Category: Aquifer

Driving East at Christmastime

My father is outside the car, hugging the guardrail on the I-35 bridge. Cars are honking. He’s under a lot of stress, Mom says, like we haven’t noticed this festering since Thanksgiving. We’re driving home from Fargo. The sun blinks through pregnant clouds, melting snow on the shoulder. Stay here, Mom says, like there’s someplace we can go. The car idles.

 

Hey, fag. My older brother, Kyle, punches my shoulder. I twist to return his blows, and he spits a Skittle that strikes the bridge of my nose. I swing at his face, but he ducks and pounds my thigh and yells, Charlie horse! My brother, Kyle, only fifteen, already a hyper-masculine caricature of his younger self, the Kyle who only a year ago planned D&D campaigns with me, whom I once believed would protect me from anything.

 

I can see Dad’s shoulders heave. Mom crouches next to him, rubs his back. Whispers into his hair.  Kyle unbuckles his seatbelt and climbs over me and into the driver’s seat, kicking at my face.

 

I ask him what he’s doing.

 

Getting away from you, he says.

 

I catch Mom’s eye, and she winks. It’s going to be okay, she’s saying, to all of us, to everyone on the freeway. My mother, the steadfast. Unfazed, as always. It’s going to be okay. I climb into the front passenger seat.

 

Dad is yelling at the clouds. Under stress. This all began when Grandpa—Mom’s dad—died. We were packing for the annual trip to visit Dad’s family in Wautoma when Mom’s phone rang. A stroke. Seventy but healthy. So of course, plans change. We head west instead of east. In Fargo, Dad called the office and said he wouldn’t be in on Monday. On Monday, they said come in or don’t come back. And, of course, he couldn’t. And he said as much, but they wouldn’t back down. So then there’s the stress of holidays plus death plus, now, what we can and can’t afford. He said we’ll need to cancel our summer vacation. That Christmas might be leaner this year. And Mom doesn’t even blink. A rock, always.

 

And then there was the flat tire on his motorcycle. The car broken into, the driver-side window smashed (still covered with fluttering plastic and duct tape). All this in the last month. So of course, after he received pity money from his widowed mother-in-law; and traffic has been stop-and-go for four hours; and at last there’s a respite, a sigh of collective relief: finally, let’s floor it; and then brake lights re-emerge like angry fireflies—of course he was going to snap.

 

It began with yelling, with cussing. And Mom whispering sternly: Jeffrey. And then he started smacking the roof, the dashboard. Alternating open palm and closed fist. And Kyle and me in the back seat, silent for once. And then he stormed onto 35 and left the door hanging open; 35, packed with its slow and stopped cars and Minnesota plates and Minnesota Nice yelling and honking, and he’s on the guardrail letting God know.

 

Cars begin veering around us, the gap between their fenders and our bumper shrinking with each pass. Kyle engages the emergency lights like he knows what he’s doing. He’s quieted, and the space in the car seems endless. I’m startled to feel lonely, to feel nostalgic for the times these trips weren’t so miserable, when we would lean our heads together and he’d read from The Two Towers or Dune.

 

I crack the window and press my face against the cool glass. Dad hasn’t moved. A cop pulls behind us on the shoulder, lights flashing.

 

Good afternoon, sir, Mom says. He’s just stressed is all, just stressed. You can understand. The cop’s stride is measured, and he hasn’t said a word. He tips his cap. My brother is holding his breath. There’s tension in the car I can’t grasp. It’s all above me, like I’m submerged beneath the Mississippi. But I’m buoying toward the surface, about to break through: Kyle’s hands are on the wheel. Everything registers at once like oxygen flooding my lungs. My parents on the shoulder. The cop, mid-stride. The car casting its long shadow across all lanes of stagnant traffic. The smell of a warm winter, of exhaust fumes and evergreens.

 

This is what will happen: Kyle will put the car in gear. We’ll jolt forward, the pedals unfamiliar beneath his adolescent foot. He’ll swerve, smash the taillight ahead of us. And we will be rear-ended by the impatience behind us. And the cop will ticket everyone, and traffic will crawl and crawl and crawl, and my father on the bridge will call a tow truck.

 

But first, the cop approaches my window. He instructs Kyle to turn off the vehicle, to please remove the keys from the ignition. But first, the sky sears open and heavy raindrops spill down. And my father, this large, aching man screaming at the sky, feels he has rent the heavens. He releases the railing and sits on the shoulder. He begins to laugh. It will be okay.

Share

Winter Solstice

Disruptive storms gather from and to
Even at the bottoms of eternal sequoias;
Hungry-lunging waters, numb-thumbed, virtues
Strongly up-lifting,
Strong spiritual boosts
Upon a time. The discerning solstice empties
The full tank of Morning without fading beam
Of overcast mauve, when the sky brightens to
Its generous gift. —Halt! Ever more chatter reveals
The only solstice of the renewable milky way.

Share

Interview: Ana Castillo

        
        

 

Ana Castillo is a much-celebrated voice in Chicana literature and feminism, or, as she puts it, “xicanisma,” a term she coined to describe a non-binary approach to the issues of gender, class, and race. Her publications include eight novels, one collection of short stories, five collections of poetry, a two-play volume, and a children’s book, and, as well as two books of nonfiction, the latest of which, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me (Feminist Press, 2016), was recently out when this interview was conducted in November of 2016. She has also edited three collections of Latina/o literature and translated a Spanish-language adaptation of Cherrie Moraga’s The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, one of the touchstones of efforts to challenge the lack of women of color in the feminist movement. Her novel Sapogonia was named a New York Times Notable Book, and she has received numerous awards, including National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, a Carl Sandburg Award, a Sor Juana Achievement Award, and the American Studies Association’s Gloria Anzaldúa Prize. She holds a B.A. in art from Northwestern Illinois University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from the University of Bremen, Germany, and was appointed the first Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University, as well has having taught at numerous other colleges and universities.

 

An excerpt from Black Dove appears in 41.2 of the print Florida Review, and the book is reviewed here in Aquifer.

 

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:

I’ve admired your work for a long time, and the first thing I wanted to say was what a gripping read Black Dove is. Tell me about this book and about how it evolved for you.

 

Ana Castillo:

It’s a compilation of personal essays and memoir, and I distinguish the two things—the essays were written for a more general audience and with a theme in mind, and the memoir comes from a very much more personal place. The earliest one, which is also the leading one, is called “My Mother’s México,” and I wrote and published it in the early nineties—’94, I think it first came out. I always thought that I would do a collection of essays eventually called “My Mother’s México,” and it would be along the lines of being a daughter and having been my mother’s daughter and so forth, but as time went on my role in life became more as mother than as daughter. My mother passed on over twenty years ago, and I raised my son almost all his life as a single mother.

 

That’s a really important part of this book—being a single mother, being a brown woman in this country with a brown young man that was growing up. Whether or not a single mother can successfully raise a man is always in question. I think I did a good job as long as he was on my watch. He did well in school, he went straight through university, got his degree, he became a dad and was supporting his family during the recession, but then became very depressed and began to spiral. I didn’t really know what was going on—he’s already an adult at this point, in his mid-twenties, and has his own little family to take care of, so as a mother I’m a little bit more on the outside—and when he hit bottom he committed a senseless robbery—of an institution, unarmed. It felt like he was ejecting himself from the world of society, and that was really the catalyst eventually for much of what I wrote.

 

His voice is also included in the book from some of the letters we exchanged. We decided to share the story. We are in a country that that supports a multibillion-dollar prison industry. We find all kinds of people becoming felons at the time that my son was arrested—in Chicago, two governors of Illinois were in federal prison at the time!—but whereas those guys will come out and have their friends and their connections and they will have work and will have homes and places to go, many of our incarcerated, when they’re felons, they come out and then they have to face the challenge of not being given jobs that they’re qualified for. They have children, families to support and to house. They are not rented to, they can’t get a home, they can’t get loans. So, we are perpetuating a society in which we continue to castigate individuals, but sort of encourage them some in some cases to continue that cycle.

 

My story turns out to be a good one. My son came out, he was well, he was ready to take on his life, and he’s an awesome dad with a growing little girl, but he has had those challenges. It was because we wanted to share that story that that I decided to put this collection together.

 

TFR:

And there are ways in which that content and theme is supported even from the first word. I found the structure of the of the book quite moving because you set it up as it is a family saga, so right away you acknowledge it goes beyond you individually. There was this sense of family and people and community and the way they all work together.

 

I want to ask about to what extent that trauma of having your son incarcerated turned you toward the book-length memoir. You’ve been writing these pieces for some time about your mother and so on, but do you think that there was a way that this was a point where you felt, I have to speak as myself, not as a fictional character, about this kind of situation? Was it related to a different type of activism for you than fiction or poetry?

 

Castillo:

Yes, indeed. I think that it was. A big, big part of my life is having been a mother. It was something I chose to do. When I chose to become a mother, it was just before the precipice of when we begin to get U.S. Latinas recognized in this country as writers, as part of a generation of writers. So, I had to have a vision of myself being a mother—What does that mean? How does that change my life?—but, also, I’m not going to give up this vision of being a writer and being published in a country that has no history of that. Those things have been really important for me—being vocal and being part of this large community of Latinos and people of color in this country. My writing has been my form of activism. But my heart was so broken with my son being broken that ironically initially I couldn’t even write in my journal. I was that broken-hearted. I knew that the gods had given him and given me a second chance because he at least had not been killed and had not killed himself—and there were many opportunities in the society that I’m talking about in which that could happen to a young man of color, not only during his senseless criminal act, but he also as a teenager had been involved in graffiti and lost a lot of friends on the streets of Chicago. There’s “stop and search,” and my son had been beaten up by the police for no reason except getting off at the train station with a couple of guys, and maybe, maybe, if you acted up or responded, that’s what happened. So, this was building up, but I thought by the time he was a young family man in his late twenties, Well, we’re home free, and yet he had become this very angry man, as many males of color have a right to be.

 

This is where I was losing my voice, so to speak, as far as writing so that initially I couldn’t write at all about it. We came together—and we have some of that in this book—my son and I came together, interestingly enough, through our love of books and writing. There’s an exchange of excerpts of our letters in the book, how I began to reach out to him and bring him back. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance beforehand, no connection. He played cello in high school, but he didn’t talk about music and he didn’t know how or want to play music anymore—just gone. So, how do we begin to have conversations and discussions? We did that through books. He would ask for books, and I sent them to him, and I would read them.

 

In the process of this we shared Charles Bukowski—he wanted to read Bukowski’s poetry, and I read his prose. It kind of inspired me, and, in the process of this moment, I actually whipped out a novel called Give It to Me, which was published by the Feminist Press, and it was so far away from what I was experiencing—this sort of (I hope) funny, really quirky story where she [the main character] was having a lot of sex in the midst of this crazy, old politics. It was just like, Let me escape. So, I did that. I got the writing going again, the fiction.

 

Eventually, we decided to share our story because we do have a lot of communities across the board—racially, because of gender or religion, or otherwise demographically—that are made ashamed and are being punished by this culture.

 

TFR:

Even often there is that sense of Well, if you’re a well-behaved person of color, this isn’t gonna happen to you. I was very glad and moved that you went out on the limb and said, No, I did everything right, and it didn’t matter. My son was still subject to these forces, and he did everything right—he went to college, he was taking care of his family, and yet there was still this justifiable anger that had to come out somehow.

 

Castillo:

And at no time does he or do I excuse his behavior. He went out and he committed a senseless robbery, though he did not threaten anybody. It was the accumulation of anger that he had felt toward the system and what was going on—this was during the fallout with the banks and everything else that was happening. It’s not to excuse breaking the law.

 

By the same token, I talk about the fact that I know that he smoked weed, which I don’t have a moral objection to or anything, and some of this was self-medicating. Again, I’m not making excuses, I’m not saying it’s okay. I had taken him to Amsterdam when he was in college—I did a reading in Germany, and we went off to Amsterdam—so, it’s okay if you’re in Colorado, it’s okay now in California, but if it’s not okay don’t get caught with it. Once again, it’s no excuse if you get caught with it, and that was part of what was going on with him at that time, a resentment over the hypocrisy.

 

Nevertheless, [as a society] we’re not looking at the constant harassment of people of color. In this case, as a mother of a son, I’m looking at men being harassed and what happens. Again, it’s not to justify some reaction that’s illegal, but this is who you’re forming. I grew up as a brown girl in Chicago, and I had a lot of anger throughout my twenties. I actually went to graduate school at the University of Chicago, so I was a bright, self-motivated woman, but was always getting stopped, even then, by police, with your standard excuse about the taillight to ask you about your papers. It builds up in people.

 

TFR:

It does, absolutely. I’ll come back to the social commentary aspects, but I wanted to ask about how, even though there is anger and tragedy woven through this book, and also a kind and also a mystical tone that is quite beautiful and poetic, there’s also the sassy in it as well and little moments of humor. Could you comment about the role of humor in the book and how you see that? Was it something that you worked on or was it just something that came out of you naturally as a sort of antidote or complement to the other emotions that this book so strongly brings?

 

Castillo:

You know, writing funny is very hard. Writing humor is difficult, and when I when I knocked out Give It to Me, I really needed some levity my life. It was tragic—I was comparing my son in my head to, like, Odysseus, though he’s not a king and not a hero, but the mother ends up in Hell. I often come up with these connections in my head, and so I twist that and find irony—more than funny, I look for irony. That’s important, when you’re telling a story, whether it’s a quote-unquote true story, nonfiction, or you’re making up a story, and you’re giving it to the reader, you’ve got to have some moments of levity to give the reader a respite, a little island, an oasis. I’m happy that the book has some of that, not necessarily always together in the same essay but in other places.

 

My aunt, my mother’s sister, was always and remains a very colorful character, and certainly because of her joie de vivre, which she was born with, I was able to get a little levity to balance my mother’s somber personality. In the book, I talk about the influence of my aunt in my life and the things that I saw with her—the flirtation, her love of cooking, her flair for dressing, and so on—and all despite her very humble lifestyle. I think that there’s part of that in my personality, and this is how I can get through life—by thinking of the irony of certain situations.

 

At the same time, as a writer, even as a poet, you have to give your reader a break. If it’s pretty relentless but it has to be told, you have to have a host a little way-station for people so that they can catch their breath and then go on

 

TFR:

And maybe for yourself as a writer, too.

 

Castillo:

Absolutely.

 

TFR:

Speaking of your Tía Flora’s personality, there is a video of you online, in which you talk about how important Germaine Greer was to you in bringing up for you that challenge of being happy as a woman in our society, and I thought that the portraits of your somber grandmothers and mother contrasted really with the indomitable, lively portrait of Flora. What do you think about the balance of those different influences on you?

 

Castillo:

Just let me say that my Tía Flora is eighty-six. She’s outliving everybody. This just made me think about it. Maybe there’s something to that ability to laugh through all kinds of hardships. She had by no means an easy childhood in México City. She was orphaned, she married young, her husband was killed, she had two children at that time. She came to Chicago, became a seamstress in a little kind of quasi-sweatshop factory in the Mexican neighborhood there, her second husband became an alcoholic, and by then she had five children. All this time, this lovely person has a flair, as I said, for carrying herself like Queen Nefertiti down the street.

 

How she influenced me—since I knew her from when I was very small when she came from México City—was having that contrast in her personality. I like clothes and I like fashion, but it wasn’t necessarily encouraged anywhere around me. Dance music. Having a nice margarita. I learned about a margarita from my aunt. [Laughs.] Back in her in her kitchen, she used to make them in martini glasses when I was a kid. While she’s cooking for everybody, she’s happy with the radio on.

 

I think it’s really important for all of us, but particularly, I would say, for girls to have that balance and to be able know that they are not just lovable but they can embrace all of who they are. That means it’s great to have a brain, which I am happy that I celebrate, and I work at that, but it’s okay to be lovely and enjoy all the other things that I am as a woman.

 

TFR:

You mentioned Clarice Lispector, a writer whose works Near to the Wild Heart and Apple in the Dark I’m fond of. My writing teacher Paul West introduced me to her work.

 

Castillo:

Hour of the Star is my favorite. They made a wonderful movie of it, too, some years ago. It’s really beautiful.

 

TFR:

Paul was a great teacher, and he was insistent that we needed to read beyond the borders of the traditional U.S. territory. He inspired us to read widely and internationally. You’ve often spoken about a lack of Chicana role models in your education. I was wondering to what extent you see your work connected to the Latin American literary tradition—the strong tradition of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Amado, Borges, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa—or has it been more about building a new tradition here in the U.S.?

 

Castillo:

I can only speak for myself—I was a self-taught writer. I didn’t go through an English department program or Spanish department program or literature or MFA program. At the University of Chicago for graduate school, I got into their very new, at that time, Latin American Studies program, but it was seen as political science, so I saw myself doing something else other than writing, even though I was writing. Aside from the political interests that I had, I also did visual art, so I thought, if anything in the arts, I was going to be a painter. I started looking at poetry and literature sort of visually.

 

The [Spanish-language] literature that was being translated and brought to this country at that time was from the Latin American boom. Before I really saw myself as ever becoming a fiction writer—although on the side I liked to write little stories and wrote my poems—I was reading Jorge Amado, I was reading Cortázar. My first novel is dedicated to Julio Cortázar, so people think that he was my big influence, when actually I was reading everybody, all these guys, and I had this idea to do something like Julio Cortázar had already done [laughs]—because they’re very innovative. They were doing all kinds of things, not just what was later called magical realism, but playing with structure and so on. So, yes, indeed, we, by all means, have that connection—I think of Carlos Fuentes, too. I looked to them also because of the Catholicism, with the history of our families and legacies, there were a lot of connections along those lines.

 

I do believe, also, that, in time, as U.S.-Latino/a literature start to rise up—and certainly by now it’s made its claim in the world—there was also a reciprocation. By the mid-nineteen-eighties, Chicana feminists were having conversations with Mexican feminists, and so there was initially a very strong, deliberate contact and communication and encouragement going both ways, even though we wrote in English and even though we were considered privileged Yankees. [Laughs.] The irony was that most of us came from working-class backgrounds. We were dark-skinned, dark-haired girls, and these women writers [in México] had European last names, privileged backgrounds and education, and were multi-lingual. They wrote in French and in English [as well as Spanish], and we were just writing our English that we knew from our Chicago Public School System. But there was that connection that we have a history of colonialism, through the history of the conquest of México and South America, so, yes, I do see that. I’m very happy that to some degree at least, even though very few of my books are available in Latin America, that I am seen as having that connection with Latin America and the Caribbean, too.

 

TFR:

You’ve also spoken in the past a bit about living life “on the hyphen,” a term, I believe that was coined to describe Cuban-American experience, but that has been used in a variety of ways since then to describe positions that combine nationalities, but also being multi-lingual, bi-sexual, and so on. My sense is that in the literary world this has come, more and more, to be seen as a positive quality that also has influenced our literature with the mixing of boundaries of genre and form and so on, as in the inclusion of the letters you exchanged with your son in Black Dove. Have you experienced any change in attitude, an acknowledgement of the positive nature of hybrid spaces and forms?

 

Castillo:

It’s a reality. But it depends on who you’re talking to. I’m feeling today [November 20, 2016] a little less optimistic about those views. Particularly with the idea that if there is going to be a tone in this country about people who have quote-unquote immigrated here—whether or not they actually have immigrated—and we begin to do racial profiling, then, no, it will definitely not be seen as a positive. If we’re going to start questioning women’s rights, some of the progress that’s been made for women and our roles as women, and if we’re going to start questioning same-sex rights, then, no, it’s not going to be seen as a positive. Indeed, I think a lot of that negativity is as being brought forth, and if it’s viewed as validated and affirmed by our leaders, then, of course, those people who are in disagreement with our rights are going to feel happy—they are feeling happy—to come to the forefront.

 

Prior to that feeling, to some degree, yes, I did feel that we have made enormous amount of strides, thankfully, and not just in this country, but in the world, especially when we’re talking about women’s rights and the rights of transgendered, queer-identified individuals, moving away from the binary view, after so long of a very skewed view of what it was to be American. I think that I look as American as anybody can look, since I look very indigenous, and yet, of course, I’m always asked, Where you from? Where you from? Where? I was just asked

here by a writer in the authors’ lounge who came up and introduced himself, and the first or second thing he said to me was, “What country are you from?” I told him, “Chicago.” [Laughs.] He had a Bernie T-shirt on, so I was really surprised.

 

TFR:

You are a writer who’s had a long-term activist consciousness, so what can you tell me about our current moment and the role of writers in it? Not that I want to burden you with having all the answers, but I’ve been asking everyone this—what does this time imply for writers? Has the current climate affected your writing?

 

Castillo:

I’ve been writing and publishing for four decades, and I remember the night that Reagan was elected—I wanted to leave the country then, but I didn’t. Someone brought this up recently and said, “Well, you went through Reagan,” and I said, “Yes but this has been a progression with the Republican party, and Reagan wasn’t an overt misogynist. We all know he adored Nancy, and his son was gay. He was an old-school gentleman, although he was a major imperialist. That speaks for itself, but this is moving in an unprecedented direction.

 

I feel devastated emotionally, morally. I know that Trump did not win the popular vote. But, it’s all very unbelievable. Some of the Republicans are also in shock that that’s their new leader, so there’s a dream that some people have that this term cannot last. Let’s see how much damage he’ll do before that might happen. With all of that in mind, I’m trying my very best personally to, as Obama said, get over my moodiness, to stop feeling sorry for myself, to get up and do something.

 

This moment is shocking. It’s shocking when you’re a woman walking around, catching a bus, or your children are in school being harassed. If you’re being protected by the Secret Service or leading a very protected life, maybe you’re not realizing what happens to people in their everyday experience. So, I’m in these past ten days trying to move from that shock, that sucker-punch that the electoral vote gave us and telling myself that I have to remember who I’ve been, why I’ve been writing all these years, and that I cannot be afraid to speak out. If that’s all I do—if I just speak out, if I respond to some of the invitations I get to write for people’s blogs or their zines—I have a zine myself—La Tolteca: Promoting the Advancement of a World without Borders & Censorship—I’ve been doing it for about six, seven years now. I feel like I have to do that. I can’t be afraid, and that’s all I can do. I can do other things—you donate money to organizations you believe in, if you can go march you can go do that, anything at all, including lighting candles and incense and praying to whomever you pray to. Whatever it takes for you to lift yourself up to do it—that’s what I think each of us has to do. And be there for each other.

 

Share

Meditation on the Purpose of Art Making

In my works, I attempt to capture some of the narratives that I heard from first-hand accounts while volunteering on Lesvos Island in Greece in December of 2016. What I’ve discovered thus far, is that the refugees are from all around the world, rather than only being from Syria as depicted in the media. I have also come to discover that the news coverage on the topic is often sensationalized, and even sometimes re-enacted for the sake of reporting. The stories of the local villagers and the volunteers seem often forgotten or ignored, and the refugees are used in narratives that sometimes are simply not true. More importantly, I wish to capture the humanitarian tale amongst this crisis, hoping that in turn, my viewers can be inspired to assist refugees or anyone who has suffered a great loss due to manmade or natural disasters.

Share

Beta Males

Share

A Woman’s Journey

Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, by Ana Castillo
The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2016
350 pages, paper, $16.95

 

 

For years, Joseph Campbell’s monomyth has served as the definitive narrative archetype. The seventeen-step adventure from the known to the unknown and back again describes the challenges a character faces on the path to become a hero. From “The Call to Adventure” through trials like “Belly of the Whale” and “Woman as Temptress,” the character comes out on the other side forever changed into a more mature, more capable man. Toward the end of Ana Castillo’s memoir Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, she draws attention to Campbell’s monomyth of the journey of a male hero. As an aside when discussing how she spent the two years her beloved son was incarcerated for robbery, Castillo tells the story of when she taught the monomyth in a feminist course at a university and had to adjust Campbell’s linear narrative for a woman’s journey. Castillo writes, “… female archetypes had three life stages: lovely maiden, fertile mother, and (sterile, hunchbacked, saggy, wild-haired, banished from-the-village-to-a-hut-where-she-concocted-poisons-to-harm-men-unworthy-of-love-although-wise-and-yet-despised-for-her-wisdom) crone. Me, in other words.”

 

Although the various chapters are not broken into separate sections, this three-stage female monomyth forms the base structure of Castillo’s memoir, placing Castillo on her own hero’s journey from daughter of a Mexican Indian immigrant family to well-established Chicana novelist and poet. Through this journey of becoming, Castillo reflects on multiple generations of her family (her parents’, her own, and her son’s and grandchild’s), weaving together these generations and the trials they faced once the family became citizens of the United States.

 

The backbone of Black Dove may be the female monomyth, but Castillo mostly avoids an obviously structured approach and instead strips down on the fictive elements often found in memoir, such as detailed scenes and dialogue, and opens up for an intimate chat with the reader. For the most part, chapters cover large periods of time, placing her own journey beside those of family members. She jumps from story to story, transitioning back and forth in time, moving as though a new story has just popped into her head. For example, at one point, Castillo relates a story about her aunt dropping a busted television out a second-story window and it narrowly missing her aunt’s husband. After this story, Castillo writes, “That wasn’t the story I wanted to share about my livewire tía Flora, although that one was a good one, too.”

 

This stream-of-consciousness approach allows the reader to get closer to Castillo, to feel as though there are no fictive elements masking the author. She exemplifies the need to share everything about her “becoming,” with no topic off limits (childhood, love, sex, immigration, gun violence, motherhood, writing, marriage, feminism), but she also backs away from naming other individuals, thereby protecting identities and showing her compassion and understanding.

 

Throughout Black Dove, Castillo seems uninterested in offering readers answers, suspense, or even new revelations on the immigrant experience. This sounds like a weakness, and it may be in other books, but Castillo’s honest and affable voice easily carries the memoir through to the end. Castillo remains so likable, the reader wants to continue reading only so as to not leave her presence. Sharing her experience, trying to connect to the reader, person to person, seems to motivate Castillo’s narrative. It is difficult, if perhaps impossible, to read Castillo’s memoir without thinking of the xenophobia, especially regarding Mexicans, that has intensified in the United States during Donald Trump’s presidential race and into his presidency. Castillo recognizes this and begins her introduction with:

Perhaps some of you may come away from this book feeling that my stories have nothing to do with your lives. You may find the interest I’ve had in my ancestors as they were shaped by the politics of their times, irrelevant to your own history. My story, as a brown, bisexual, strapped writer and mother, constantly scrambling to take care of my work and my child, might be similarly inconsequential. However, I beg your indulgence and a bit of faith to believe that maybe on the big Scrabble board of life we will eventually cross ways and make sense to each other.

Castillo, then, discusses the importance of knowledge and how, growing up, she never saw people like her in history books. She does not mention the current political landscape (where recent inclusion of Native and other minorities’ histories are once again being stripped out of schoolbooks), but the connections are clear. She wrote her memoir to show readers a life they may not have lived, to show how similar that life is to each reader’s own or at least to increase understanding of the forces that have shaped her own.

 

The memoir, however, mostly avoids political comments, with the exception of a digression here or there. Most of these exceptions come during chapters focused on her son, Mi’jo, as though in her role as a mother, Castillo recognizes how little control she has in protecting her child, how she must turn to larger forces for explanations and understanding. For example, while discussing her son’s incarceration, she writes, “in a country proud of its wealth and resources, healthcare and public education are not guaranteed to all citizens.” Castillo’s dialogue with the reader draws connections between political, cultural, and, most of all, personal history to show how multifaceted a person is and how linked together so many aspects of our lives are. She goes deeper than her own experience by including so much from other generations of her family. One whole chapter is given over to an essay co-written with her son Mi’jo, allowing his voice, for a moment, to be just as important as Castillo’s. In Black Dove, Castillo shows the hardships faced by immigrants, hardships that last generations, well beyond those who immigrated, and most importantly, she shows that one vital way to combat prejudice is try to connect person to person. In this, she succeeds with brilliance.

 

Please also see our interview with Ana Castillo here in Aquifer and an excerpt from Black Dove in 41.2 of the print Florida Review.

Share

After the Poetry Reading, a Condom

 

 

 

 

 

 

We publish an extra poem this week in celebration of the arrest of a suspect

in the murder of four people in the Seminole Heights neighborhood of Tampa, Florida.

Gianna Russo wrote this loving picture of her neighborhood, and we accepted it,

before these murders began. We hoped that the perpetrator would be found

so that the casual vivacity of the area could be restored before we published

the poem. Today we hope this nightmare has ended for our friends in Tampa,

and we celebrate the joie de vivre of that area with Russo’s work.

 

I stepped away from the bar at Ella’s where the din is handcrafted and foams up to a roar,
 as the famed poet served us his lines succulent and Southern.
With his Rhett Butler accent, the poet summoned Old Uncle Walt.
So Whitman came among us with his taste for bacony bodies and sweat-odorous men,
draped his arm over the poet and reached for the jalapeno poppers.

 

I stepped away from the cherry martini that had me teetering
on those heels I hardly ever wear anymore since they kick up my bursitis,
 but I’d put in my contacts, too, so what the hell.
I stepped away from the wine-rinsed laughter and the joke I told
—if a place could have its pants down, this one does—
this mugshot of a neighborhood where I live
 with its one long avenue stretched like a nekked leg.

 

And what about that woman in the towel once, right there across the street,
three a.m., outfoxed by the absence of a bathtub and her mislaid name?
Of course the cops were called and they folded her like a burrito into the back seat:
 just another Tuesday night in Seminole Heights.

 

The night was just three beers along when I left the julep-voiced poet
 singing of Lincoln Continentals cruising the side streets, their flopping mufflers.
I walked into the after-rain on Shadowlawn Street.
Twilight sorted its lingerie in the leaves, rosy and white,
and I tottered down the block toward my car, while in all the yards,
confederate jasmine mounted the fences, bouquets on the bridal veil bushes shuddered
 and the magnolia tree came inside each mammoth blossom.

 

Then just as I leaned to unlock the door, I looked down at the old brick street
and saw it lying flat in the dirt, the deflated jellyfish of lust:
 used, tossed over, open-mouthed, smiling,
it was the remains of someone’s poem, or at least the start of one.

 

Share

Witness to a chain of bursting

balloons filled with chirping finches.

I liked to make things up in the dark, bright

 

yarn spider webs, name your electric

mood disease a super-power. Instead,

 

the nightmare of your mania:

constant smell of burning feathers,

 

last year’s untouched dinners. A ghost

now buried in moss, now gone for days

 

in the snow, coked up and knocked up,

your exquisite moth chocolate eyes,

 

mimesis of a child who was a little prone

to trouble. I could hardly remember you.

 

I learned to sow the medicine, delicate,

and learned how someone doesn’t die

 

but fragments into hydra,

rakshasa or Ophelia,

 

minister of mystic meth-trips

down the silver-tunnels of the soul.

 

Sister, the day you walked out of

the labyrinth and into the kitchen

 

was not a day, but years of impossible

breakfasts. We used to joke about

 

you breaking dishes. What marvel

made apocalypse stormed through

 

you, what storm always in you,

what storm you

held.

Share

Bootleg

Just for laughs, me and my cousins grab one of Violet’s wigs and we dress baby Matty up like Elvis Presley. We’re on the back porch—smoking Violet’s dope, drinking beer we bought with Charles’s fake ID—when the B-52’s come on the radio. Everybody gets caught up in Private Idaho. We forget all about tiny Elvis. He takes a nosedive out of the porch swing and starts to wail like a wounded bobcat. Charles and his younger brother, Clay, head for the woods at the first sign of trouble.

 

Matty reaches out and hollers, “Budger, Budger!” It’s Matty’s word for brother, which is what he calls me even though I’m really his uncle. I pick him up. His lip is busted; there’s blood on his face and his Elvis-do is sideways.

 

Behind us, the screen door opens and slams shut. My big sister, Violet. She’s skin and bones. A red bandanna covers her bald head, and her eyebrows are painted on with a pencil.

 

“Give him here,” she says.

 

“I got him,” I say. “Go back in and lie down.”

 

“Let me have my boy.”

 

I hand him over but he’s too heavy for her so I help her sit on the steps.

 

“Run and get a bottle of Mercurochrome and some cotton balls.”

 

I don’t move. I stare at the tree trunk we use for a table and the ashtray on top. It’s overflowing with butts and roaches. Beside it sits Violet’s medicine bottle. It should be filled with weed, but it’s every bit as empty as the Old Milwaukee cans scattered around the porch.

 

“Go on. Run.”

 

I go, but for a time I stand on the other side of the screen door watching Violet rock Matty and sing to him. She doesn’t really sing so much as she just hums along with Have You Ever Seen The Rain, but it works and Matty stops crying.

 

I’m rummaging through the medicine cabinet when I hear mini-explosions coming from the woods. Charles and Clay are setting off cherry bombs. They sound like little cannons. I close my eyes and imagine one of those Civil War battles we’re always hearing about in school. Everybody likes to say it was brother against brother. I see Charles and Clay dressed in matching uniforms. Even though they’re on the same side, they still fire their baby cannons at one another because they’re such assholes.

 

Charles always has a pocket full of fireworks. Black Cats, Silver Foxes, Smoke Grenades and M-80s. Every night when we’re walking out of the woods, he drums up one last bottle rocket—like it’s a big surprise—and hands it to Clay. He hands Clay his lighter, too, and lets him fire off the final one of the night. It’s always the best.

 

I spot the Mercurochrome. It’s buried in the medicine cabinet. Stuck on a shelf in the middle of Violet’s painkillers. I pull it out and put it in my pocket, then I study Violet’s medicine, picking up one bottle after another, reading the labels and staring at the pills inside. They’re shaped and colored like freaky planets from an alternate universe, and they’ve got outer space names to match: Percocet, Darvon, Elavil. Useless against Violet’s pain. It’s weed she needs.

 

Charles knows a guy. He sells bootleg and fireworks. Other shit, too. Like weed. His name is Commodore and sometimes this Commodore will make a trade with you if you’re in a bad way. Last year in eighth grade, Tommy Larkin got a box of Roman Candles for a busted-up Zebco rod and reel. I calculate the value of a day spent on Planet Percocet, or an afternoon rolling around in the purple haze of a distant galaxy called Darvon. I come up with one million dollars. I convert that number to an earthly sum fitting an ex-con named Commodore who lives with his one-legged mom in a rusty trailer at the dead end of a dirt road on the other side of Lively Creek. I figure a dime bag, two at the most.

 

But I need Charles to get to Commodore, and King Charles doesn’t need anything from me. What stands between us now is a bicycle, beat up something awful with most of the green paint flaked off and a chain that won’t stay on. But it might as well be a brand new Cadillac for all the weight it carries between me and Charles.

 

“You two will be just like brothers.”

 

That’s what Violet said the day she told me Charles and Clay were moving in.

 

I said, “He’s already got a brother, thank you very much. And so do you.”

 

“Now, don’t be that way, honey. You’ll see, you two will be just like Dad and Uncle Willis.”

 

We keep a picture over the mantel, of Dad and Uncle Willis with their arms around each other. They’re both wearing mirrored aviators, t-shirts and dog tags. It’s the day they shipped out. A Pall Mall hangs from Uncle Willis’s lips. Dad is smiling.

 

Uncle Willis did all right. He made it out. He came home. Dad didn’t. After Uncle Willis got back he started drinking and running around with married women. He finally got himself shot and killed by Tanya Clark’s husband, Hoyt. Charles and Clay shuffled around a lot after that. They went up north and lived with our old lady aunt who was rumored to be a Catholic. Then down to Mississippi to a foster family who raised baby goats. Last year they came back to Georgia and moved in with me and Violet.

 

Charles showed up wearing Uncle Willis’s aviators and his dog tags. “You’re every bit the spitting image,” Violet said. Then she said it again, “Every bit.”

 

I decided I didn’t much care for the looks of him. What right did he have? Showing up looking like that and talking like that? Telling his stories about that fishing trip on Nickajack Lake when Uncle Willis let him drive the boat, or that one time when they went to Atlanta to see the Braves play and spent the night in a Howard Johnson’s with a swimming pool. And Violet hanging on every word. I never said anything about it, but that’s what I thought. What right did he have?

 

I cram Violet’s pills in my pocket and head back to the porch. Matty grins and reaches out. Violet’s taken off his wig and fixed his hair so he looks like Matty again. She hands him over. I doctor his lip and he starts to wail. But I walk him around the yard, and we count the lightning bugs that are starting to shine.

 

In the woods, Charles fires off the first bottle rocket of the night. It barely makes it above the treetops, and it’s nothing more than a flicker against a sky that’s just beginning to fade. But when I point it out to Matty, he laughs and he claps, then he reaches for the empty sky and hollers for more.

 

—

 

The next morning we’re sitting there in our underwear eating Pop-Tarts when Clay starts in. “How come I can’t go?” he wants to know. “I’ll mind you. I won’t talk back.”

 

Charles ignores him. He licks his saucer clean, then walks over to the sink and tosses it in. I get up and follow him.

 

Clay won’t let it go. “Is it because I sassed you yesterday? Is it because I sassed you in front of Hub Grant and all them?”

 

Charles still doesn’t answer. He turns on the water and goes to town on last night’s supper dishes. I cooked—Beanee Weenees and Tater Tots—so Charles is supposed to clean. That’s our deal. But he barely finishes his own saucer before he shuts the water off and turns to look at me.

 

Wearing those aviators, and with that smirk on his face, he’s every bit the spitting image. All that’s missing is the Pall Mall.

 

“Explain your brilliant plan to me one more time, Einstein.”

 

I say, “I reckon we could trade the pills to that guy you know. We could get a couple of dime bags for Violet. We could trade our goods to Commodore. We could do it for Violet.”

 

“Our goods? You’ve been watching too much Starsky & Hutch.”

 

He’s leaning against the sink with his arms folded and his legs crossed. The pills are on the table.

 

Clay picks up a bottle and gives it a shake, but Charles snaps his fingers and points to the table so Clay puts the pills back. Then Charles tosses him the dishtowel and Clay heads to the sink. He lays into the supper dishes while Charles crosses to the table and sits down. He opens up each bottle, dumps out the pills and runs his hand over them like they’re a pile of rock candy.

 

I take a seat across from him.

 

“You don’t know the first thing about it,” he says. “Commodore sells fireworks and bootleg. What makes you think he’d be interested in this big load of bullshit?” He picks up a hand full of pills and lets one or two spill through his fingers. He looks at me, but all I see is my own twisted face reflected in his aviators.

 

Then I think about that bicycle. Lately, I’ve been thinking about that bicycle a lot. Every time I look at Charles, that’s what I see.

 

The fight was over a year ago, soon after Charles and Clay moved in. At the time, I walked away from it feeling good about things. After a while, it hardly ever crossed my mind anymore, and when it did, I was convinced that I got the best of Charles. Then Violet got sick, and I found myself recollecting on a regular basis. Me and Charles rolling down the stone steps on the back porch, the pain in my wrist when I fell on it and broke it. The feeling of satisfaction, even joy you might say, when I jumped up and swung my other arm and made contact with Charles’s lip. His aviators flew off and in the middle of it all I stood there trying to remember if I’d actually ever seen his eyes before. I was sure I had but I just couldn’t recall. That pause gave Charles the upper hand and he was on me again, then we were both on the ground once more. I was on my back, and Charles, the same age as me but a lot bigger, was on top of me with his fist pulled back ready to do some damage. But he didn’t slug me. Instead he started to cry. He put both fists against my chest, and I couldn’t move. He held me there, dripping tears and blood all over my face.

 

I push my chair back and get up from the table. I walk over to the sink where Clay is almost finished with the dishes. Then I walk back to the table and sit down.

 

“What makes you think Commodore wouldn’t be interested?” I say, “You don’t know. Bootleg’s no better than pills. Especially to some loser shacked up with his mom in a rusty doublewide. You don’t have to be an Einstein to figure that one out, Einstein.”

 

“What about me,” Clay hollers from the sink. “I’m part of it. Don’t forget about me.”

 

We ignore him.

 

Charles says, “And tell me this, what do you plan on saying to Commodore? Howdy Commodore, pleased to meet you, would you like to buy some dope off me and my cousin?”

 

We sit there cussing and trading Einsteins while Clay finishes the dishes.

 

Soon as he turns off the water, we hear it. It sounds like the dishwater leaving the sink, but it’s not. It’s Violet breathing in the other room, low and gurgly. It keeps going long after the dirty dishwater has gone down the drain, and Clay is standing by the table with the dishtowel in his hand, waiting for a word or a look or anything from Charles.

 

Nobody says anything.

 

Violet sucks in a fast and deep breath like she’s been under water, then she coughs.

 

“Yuck,” Clay says.

 

“Don’t be a dick,” Charles tells him. Then he says to me, “Well, put your shoes on, asshole, unless you plan on going to see Commodore in your bare feet.”

 

I go to my room and throw on yesterday’s smelly t-shirt and a pair of tennis shoes, then I sit on the bed.

 

I guess you could say the fight was my fault. Like I said, Charles and Clay had just moved in. It was summer. We were on the back porch. Clay was playing Superman. Or maybe it was Batman. I just remember he was wearing a towel like it was a cape, and he would jump off the side of the porch, again and again, with his ratty-ass cape flapping behind him.

 

I was shelling corn for the chickens. Charles had wandered off someplace. He was supposed to help with the corn. That was the deal. The last thing Violet told us when she left for the flower shop that morning was to shell all the corn in the crib. “All of it,” she said. “I mean it, boys. Don’t burn down the house. Don’t kill each other. And finish shelling the corn. Besides that, I don’t really care. Is that too much to ask?”

 

But soon as Violet left so did Charles, and I sat there shelling corn by myself. The kernels were hard and dried. Perfect for shelling. By noon I’d half way filled the oil drum at the end of the porch. I got up to walk to the corncrib for another bushel, that’s when I saw Charles. He carried a greasy chain in one hand; with the other he was pushing a piece-of-shit bike up the drive. It used to be green, now it was mostly rust. I figured that’s why whoever owned it had tossed it, or why they wouldn’t much care that Charles had come in and stole it right out from under their noses. He wheeled it up to the porch and stopped, held out his arms in a big, showy gesture, with a shitty grin on his face that said, Now I’ve got a bike and you don’t.

 

I went to the barn, filled up my basket and hauled it back to the porch. Charles occupied himself with the bike chain, Clay kept jumping, and I shelled my way through the rest of the corn.

 

By dark, the oil drum was finally full. I got up to go to the kitchen for a glass of tea when Charles said, “Hey man, while you’re up, how about bringing me a Coke?”

 

I stood there watching Clay jump and watching Charles mess with the bike chain. I bent down and picked a kernel up off the floor. It was shriveled to the size of a BB. “Hey man,” I said, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

 

It wasn’t planned. I’d never thought of it or practiced it. The words just came out in a perfect imitation of Charles’s voice.

 

He stood. He didn’t come at me. Not at first. It wasn’t exactly a smile that played around his lips. It wasn’t a smirk either. He wasn’t the spitting image anymore.

 

He shrugged and started to turn away.

 

It came as natural to me as baiting a hook or wringing a chicken’s neck. The kernel flew from my fingertips like it had been fired from a slingshot. It hit Uncle Willis’s aviators on the upper right side by Charles’s nose, and it barely made a sound. One small speck of mirror is all. Damage the size of a fruit fly. It was nothing. But to Charles it was something.

 

A few days after it happened, Hub Grant came by to pick up the oil drum full of corn. He works at the Co-Op. He grinds the corn into chicken feed for us.

 

Violet was at the flower shop. It was hot, so Clay was trying to work up a breeze in the porch swing, fanning himself with a Frisbee. Charles had wandered off again. I helped Hub load the drum into the back of his truck as best I could with my messed up wrist. He asked me what happened to it. I told him I fell. He didn’t ask me anything else about it. He got in his truck to leave and stuck his head out the window.

 

“Hey buddy, I meant to ask you, how’d you like that bicycle?”

 

I was standing on the steps; the truck was parked a couple of feet away.

 

“You know … the one your cousin fixed up for you. It used to belong to one of my boys. Charles found it in the shed behind the Co-Op. Said he wanted you to have something nice. We made a trade. I’m gonna raise some hogs on that piece of land I own behind the post office. I need a fence. Charles is over there right now, creosoting the fence posts and laying them in the ground. Lordy, can you imagine? In this heat? You ask me, I sure got the better end of that deal.”

 

I still didn’t say anything.

 

“Well, you boys stay out of jail now.”

 

“We’ll try,” Clay said from the porch swing. “Come back and see us.”

 

“I surely will.”

 

He drove off.

 

It wasn’t in the tool shed, or in the corncrib, or anywhere else in the barn. I walked across the pasture and down to the little holler where everybody dumps their broken shit. It wasn’t there either. I stopped at Tommy Larkin’s house. They weren’t home but I looked in their carport anyway. Tommy’s older brother Hank steals stuff. Even from people he likes. Tommy calls it a friendly five-finger discount. The bike wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere. I looked until dark. Charles never brought it up again. Neither did I. I kept waiting for him to tell Violet what an asshole I’d been. I figured I see him riding the bike one day, popping wheelies and showing off.  None of that happened. Then Violet got sick.

 

Now I worry over Violet’s life and that fight with Charles like they’re the same. When I’m not thinking about one, I’m thinking about the other.

 

I get up off the bed and go out to the living room. I pull a chair up to the couch and hold Violet’s hand. She’s sleeping, and Matty is sitting on the floor with Clay. They’re pretending to play checkers, but mostly Matty just likes to stick the checkers in his mouth because he’s teething.

 

I tell Clay, “Don’t let him swallow one of those, do you hear?”

 

He doesn’t answer.

 

“Do you hear?”

 

“I hear you, I’m sittin’ right here. I’m not retarded.”

 

Charles comes out and says, “Don’t be such a dick, Clay.” Then he grabs the pills off the table and goes out and waits for me on the porch.

 

I hold Violet’s hand as long as I can. It’s as light as air, like a quail feather or a June bug. Something that could float away as soon as I let it go.

 

Charles hops off the porch and heads down the drive towards the main road. When he crosses the highway and steps into the woods—woods that are as thick and overgrown as any jungle anywhere—when I lose sight and sound of him completely, I finally let go of Violet’s hand, and get up to run after him.

Share

Under Florida

When we think about light, it is generally in the context of it projecting through the medium of air. Light reaches onto objects and by its reflection on the surface renders them visible. However, when light projects through the medium of water, it behaves differently. Water acts more like a lens that distorts in a number of ways, bubbles, amplification in size, murkiness, etc. When photography attempts to capture light in the liquid medium it relies on conventions established by the medium of light. The liquidity of light would be a state in which the immaterial of light projecting through water gives it materiality. They both become something else, light becomes a property of the liquid and vice versa: the liquidity of light.

Share