uprooting

It wasn't until after I'd read all the poems by Mahealani Perez-Wendt that I read her bio. And I wished I'd read it before I read the work; I wish I'd read it years ago. Bio blurbs's are usually so strange, right? Placing a poet in a location and a job, with a pithy bit about their present situation and placing them in the context of a literary pubic. Which makes sense, but is none-the-less always a little removed and usually about claiming legitimacy in the publishing/writing world. But Perez-Wendt's bio, while doing some of that expected publication list stuff at the very end, began with where she comes from. It began with her grandparents and migration and labor,  a whole paragraph of acknowledgement of where she comes from and what heritage. Which is such a powerful gesture and commentary on historical position, on the predominance of her ancestry and location and family in who she is and what she does.

Of course, all of us are products of the generations before us and where they moved from and to, what they did and had to do where they were, where that cumulative history placed us in our lived and experiences. But mostly, even in the folks we've read this semester, people don't lead with that. The way that Perez-Wendt did recognizes the primacy of ancestral ties in her life, her person, her writing.

I went back, then, to the shorter poem Uprooting. At first read the poem is about a single I being watching by a group of tourists who take her as a "native spectacle." In and of itself this is gross (like the tour buses that arrived in New Orleans shortly after the storm to see the damage but never step out of the bus and help rebuild) - putting survival and indigeneity on display and stripping the humanity away by act of watching at removal. But of course, this poem is about the ways that this culture has been stripped away and uprooted (graves dug up, bones tossed aside) and made peoples lives and culture and ways of life a novelty to be watched from afar. With holding Perez-Wendt's bio in mind, this poem bursts into all the echoes of a killing off of a culture forward and backward generations.

"I turned my back
so I wouldn't have to see them
Watching me
I stood like that
For quite awhile
when I turned around
they were still there
Watching me"

The creshendo down of lines, the tumbling and solid rhythm repeats this feeling that tourism and the arrival of outsiders who make a removed spectacle of ancestral and living ways of life flows back up the line of generations and threatens those to come. Even turning ones back doesn't make that arrival of the bus disappear, doesn't put the bones back undisturbed.

"This is my home, my roots -
What they doing is uprooting."

Uprooting the single I and all the blood, history, labor that flowed down into making that I exactly who she is. Uprooting all the generations before and after by arriving to watch the simple act of survival. I so appreciate Perez-Wendt's to the point and confident writing, downward rhythms and leading from ancestry.