Poets of Color



Elmaz Abinader, Instructor Office: 313 Mills Hall
510 430 2225 elmaz@earthlink.net
office hours: 5-6:30 Thursday and by appointment

Here are the texts for the class.
• Asian American Poetry: the Next Generation edited by Victoria Chang
• Voices from Leimert Park, ed by Shonda, Buchannan
• Effigies, An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing Pacific Rim, 2009, Okpik, Rexford McDougall, etc (Salt Publishing)
• The Wind Shifts, New Latino Poetry, Edited by Francisco Aragón
• The Essential Etheridge Knight by Etheridge Knight
• Mercy by Lucille Clifton
• Zodiac of Echoes by Khaled Mattawa
• Diwata by Barbara Jane Reyes


Monday, October 1, 2012

Najarro writes SENSEational time capsules.  Her ability to speak in the different voices to tell a number of stories is a fantastic skill. Najarro uses details as markers of place and time and even circumstance. Details that explore class, immigration, language, culture. Moments like the one of Najarro’s father selling tamales using his bicycle, takes us on a journey that resembles a family slide show. However, the unique part of this strategy is how she creates images that open a door into your own personal images. The work of Najarro has made me question my strong resolve not to pursue graduate school.
She does a great job at creating a structure for you to walk into. Najarro successfully weaves accessible scenery of rich cultures meshing together. At times these cultures or generations mentioned in her poetry collide into one another. Immigration perspectives from second and third generations are explored deeply in her poetry. 
What a joy it is to find jewels like the word hinged wrapped in between words and rhythm and meaning more than one thing.  To show the connection between the farmers the farmers children and the children who will never farm the way their ancestors did. The lineage of family and culture are the most prevalent in Najarro’s poetry.
I’m sorry this has been a hard weekend, week and semester for me. So my thoughts are more scattered than ever.

I do appreciate the way the specific poets we've been reading truly find ways to identify with a larger meaning. Poets like the one's we read in this course, those who break rules and make new ones, who bring to the surface those things we aren't supposed to talk about.

Najarro helps me distract myself from the haunting realities of my mentor’s third tango with breast cancer, the heart wrenching conversations of mastectomies, and the ugly business of the end of things.
She helps me travel back in time to the beginning.
Her words put me under a spell,
Spell reminiscing.
Without judgments only observations live on.
Only the details make it in, the things that can join a universe together in recollection.
Najarro finds my accent and returns it to me
The one I lost when my mother migrated past the comfortable stoop of Brooklyn far from the eyes of her mother in Puerto Rico far from ties and obligations and rituals.
Najarro helps me remember my voice and all the voices that live inside of me, because of me, before me.

My mentor asked me to write her poem, I said what kind, she said one that tells my story.
That's it, that's what connects us all. The need to tell, to listen, to know one's story. The details, the moments that make us and broke us. For some human reason writing down one's history is a right of passage. When we get to a point in our lives when we feel we've conquered Goliath there's this pull to tell other's about your strategy, your fear of the giant and in doing that connect to other's who wrestled with things larger than themselves.

4 comments:



  1. Yes!she can guide us through these moments and places with a deft hand and we buy it and feel it all the way through.
    e

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  2. Thank you so much Llesenia, for tying Najarro's powerful writing into our own experiences, and the pull to be able to document our own herstories. I am so sorry you've had a rough start to it all, but appreciate you being able to find solace and healing in folks pouring out their hearts to touch and heal our own. I totally agree with your understanding Najarro, in her "creating a structure for you to walk into", yet be able to resonate so strongly in our own personal struggles. I truly for REAL felt that last paragraph, how writing one's own history is a rite of passage; to show we've sweat and earned some scars but also transformed them, and pass down this story to other folks who are headed in similar directions. It's a reminder that yes, these tales ARE worthy! If we don't document our own story, who else will?

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  3. it's crazy that I never understood the value of books, or words for that matter until my life depended on it, until the books that I was faced with told me my story, echoed my ancestors stories and the words finally made sense. I connected my rage to so many others, and it has helped me be less angry. Youre right if we don't tell our stories it would be a loss to the voice of generations, because we are connected to one another by the STORY.

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  4. Najarro's work uses sense to convey themes, as you mentioned, of "class, immigration, language, culture." This analysis made me think about how closely tied we are to the emotions present in each text and how the situations might be particular to a situation but the senses and emotions themselves are universal. The fact that Najarro bridges the gap between her work and the reader's reality (ie your personal conflicts) speaks to the depth of emotion present in poetry.

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