Category: personal essay

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.

AWP vs LA Festival of Books

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Los Angeles hosted two large book events within two months, and I attended both. Was one better than the other? I think not. They both focused on their audience and did so quite well.

March was abuzz with AWP and the writers who visited from across the country and internationally to make the city grand!

Association of Writers and Writing Programs hosted 12,000 writers, editors, publishers, book sellers, college programs, and others at the LA Convention Center. Amazingly, I didn’t just attend. I also presented for the first time! I was on the “New Literary Forms for a New Los Angeles” panel moderated by Claire Phillips. Along with Claire, I was proud to accompany writers Steph Cha, Sesshu Foster, and Gina Frangello.

Challenge number one was to calm my nerves! This was my first time presenting at AWP. The closest I’d ever gotten to presenting at AWP was participating in an off-site event alongside my publisher, Another Chicago Magazine, at AWP Seattle in 2023. But practice paves the way for perfection. And practice I did, even though my goal wasn’t to be perfect. I just wanted to be prepared enough so that if I made a mistake, I’d be able to regain composure and keep it moving.

As an attendee, I made my way to the panel “Do the Hustle: How to Publicize Your Book.” Luckily, I am reaching that yearned-for point in the writing process in which I get to focus now on submission, marketing, and publicity. So, it was great hearing how authors are clearing their own pathways to sales in an era in which publishers do less book promotion.

The panel “Literary Production During Authoritarian Governments” hit the right notes of concern and caution given our current administration in D.C. I share in the presenters’ belief that it’s imperative we continue writing and resisting during this era of book bans and limited funding.

“We Beautifully Outside: Informal Writing Collectives, Community and Kinship” was a wonderful reminder of the power of writing groups and how they have nurtured Black women writers in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Seattle.

In April, LA Festival of Books had about 160,000 people in attendance and was more about casual engagement. Let’s face it, at AWP writers are speaking to their peers — the toughest audience sometimes.

Because AWP and LA Festival of Books were back-to-back in the same city, I picked up on the different tone right away. At the book festival, authors speak to their readers. So, the presenters delve into the content of the text more so than the writing process that led to its creation. Their presentation is more relaxed because they want to meet their audience halfway, and their audience is simply out and about enjoying their weekend.

For me, panel number one was “Existential Memoirs.” As a writer of hybrid memoir, I search out this genre. The panel was moderated by Gina Frangello, my co-panelist at AWP, and included authors Meghan Daum, Lyz Lenz, and Glynnis MacNicol. The women covered a wide range of topics including relationships, motherhood, the humor of daily life, and the horror of contemporary politics.

And finally, the “Speak Out” panel on writing and activism was moderated by journalist Jonathan Capehart and included authors Ibram X. Kendi, Aida Mariam Davis, and Rita Omokha. I loved that this panel had a Pan African scope, with presenters of US, Ethiopian, and Nigerian heritage. Their call to activism was rooted in US reality but stretched across the African/Black diaspora and highlighted the need to act locally and analyze globally as we draw on Black activism from the past to traverse the winding roads of an uncertain future.

Why Samuel Beckett: A Black Writer’s Perspective

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Studying Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett during junior year at UCLA was the final straw that pushed me towards mental and emotional exhaustion. I had overextended myself academically by taking too many classes during spring and summer quarters; and, studying Beckett in the fall led to questioning my Catholic faith and having to take a quarter off from my studies.

When I heard that OR books was publishing a hybrid memoir titled Beckett’s Children by Michael Coffey, I rushed to pre-order it. Coffey’s memoir, published in July this year, offered a sense of relief because I had worried that the allusions to a modernist writer in my memoir manuscript might seem a bit dated. But here was a memoir published in 2024 proving me wrong.

Unlike Coffey’s book, there are no continuous references to Beckett in my manuscript. Studying Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is pivotal to the inciting incident in chapter one because it causes me to doubt my faith. In Beckett’s Children, on the other hand, the author’s inciting incident centers around the idea that the Irish author may have fathered the American poet, Susan Howe.

Threads running through Coffey’s hybrid memoir include the stated curiosity about a familial bond between Beckett and Howe, Coffey’s literary research on the two writers, his own history as an adoptee, and his relationship with his son who is a three-time felon and addict.  In my manuscript, I weave in the history of Black Los Angeles beginning with the founding of the city by the Spanish.

Coffey’s description of airports and prisons as structures distinguished by their “architecture of waiting” stood out to me. This description was impactful because I’m familiar with Professor David Harvey’s description of the revolutionary potential of airport workers who are a class in themselves with the potential of becoming a class for themselves. In contrast, prisoners are the most captive humans on US soil; and prison is where the US Government has sent revolutionaries, such as members of the Black Power Movement and the Black Panther Party. So, I found the analogy of prisons and airports interesting because the two structures can also be considered exact opposites.

I recommend Beckett’s Children because one or more of the four narrative lines the author weaves into his hybrid memoir will grab your interest and pull you through the author’s skillful storytelling until the last page.

Lost in Los Angeles

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I center the beginning of my memoir on my feelings of alienation from Los Angeles during my youth. Given the reflective impulse of memoir, I now realize that one reason I felt alienated from my city of birth was because I didn’t know its hidden history. Yet, history, whether in written or oral form, can be boundless, especially when the focus is a major city. I wanted to know the history of the land because one of my goals as I write my memoir, is to invite the land to speak. With that goal in mind, I decided to research the relationship Native Americans have with the land. I found some clues in a couple of articles.

I’ve passed La Ballona Wetlands in West Los Angeles countless times. Almost always, it’s during a drive to the South Bay when I take Jefferson Boulevard west. La Ballona is 577 square acres of grassy wetlands you encounter before the turn left on Vista del Mar results in expansive views of the sandy beaches and rolling waves of the Pacific Ocean. A sign indicates the wetlands are an ecological reserve. Yet, I had no idea that this area was also a former community and sacred burial ground of the Tongva Natives — commonly referred to as the Gabrieliños. The research of Seetha N. Reddy and John G. Douglass – “Native Californian Persistence and Transformation in the Colonial Los Angeles Basin, Southern California” –wasn’t replete with information on the Tongva’s relationship to nature, but the writers did state that the Tongva polished, painted, and adorned pine trees as part of a burial ritual at the Ballona site. The Natives made offerings of plant foods that they burned in baskets during burial ceremonies as well. The scant information I found demonstrated the intimate relationship between nature and this Indigenous group who were historically second only to the Chumash in regard to wealth, population, and power. With its distance from El Pueblo in what is now downtown Los Angeles, La Ballona was a living space that allowed the Tongva to escape the governance of the Spanish. Distance was preferable because after the arrival of the Spanish – who viewed them either as laborers or souls to be saved – the Indigenous lifestyles of the Tongva were disrupted in just one generation.

Before you even view the beach, the sense of vastness that hangs over the Pacific Ocean is something you sense at La Ballona. I wasn’t totally surprised to learn that the area was sacred Indigenous land. It has a distinct aura that marks it as special, as do other locations in Southern California such as the Hollywood Hills, Chino Hills, and Palos Verdes.

I gained additional insights about the Tongva people from Jon Mcvey Erlandson’s article titled “The Making of Chumash Tradition: Replies to Haley and Wilcoxon.” His writing focuses primarily on the Chumash Natives, but I learned the Tongva prophet Chinigchinich was born on the territory that is now Cal State Long Beach. In other words, the university campus is also sacred Native territory. The most sacred. The original name of the site is Puvungna which means “where all things come together.” And as recently as 1972, archeologists discovered a Native American burial site on university grounds.

Land considered holy for the Chumash includes Point Conception in Santa Barbara. Yes, the famous Point Conception that is a major geographical site for meteorologists charged with delivering our daily and weekly weather forecasts. The Chumash refer to this area as the Western Gate and they believe the dead pass to the afterworld here. They hold sacred the idea that there was “a land of the dead across the sea to the west.”

Erlandson’s article tells us the idea of individual ownership of land was a foreign concept to Native Americans. Quite an irony in a state like California which has some of the most expensive land parcels in the country, especially when the real estate is on the coast. I didn’t glean a ton of information about nature from this second article, but I was able to infer that the Natives, who have inhabited Southern California for at least 11,000 years, didn’t have the materialistic relationship to the land that characterizes current economic practices.

So, what was my major takeaway? I learned to differentiate the city constructed by humans – with its miles of pavement, glass skyscrapers, freeways, streetlights, and endless rows of homes — from the land. I came to realize that the two are distinct entities. And it’s the city – whether under Spanish, Mexican, or US governance – that has imposed its rules and regulations regarding the land on top of Native beliefs. Once I got a clearer idea of how the Tongva and Chumash viewed the land and how they held it sacred, a lot more made sense. Yes, I sensed when I was in the vicinity of La Ballona that there was something special about the area. Or when I viewed Chino Hills while driving south on the 71, I felt in awe of the serenity and sense of balance on the land there. Undoubtedly, I have felt alienated from the City of Los Angeles. I still am. But I’ve learned to love the land and to embrace it as it has embraced me. And that is one major contradiction about living in Los Angeles – how one can feel alienated from a city that can be downright ruthless while loving a land that is quite welcoming.

Cop Brutality: @Memphis and Nigeria’s #EndSARS

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“But somehow we survive

severance, deprivation, loss

Patrols uncoil along the asphalt dark

hissing their menace to our lives,

most cruel, all our land is scarred with terror,

rendered unlovely and unlovable;

sundered are we and all our passionate surrender

but somehow tenderness survives.”


-Dennis Brutus (from “Somehow we survive”)


MY MEMPHIS TRAUMA REVOLVES AROUND THE UNIVERSE OF WILEY BENTON WHO WAS ONE OF TWELVE CHLDREN BORN TO MY MATERNAL GREAT GRANDPARENTS, BUD AND LETTIE BERNETTE BENTON.  THE BROTHER OF MY GRANDMOTHER, DOLLIE, A YOUNG WILEY LEFT HOME TO RUN AN ERRAND, ONE DAY IN 1930’s MEMPHIS. HE WALKED IN A PART OF THE CITY WHERE HOUSES FADED INTO TREES AND WHERE THE PAVEMENT DRIFTED TO DIRT ROAD, CHANGED TO LEAVES AND BRANCHES UNDERFOOT, SNAPPING AND BREAKING BENEATH HIS FOOTSTEPS. HOURS, DAYS LATER, WILEY NEVER RETURNED HOME. NEVER. HIS WAS THE EMPTY PLATE AT EVERY FAMILY REUNION IN MEMPHIS AND DURING ALL THE CHRISTMAS DINNERS OF HIS SIBLINGS IN CHICAGO AND LOS ANGELES.

on January 7, 2023 police officers pulled over TYRE NICHOLS for alleged reckless driving. what should have been a routine stop turned instead to his battle with death as five police officers beat and tased the 29-year-old to death. TYRE, father to a four-year old, was a skater who had a website called “THIS CALIFORNIA KID” documenting his skating life in sacramento. he had come to memphis during the pandemic to live with his MOM and was working with his STEPFATHER at fedex. his killers were members of the memphis police unit called scorpion (street crimes operation to restore peace in our neighborhoods) that the department formed in november 2021. following the murder of TYRE, the unit was disbanded.

in nigeria, there had been years of complaints about the police unit called sars (special anti-robbery squad). authorities formed the unit in lagos in the early 1990’s, and later it was expanded as part of a national police strategy. nigerian citizens complained of being arrested, detained, and tortured by sars officers.  two incidents in 2020 set off national and international protests against the police unit – an arrested MAN falling off a police vehicle in early october in delta state who onlookers presumed dead and then police killing protestor, JIMOH ISIAKA, on october 10 in oyo state. a few days after those two incidents and their subsequent protests, the police replaced sars with a new swat unit.

INDULGING IN HER ROLE AS THE BEST SOUL FOOD CHEF OF THE TWO MEMPHIS SIBLINGS THAT MIGRATED TO L.A., MY AUNTIE TILLIE COOKED CHRISTMAS DINNER AT HER HOUSE EVERY YEAR. TILLIE (HAYDEE MAE) WAS AN OLDER SISTER OF MY GRANDMOTHER. AS THE TWO OF THEM TALKED ABOUT MUNDANE INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE, THEIR CONVERSATION MEANDERED TOWARDS MEMPHIS MEMORY WHEREUPON THEY EVOKED THE EMPTY PLATE OF THEIR BROTHER WILEY. AND FROM WILEY, MY AUNT TILLIE ALWAYS SHIFTED TO STORIES OF HER LATE HUSBAND, DAVID, WHO DIED A YOUNG MAN YEARS BEFORE I WAS EVER ABLE TO MEET HIM. DAVID SERVED IN THE SEGREGATED MILITARY OF THE UNITED STATES, AND HIS IMAGE, WITH HIM IN UNIFORM, STARED OUT AT US FROM AN END TABLE IN MY AUNT’S LIVING ROOM. WITHOUT FAIL, AT SOME POINT IN THE EVENING, AUNT TILLIE WOULD BEND OVER HER WOODEN RECORD PLAYER, PICK UP THE NEEDLE AND PLACE IT ON DINAH WASHINGTON’S LP JUST AT THE LINE WHERE “A COTTAGE FOR SALE” BEGINS.

the five officers who killed TYRE NICHOLS in memphis were fired. as the nation goes through these cycles of police abuse and firings, we know that firing officers doesn’t end our colonial status as Black people within a system of white supremacy. Journalist CHRIS HEDGES recently stated that the “military and police forces in the u.s. function as armies of occupation” stabilizing corporate colonialism. despite the five officers being black, they derive their agency by ensuring the social system functions for a business-as-usual economics that benefits the few. within capitalism, the “representationalist” aspect of identity politics, to quote the late GLEN FORD, hasn’t saved us from losing forty percent of our wealth since 2008, nor from being forty percent of the nation’s homeless while accounting for only fourteen percent of the population.

at a press conference in memphis, police officials said, “…”


despite protests across nigeria over police brutality, police and hired thugs continued to kill PROTESTORS. during the october 2020 protests in lagos at the lekki toll gate, soldiers attempted to restore order. order in nigeria includes maintaining control over crude petroleum – a crucial global resource and the nation’s largest export; one percent of the population owns eighty percent of the nation’s oil wealth. despite PROTESTORS waving the nigerian flag and singing the national anthem, soldiers stormed and shot at them. the military killed at least forty-eight PEOPLE and another ninety-six CORPSES were later found.

at a news conference in lagos, authorities promised, “…”


THE MUSIC PLAYING, AUNTIE STOOD IN HER DINING ROOM, RAISED THE SCOTCH AND COKE TO HER LIPS, AND TOOK A SIP. HER LIPSTICK LEFT A RED STAIN ON THE GLASS. SHE POINTED TO HER FOOD PREPARED MEMPHIS STYLE AND SAID, “YES, DAVID LOVED MY COOKING.” MY GRANDMOTHER, SISTER TO BOTH AUNT TILLIE AND THEIR DISAPPERARED BROTHER, WILEY BENTON, SMILED. I REALIZE NOW THAT MY AUNT COOKED NOT JUST FOR THE LIVING, BUT FOR THOSE WHO HAD PASSED AWAY.

MAKING WAY FOR US TO EAT, AUNTIE WALKED TO THE KITCHEN AND RETURNED WITH PLATES SHE THEN PUT ON THE TABLE. THERE WERE DISHES FOR EVERYONE AND A FEW PLATES THAT WOULD PASS THE NIGHT EMPTY. NOTICING HER SONG HAD REACHED ITS END, MY AUNT BENT OVER THE WOODEN RECORD PLAYER, PICKED UP THE NEEDLE, AND PLACED IT BACK AT THE BEGINNIG OF DINAH WASHINGTON’S SONG.

WITH HORNS AND BASS PROPELLING HER FORWARD, DINAH VOCALIZED, “FROM EVERY SINGLE WINDOW, I SEE YOUR FACE. BUT WHEN I REACH THAT WINDOW, THERE’S

EMPTY


SPACE.”


SOURCES

The accounts of police brutality directed at Tyre Nichols are from:

“Woke Imperialism” by Chris Hedges in The Chris Hedges Report” (San Francisco: Substack, Feb 5, 2023)

“We’re not done: end of Scorpion Unit after Tyre Nichols death is first step, protestors say” by Edwin Rios in The Guardian (New York: Jan 29, 2023)

“Colonial-Capitalist Fascism and its Deadly Outcome: The State Murder of Tortuguita in Atlanta and Tyre Nichols in Memphis Are Inextricably Linked” by Black Alliance for Peace Atlanta in Black Agenda Report (USA: Feb 1 2023)

The accounts of police brutality in Nigeria are from “The massacre at the Lekki Toll Gate” by Femi Falana SAN in The Guardian Nigeria (Lagos: Nov 24 2021)

The statistic on Nigeria’s oil wealth is from “Imperialism, dependence, development: Legacies of colonialism in Africa” by Lee Wengraf in International Socialist Review (Chicago: Center for Economic Research and Social Change, Issue 103, Winter 2016-17)