A couple of days ago I invented a new word in my favorite fast-growing language, Spanglish. Spanglish happens when Spanish speaking people grab a word from English and make it our own. (Ingañol is when we anglicize something from Spanish.) Puerto Ricans, whose homeland has been invaded by a massive influx of U.S. commercialism, and half of whose population is now living in the United States, are world experts. Among my long-standing favorites are emiliar (v. to email) and its attached noun, el emilio,(the email); zafacón, meaning waste basket, which evolved from the U.S. military "safety can," and guiltripeo, a guilt trip. The other night I was with a group of women, moving fluidly between languages as we spoke about our lives, and someone smacked her chest and said "bring it on!" In that instant a new word was born: bringetona, a woman whose basic attitude toward the world is "bring it on!"
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by Ricardo Levins Morales During the same years that Simón Bolivar was warning the newly independent nations of Latin America that the greatest threat to their sovereignty was U.S. imperialism, and urged a strategy of unity and cultural independence in order to prevent a reconquest, the great Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa were warning the indigenous people of North America of the same dangers, and built a Pan-Indian alliance to unify the Native nations, restore indigenous cultural and spiritual values, and oppose U.S. expansion. Two hundred years later, U.S. capitalism and imperial domination continue to be the greatest threats to sovereignty, democracy, economic, social and environmental justice inside and outside its borders, in Latin America and the world. The revolutionary processes now taking place in Latin America represent the most successful opposition to that threat, and have made it the most hopeful place on earth in a time of tremendous danger. The support and defense of an integrated, independent, egalitarian Latin America capable of withstanding U.S. domination is in the highest interests of all people, but especially of the people of the United States, whose liberation has always been deeply entwined, whether we knew it or not, with that of all of America. At the same time, everything we are able to do to weaken U.S. imperialism has impact around the world, but especially in Latin America. These are series of speculations on what recent insights in a variety of areas of science could mean for a community based healing movement that includes amateur research infused with radical understandings of what we mean by health and environment, and high expectations for our own empowered potential. 1 Epigenetics is what scientists call the discovery that events in our environments can change the outer skin of our genes, change the way in which they express themselves, turning them off and on depending on how our bodies read the conditions of life, and that those changes get passed on to our descendents. Dutch women who survived the famine of 1944 gave birth to low weight babies, as expected, but when their children grew up, they also had low weight babies. The story of hunger clung to their DNA and passed on the traits appropriate to a permanent famine. Combat veterans pass on the changes in their own bodies that come with the constant threat of sudden and violent death, and the DNA of their children born after the trauma wears a coat of camouflage, expressed in the symptoms of PTSD. But if hunger and terror tattoo the skins of our genes with outdated survival manuals and a continuous stream of SOS signals, if the conscious acts of human beings to deprive each other of food and safety and life itself, mark us in inheritable ways, surely we can decide to mark ourselves, through an entirely different set of human acts, with messages of solace and solidarity, with a codex of healing. 1976. I'm 22 years old, crowded into a couple of small rooms in East Oakland with a handful of other activists of color being trained to produce a new kind of radio news, mixed up with poetry and music: the KPFA Third World News Bureau. ...I'm fresh out of four years in white, white Northern New Hampshire, head spinning, heart open, learning with both hands and that's where I heard "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and "Johannesburg." It was the soundtrack to the splicing of tape with razorblades, last minute edits of stories from then Rhodesia, from Nicaragua, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, South Africa, Ethiopia, the I-Hotel in San Francisco and a whole lot of Oakland, learning to slice into words and make them as sharp as those ten-packs of Gillettes, broadcast haiku 45 seconds at a time. May he find peace, peace, peace. May the force of what his music did in this world cradle him among the ancestors.
Memorial Lizard. (My mother loved lizards and drew them a lot--drew, stitched, made woodcuts... So I made one of my own, thinking of her. This is your new blog post. Click here and start typing, or drag in elements from the top bar.
It's been a long, deep time since I posted. On Saturday, May 7, our family ended the first phase of grieving with a public celebration of my mother's life. For a week before it, I spent hours going through treasure troves of photographs, many I hadn't seen before, and six hours scanning them into my computer so that my brother Alejandro could make a slide show for the celebration. That was the kind of task I was fit for. Everything else slipped rigght out of my mind, into the fog of absence and shock and disoriented exhaustion. Then we all got the stomach flu.
If it were not for a remarkable and loving friend, the celebration wouldn't have happened at all. Patty Berne, my beloved and very busy friend and the artistic director and general heart and motor of Sins Invalid offered to organize the entire event long distance, from Berkeley, and while my stunned family struggled to keep our heads above water, organized teams of volunteers with leaders, followers and task lists, dealt with caterers and made seating charts, so that there was nothing for us to do on the day itself but be there and receive, be there and speak. It was a gathering of poets. Kate Rushin, who frequently read with my mother in the heydey of her writing life, our companion from the heady days when This Bridge Called My Back was first released, agreed at the last minute to be our MC, and did it with grace and feeling. Denny Bergman, who was in a writing group with my mother for ten years, read both her own and my mother's poetry, starting the event off with probably my mother's best known piece, "I Am What I Am." And I read "Concepts of Pollution," my mothers enraged diatribe on anthropology, a tribute to her critical, radical mind and sharp, clear voice. Our dear friend and adopted family member Freda Hauser sent a letter about the gift of getting to have a mother by choice, of the things my mother, our mother, taught her. And many others stood and spoke about her impact on them. But the star of the show, the icing on the cake, the bright red cherry on top, was my mother's own voice, culled from her bedside rolodex and a little book my father prepared for one of her birthdays--a sampling of her wonderfully garbled sayings, labeled, in her elegant handwriting as "malaprops." My brother Ricardo suggested we put them on numbered cards and hand them out, and Kate called on people by number to stand and read them. "It takes two," she once declared, "to waltz to a tango." "As alike as two peas in a pod if there ever was one." "That's water over the hill." "Dead as a doorbell." She often combined two proverbs into some new and deliciously expressive declaration: "I don't know him from a hole in the head." (We all know people like that.) "Everything under the kitchen sink." "That's water over the hill." "It drove her up the garden wall." "Leave no hole unturned." And perhaps my favorite, "That's a fish of another kettle." I know that death alters the story. People focus on the delights, the gifts, and shy away from the struggles. My mother and I had long, difficult periods of our relationship. She was controlling and critical, and particularly harsh with me, her firstborn child and only daughter, and I was rebellious and sharp in return. In our grief, we can praise the control as assertiveness, and focus on the power of her critical mind to clarify, not the hurts we took from her sharp tongue. In the freshness of our loss, everything about her seems heroic. It will take time for the stories to sift and fall into place, for the rich complexity of her to fully emerge in what we say. It's a task I've taken on, my own path of mourning, to write her story. In September I'll return to Boston and while my father travels, I'll water the bromeliad and the hibiscus grown from smuggled cuttings from our farm, and surrounded by her notebooks and lists, her books and photographs, begin writing a memoir of my parents' lives. I won't evade the difficulties of her personality, but what shines now will still shine. She was infinitely curious about the world, and far more courageous than she could let herself know, facing into the wind of pompous men in her political and academic worlds, saying what she thought, putting her finger right on the flaw of any argument, and delighting in the odd and beautiful details of this world. (So many of the photographs I found show her laughing, face alight with joy.) And her mind was the sharpest instrument I've ever known. When I asked my father what he fell in love with, that weekend that they met in 1949, he said, "the sharpness of her questions," and our old friend Ruth Mahaney said it was my mother her taught her to trust her gut, that you didn't need to know exactly what was wrong, or what to replace it with, to say "Stop! Something about this is off." She says in political meetings, my mother's face was a barometer of the truth and accuracy of what was being said. They would look to her and if she was frowning, they'd say, "wait a minute," knowing that something wasn't quite right. Mami often said that she remembered how she felt more than what she'd done, one of the nasty impacts of sexism. It's only now, listening to my father's stories, that I'm learning the extent of what she did, how often she stood up, for and against, stood out, spoke up, made things happen, how often she asked the perfect question (it was her questions that helped steer my father from genetics to ecology,) followed her curiosity to a new expertise, invented and devised and took note. Literally. Her notebooks and file cabinets are full of information on everything from herbal remedies for a hundred ailments, to field notes for a guide to the bromeliads of Puerto Rico, from private memos on how not to spread despair or succumb to fearfulness, to pages covered with abstract designs and doodles where she began crafting her M.A. thesis, a powerful critique of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. And yet she insisted, militantly, proudly, that she was ordinary, akin to the pigeons that swoop from ledge to gutter, eating the crumbs that fall from park bench lunches, "birds," she wrote, "of a common feather." She didn't believe in intellectual altitudes, in geniuses, in exceptionality--in anything that created classes of people above and below, so I can't, in good faith, apply any of those words to her. I'll just say this: My mama may have been a bird of a common feather, but she was also a fish of a different kettle. 1960, Puerto Rico March 2, 2011 A few days after my last post I found out that my mother decided to stop treatment for multiple myeloma and start hospice. Sometime between a few months and a year or so, my mother will die, and I'll no longer be able to call her on the phone to share the joyful news that Paraguayan campesinas are marching with signs saying "Without Feminism, There Is No Socialism," and declaring that the best way to end climate change, hunger and extreme poverty is a feminist land reform that puts agriculture into the hands of women, or tell her about the delicious new word I discovered, or the wild thing I saw on wing or furred foot or scaled belly, or read her the newest bit of draft writing. I've dreaded this moment all my life, since I first understood that someday my parents would die. c. 1970, Chicago Over a period of days we made plans for everyone to visit my mother within the next two months, then, as her illness seemed to suddenly escalate, changed that to weeks and finally days. Ten days ago I flew to Boston and by the time I arrived, my mother was no longer able to hold a conversation. March 15: My mother's laughter is a thread running through all my memories, along with her sharp insights, her one foot in front of the other courage, her delight in colors, birds, textures, plants and rare words like finifugal--"of or pertaining to the shunning of endings." Soon I'll be writing much more about her, but for now I'm concentrating on breathing, crying and scanning photos. March 21: True to herself as always, my mother refuses to use Depends, refuses to be lifted, and through sheer force of will, rises to her feet to sit on a commode. Her will, it seems, holds the atoms of her being together, waiting, we think, til the last of the grandchildren arrive--not because she wants to see us, but because she knows we want to see her, and she can't stop taking care of us, can't check us off her list yet. Tomorrow, when we're all here, we tell her her tasks are done. Her decline has been dizzyingly fast. I find myself wanting to talk to the mother I've been chatting with on the phone with once or twice a week for an hour at a time, to tell her what it's like, her dying. To say Mami, you were amazing today, or to laugh with her about the fact that when she's asked if she wants water, or a cover, or anything else, she's been saying "not particularly." Last week's mother would enjoy hearing that about herself. Or how she shifts into Spanish, in a high, childlike voice. She'd be so interested. So my plan is to write to her, talk to her, keep conversing--because today's mama, deep inside herself, tells me to shut up and go away when I explain that the trip to the bathroom is no longer possible, tells my father to make me stop. I'm glad she had her commode victory. Meanwhile, stevia sweetened coconut milk chocolate pudding, abundant good food, lots of talking to each other and messages from friends gets us through. Plus rescue remedy. Gonna try for some sleep. March 22 In the middle of the night last night I was up with my mother for several hours, adjusting medication, helping her onto a commode. Today she mostly slept, and hasn't been speaking, Sometimes she waves her hand around, lifts her arms, but mostly she sleeps, breathing through moisture accumulating in her throat, and we speak to her, letting her know both that her work is done, and that her legacy continues. It's been a joy fighting for her wishes, in the face of a nurse pushing catheterization, or those who want to over medicate. At one moment last night I was telling someone that we aren't going to decide what's best for her or interpret signals--we'll ask until she says (she was still saying things then) and she said softly "uh huh." Old friends came by to sit with her and the last of the grandchildren arrived. We also talked a lot about funerals and burials and have decided to dispense with funeral home services. I'll wash her body with my daughter & niece, we'll dress & wrap her, and we're going tomorrow to see a place that makes burial baskets, fiber containers, and all sorts of biodegradable boxes. I'm exhausted from being up til 5 am, so off to sleep shortly. 1986, Cambridge March 23: My mother Rosario died at 3:30 a.am yesterday, March 23rd. I had gone to bed at midnight. I woke sudden;y at 2:40 with an image of her still face, so I got up and went upstairs. She was breathing heavily, as she had been for the last day. Lunece, her favorite caretaker for the last three years, had asked to do a night shift, even though she works two jobs and has children. My mother had asked her to be around as much as possible. She and I sat and talked for half an hour or so, and I spoke to my mother a little, as I'd been doing all along, telling her we were all OK and she could go. One of the hospice nurses had told us that women like her, who have been driving forces in their families, also have a strong identity in caring for their kin, so we should also tell her her legacy was safe with us, that she'd continue. So I told her we were OK because of her, that we were still following her instructions, that my father was napping and drinking enough water. I decided to go back to bed. Five minutes later I heard Lunece come down. She woke my father and told us Mami had stopped breathing. We went upstairs while my niece Olivia called everyone to come over. My mother took three or four more breaths at long intervals and then stopped. We all stood around, talking, crying, laughing. After a while, everyone else left the room and my daughter, my niece and I washed my mother's body and sang to her, first a sacred song from the Yoruba tradition, and then Canta y No Llores, one of her favorite songs. We dressed her in a long red dress she loved, and arranged her on her bed. We decided not to use a funeral home at all, and to do things ourselves. Yesterday we went to an alternative burials company called Mourning Dove, to look at biodegradable caskets. They had burial baskets, paper maché cases, cardboard coffins and then suddenly we saw a beautiful casket of woven fibers in several shades of brown. When we asked about it the owner told us it was made of banana leaves. We all gasped. It was perfect. She also showed us a breathtakingly beautiful shroud made of brilliant golden yellow dupioni silk, lined with little packets of white sage sewn into the lining. My mother wanted to be allowed to decompose, to become soil and plants. Most cemeteries don't allow that, but we've found a way. Although the place she'll be buried requires cement grave liners with lids, we can request that it be put in upside down, without the lid, like the top of a butter dish, so her casket rests directly on soil. We can't plant things over her, but she'll be able to join the earth as she wanted. We're also putting soil from our land in Puerto Rico and Vermont into the casket with her. I'll be staying here another week, then flying home to be part of the Sins Invalid show and taking care of various things. Then I'll come back and stay with my father for a few weeks and help him reshape the house for this next phase of his life. This afternoon I went out to buy a dress for the burial. My mother loved bright colors and dressing in beautifully constructed garments and I had only packed jeans and shirts. I found the perfect dress, soft plummy red material, beautifully cut to flatter, and some short boots with lace insets. When I came back to the house, for a few seconds I thought my mother was sitting upstairs in her well lighted room and I was all set to run up and show it to her, knowing she'd get as much pleasure from it as I did. For those few seconds I forgot she was dead, so that remembering was like falling down an elevator shaft. All day people have been stopping by. Sometimes it nourishes me and sometimes I have to get away and be quiet. Sometimes I cry spontaneously. But any connection with someone who's lost their mother recently makes me sob. I called my friend Shannon and was sobbing before she picked up the phone. I met my mother's friend Denny in the street in front of the house, and we embraced and sobbed right there. I make huge batches of sugar free, dairy free chocolate pudding for my father. Ice cream and chips disappear fast. Puerto Rican rum on chocolate mousse ice cream. Thai noodles. Baked organic chicken thighs. Delicious Chinese food brought by a friend. Death and food. And stories. All kinds of stories. Mostly my father telling about his own life to the grandchildren who live far away. Tales of all the years doing tropical island ecology among the sharks and the flying fish and Moray eels. Stories of his early political life, of how he and my mother became communist farmers in rural Puerto Rico. Upstairs, my mother's body, laid out on the hospital bed, becomes less and less like her. I no longer want to go into the room. I want her in the earth, embraced by microorganisms, become humus. My beautiful mother needs to become soil and ivory bone, needs to break down the web of her tissues into usable bits of protein, needs to convert herself into beetles and earthworms and spores and be eaten by birds who will chatter and swoop among the trees of Mt. Auburn cemetery, her last craft project--to unravel. Tomorrow she can begin. I am, in all my genres, an artist of juxtaposition, not only tracing connections between seemingly separate parts, but binding fragments into whole things: stories, garments, world vies, collages. I began making collages as a young immigrant in Chicago. At thirteen, which I've always considered sufficient culture shock all by itself, I moved from a coffee farm on the top of a mountain in Western Puerto Rico, an hour's drive from the nearest small town, to the university community of Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago. I lost the natural world that was my intimate joy and context, the close-knit circle of our family unraveled as my mother took on graduate school and activism, all the social rules were alien and I didn't know how to make sense of most of what went on around me. I took to journal writing and collages trying to map my path, visually and in words, to create coherent images made of the bits and pieces I wanted. I invented supernatural protectors-- genies and goddesses and mythical beasts made out of pieces of National Geographic and Ladies Home Journal. I remember I created an entire harp whose scales I cut one by one out of Breck hair color commercials. Collage helped me put myself back together, as the collage style of writing, small vignettes arranged in a pattern, best allows me to talk about the complexity of the world.
I love lining up images whose content is wildly different, but whose lines can be made to flow together--the edge of a riverbank and the gesture of a hand, a bird's wing and a mass of cloud, strands of hair and an aerial shot of plowed fields. I love using tiny bits of paper, so the content of a photo becomes pure pattern and color. In fact, I made my mother a miniature quilt, using tiny snippets placed with tweezers into a traditional grid of triangles. Collage is akin to magical spells, raw ingredients bound together into something potent and new. These days I make collages in large spiral bound books with black pages, exploring the places where words can't take me. I use collage to create personal talismans, to speak unspeakables, to give the wordless body voice. Since my stroke in 2007, I have often found visual art easier than writing. I compose my essays in color, tell stories in layered imagery, sometimes printed on fabric and embelished with beads, sometimes composed in Photoshop, but scissors and glue stick still takes me into that meditative dream space faster than anything else. Obviously I'll have to make storage space for my National Geographic stash in my tiny home, because the journey I'm undertaking will be full dream maps, roads marked with tree branches and ancient bits of pottery, the necks of waterbirds, altered cityscapes and the flanks of whales. Or, as above, a stormy Miami night, ancient gold, a stag and the tattooed arm of a woman of power, buried a thousand years ago in the Andes. I call it "Brujeria #1." Saturday morning I walked over to the nearest City Car Share pod and began my first road trip in almost five years: an hour north to see Stephen Marshall, my contractor. Springtime in Northern California (yes, February is spring here) means fields of flowering mustard, seas of brilliant lemon yellow lapping against the dark bent trunks of live oaks. Rolling hills like the flanks of pale gold, short-haired beasts asleep in the sun. I'm listening to Silvio Rodriguez' CD Segunda Cita, marveling at the way Cuban singers can put political precision and big word into such heart-stirring poetry. Dijo Guevara el humano que ningún intelectual debe ser asalariado del pensamiento oficial. "Guevara the human said no intellectual should be on salary to official thinking." And he goes on to sing the horrors of an artificial self, of a head without a will of its own, of a conditional heart. Driving between the yellow fields of Sonoma County, contemplating my vocation, I sing with him. Dijo el Che legendario, como sembrando una flor, que al buen revolucionario solo le mueve e amor. "The legendary Che said, as if planting a flower, that the good revolutionary is only moved by love." To declare oneself a revolutionary in the time and place where I now live sounds pretentious. Like declaring oneself a saint. In his essay "In Defense of the Word" Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano writes about the assault on meaning, when "revolutionary" is used to describe the latest detergent, love is what one feels for a car, and happiness is the sensation of having eaten sausages. But I grew up in the decades of decolonization, in a house filled with the words of people for whom revolution wasn't about storming barricades, but about transforming societies to make them livable, joyous and just. "The task of the revolutionary," my father says, "is to change consciousness." To affect the way people think, so that they are able to imagine a different way of life and begin creating it. In that same essay Galeano writes, "What process of change can move a people that does not know who it is nor where it came from? If it does not know who it is, how can it know what it deserves to be?" As a teller of significant stories, with a deep sense of historical context, this is what I try to do--to change our sense of who we are, where we came from and what we deserve. The house I am building is a story; a story about what capitalism does to living cells, about the catastrophic rise in cancer rates and the murder of bees, the wildfire sterility of GMO pollen and the permanent states of inflammation so many of us suffer from. The steel shell my contractor is designing and pricing, is a poem about immunity, about constructing a habitat that allows my overburdened defenses to rest. And because this sleek, metal poem challenges the story that "progress" has made us safe, that "the market" protects us, that the practices of modern science are objective, pure and benign, because it alters consciousness about what has happened to us, what we deserve, it is revolutionary work. I have learned over long, hard decades, the power of a personal story deeply embedded in context. What I am setting out to do is to tell the story of my body, my aging, ailing, female, Caribbean Jewish, immigrant, disabled, queer, art-making, epileptic, childbirth-scarred body—and to deepen that story with history and widen it with ecology and global vision, until in encompasses everything I am burning to write and speak and make art about. And the vision of what I want to do has changed the shape of the house, the strategy for funding it, the network of collaborators I’m building, and what I dream about at night. But most of all, it’s given me back that sense of anticipation, of knowing that I’m living inside an epic tale of adventure, where messages and teachers are everywhere, and neither time, nor effort, nor any experience at all, is ever wasted. This time, though, I’m not setting out alone. At fifty-seven, I exist in a rich, dense mat of relationships, able to chart a course in which adventure co-exists with planning, where amidst the magic of happenstance, messages can also be asked for, and teachers encountered by design. The encounters I am planning for are with people whose passions overlap with mine, with organizations that can make good use of my brief presence, with archivists and librarians who can put their fingertips on things I need to know, and also with landscapes, from the closest we have to pristine, to those as scarred and ailing as the sickest among us. |
About Aurora
Aurora Levins Morales is a disabled and chronically ill, community supported writer, historian, artist and activist. It takes a village to keep her blogs coming. To become part of the village it takes, donate here. Never miss a post!
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