Category: bilingual poetry

The LA Opera and Memories of Fascism: Federico Garcia Lorca, Neruda, Hemingway

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Would you flee a fascist state?

Given the current state of US political affairs, I was left to ponder that question as I watched the LA Opera production of “Ainadamar” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillon downtown. In the opera, the character who plays actress Margarita Xirgu tries to convince her friend Federico García Lorca – a poet, playwright, and theater director — to flee Spain as the country hurdles towards civil war. She goes into exile, but the poet refuses to leave. Xirgu then engages with the audience to tell the tragedy surrounding García Lorca’s last days during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939.

Why Federico García Lorca?

Upon hearing about this opera, I was compelled to see it. As I state in my hybrid memoir manuscript, I first learned about Federico García Lorca at age sixteen when my AP Spanish Literature teacher introduced me to two poets who had a lasting impact on my own bilingual poetry – García Lorca and Pablo Neruda.

García Lorca is the most prominent Spanish writer of the early twentieth century. Born in 1898 in Granada, Spain and assassinated in 1936, his literary influences were futurism, symbolism, and surrealism. While doing recent research on his life, I realized authorities have given various reasons for his death. Most prominent amongst them is the fact that he was gay and a socialist in a country that was moving further and further to the right.

Was the Spanish Civil War a proxy war?

I am a fan of hybrid memoir, so literature inevitably leads me to history. Because I read the book The Red Flag by David Priestland a few years ago, I reflected on the historical context of the opera as I watched the L.A. production. From Priestland, I learned how the far right in Spain gained more popularity as Hitler consolidated power in and around Germany. Before World War II, Spain, France, and Chile had formed popular front governments to combat fascism. The Spanish left had one of the most successful popular fronts – communists, socialists, and left liberals — in the Western world, and they won the 1936 election.

Regrettably, the leftist victory of the Spanish Popular Front was short lived because General Francisco Franco staged a coup in 1936, the year García Lorca was assassinated. The country endured three torturous years of civil war fought not only by its citizens but also by volunteers from over fifty countries. The fascist governments of Germany and Italy supported Franco while Stalin sent arms to the political left.

While doing recent research, I learned new details about the quickly shifting politics of 1930’s Spain. I knew from Priestland that Picasso became a card-carrying communist during the civil war era. But I also discovered that Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda was on diplomatic duty in Spain where he met García Lorca. Like Picasso, Neruda became radicalized as a communist, but he also lost his diplomatic post due to his beliefs. The Chilean poet also met Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo and attended the 1937 Second International Writers Conference that Hemingway attended.

Despite the valiant efforts of the leftist resistance and the toil of a civil war that cut short 500,000 lives, the General gained control of the country. Franco banned García Lorca’s writing until 1953 — interestingly, the year Joseph Stalin died — and maintained his dictatorship until 1975.

A surprise for me was learning that after many years of tragic war and decades of dictatorship, García Lorca’s remains have never been found.

The LA Opera’s production of “Ainadamar” — conducted by Lina González-Granados of Colombia and choreographed by Antonio Najarro of Spain – was excellent. I appreciate how it put this history and García Lorca’s art on a Los Angeles stage for us to remember and reflect on the importance of resisting the destruction and dehumanization of far-right politics.

“The House on Mango Street” and a Garden in Watts

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The House on Mango Street in a roundabout way helped me buy the garden in Watts. The garden wasn’t just the purple fountain grass and Mexican feather grass protected by weed fabric and surrounded by wood chips at the side of the house. But also, the papyrus grass that grew six or seven feet in front of the house. I bought the house in 2004 and watered the decorative grasses and the green St. Augustine grass every Sunday until the house went underwater, financially, in 2008. Then I sold it in 2009; and not because of the garden and not because of the house, but because of a family emergency that was more important than the house.

When Sandra Cisneros first published her novella The House on Mango Street in 1984, I had been living my period of attempted literary exile that inspired me to fly from Los Angeles to Paris in search of a city Anaïs Nin portrayed as inherently artistic. Nin told me this when I ditched eleventh grade and read her autobiography inside the newly constructed big blue Pacific Design Center on Melrose Avenue. While I was ditching at Pacific Design, the Diaz sisters also had a house on Melrose that they owned before the building was completed in 1975. Ironically, their 900-foot house sat at the front steps of the blue building until 1997 when they finally sold. Another irony is that as an adult I would hear Cisneros read from her book inside the auditorium of Pacific Design. I can’t remember now if the Diaz house was still at the entrance or not.

During my literary exile that mimicked A. Nin, J. Baldwin, and J. Baker, I sat one day on a bench in the cold of winter listening as the streets of Paris told me I needed a vocation. On the metro running beneath the streets, the Black skin – akin to my own — of Francophone Africans hinted I needed a home. I returned to Los Angeles determined to teach despite my mother rightly warning that secondary education was too much work for too little income. Cisneros’ House on Mango Street gave me something to teach. And lasting in the trenches of teaching, so you can have a livelihood, pay your rent, and maybe one day buy a house, is all about having something (you are passionate about) to teach.

Cisneros is back in the States from her current home in Mexico. Speaking at City of Asylum on October 20 for the fortieth anniversary of the publication of her book, she described her time teaching high school in Chicago and how she realized the students needed more than literature; she suggested that what they needed were social services and social change. Indeed. I agree. At the same time, I am thankful she gave me poetically crafted chapters to teach, such as “My Name,” “Marin,” and “Papa Who Wakes Up Tired in the Dark.”

As I taught, I wrote poetry. Lots of it. My first published poems were bilingual, and Arte Público Press accepted them for publication in their journal The Americas Review. At City of Asylum, Cisneros stated that House on Mango Street was first published by Arte Público – a press, she said required its writers to be better than good. They had to be excellent. I knew, without a doubt, that my poems – “La Chanteuse de Jazz,” La Pachanga,” and “Boca Oficial” were excellent. Cisneros also whispered to us during her talk that a lot of Latinx writing today is pop literature.

Mango Street not only inspired me to continue teaching; it was a catalyst for me to write my own YA novella while I lived in the house in Watts where on Sundays I tended to purple fountain grass, Mexican feather grass, and papyrus grass. Thinking back now, I can’t fathom how I wrote a novella as my marriage slowly dissolved and I stepped into the role of single motherhood responsible for two kids while tending to three dogs and a garden behind wrought iron gates.

It dawned on Cisneros as she studied creative writing at University of Iowa in her early twenties that everyone in her class had a house except her. That difference was another inspiration for her writing the novella. Did I ever think of my house in Watts as “A House of My Own” that was “a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem”? Considering that idea now, I don’t think so. I wrote a novella inside its four walls, but that writing occurred in a whirlwind I barely remember. The Watts house didn’t nourish my ability to write for publication; it nourished my ability to write in order to live. It, like teaching, erased the line between writing, teaching, and living until one and the other became the same.