Cather, James Thurber, and Mary Renault. Mama told me we were distant relatives of Patricia Highsmith and I discovered the immoral Mr. Ripley. I read To Kill A Mockingbird and Walden Pond over and over, with a copy of one of them always by my bed.

I came out to my friends, I became an anti-war activist, I began writing fiction and poetry in earnest, I won state in University Interscholastic League essay writing, I created a weekly column for the local paper, I rejected god, I discovered feminism, I became a mother. All before graduating high school. And the books I read were what enabled me to keep going, keep dreaming, despite bone-gnawing poverty and desperate family circumstances.

In the paragraph above, when I list the writers who shaped my adolescence, of those nineteen names, seventeen were lesbian, gay or bisexual. I absolutely did not know it then, did not even guess at it. I only discovered their personal identities, in one-by-one revelations, during my 20s and 30s. Yet somehow I gravitated toward their writing, finding an essence that fed me. And saved me.

In one of my favorite sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay, she writes:

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.

I was intensely romantic as a teenager. Yet, even then, when I read this poem I often substituted the symbolism of books and all they contain for the word "love" in its lines. Books are the love of strangers handed on for centuries.

And anyone who would seek to keep you from this love, this light, this source of sustenance, is NEVER thinking about your well-being. Not in any honest way. They are trying to keep you from becoming that which they choose not to love, an independent mind and justice-hungry heart.


[Cross-posted at Group News Blog. To support Banned Books Weeks and the fight against censorship, go to the American Library Association link.]

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