 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
O Mother, Where Art Thou?January 23, 2006 Taking advantage of my temporarily fractured routine, last night I officially started working on the third of the three writing projects I want to pursue this winter: the tribute to, meditation on, appreciation of -- whatever it turns out to be -- the late Gloria Anzaldúa, whose exploration of the borderlands and border-crossers has been indispensable to me. First task was to reread her Borderlands / La Frontera. Two pages in, I had to put it down: I couldn't stop thinking about my mother. Spanish was the connection, the open sluiceway. Anzaldúa writes in her mother tongue, a combination of English, Mexican Spanish, Castilian Spanish, Tex-Mex, and Nahuatl. My mother was Anglo, a combination of New England, Virginia, and Maryland, but she was born in Mexico City, the daughter of a Consular Service official. She and her mother spoke Spanish whenever they didn't want us kids to know what they were talking about. Her given name was Joan, but she was known all her life as Chiquita, after a remark made by a delivery room attendant: "¡Ay, que chiquita!" (She was a 10-pound baby; her mother probably weighed 100 pounds soaking wet with all her clothes on.) I'm monolingual; Spanish is, at most, my stepmother tongue, but its sounds and rhythms sunk in during my growing up. In high school I was one of a handful to elect Spanish; the default second language was French. During several of my D.C. years I lived in a largely Latin/Hispanic neighborhood; I heard Spanish almost daily on the bus, on the street, in the grocery store, and though I understood a fair amount, I never dared try to speak it. I'm still drawn to Spanish rhythms, music, lyrics. My mother was a border-crosser who didn't have the tools or encouragement to deal with what she knew. Not only was she born in Mexico, she lived in several other countries; her father was stationed in Spain in the early 1930s, on the cusp of the Spanish Civil War, and her younger brother was born in Alicante in 1932. As a kid, I bragged about my mother's experiences -- didn't they make me seem more interesting? -- but at the same time I was uneasy: how could someone with such a fascinating upbringing have so little to show for it? Other than a few, oft-repeated stories and her fluency in Spanish and French, little of my mother's life in the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s gave any hint of her multi-culture, multi-country childhood. Not only was I puzzled; I felt cheated My mother's world opened up in the mid-1970s. She went to work as a secretary for a well-known progressive press, which introduced her to new worlds of iconoclasm and dissent. Thanks to her minister, whom she greatly admired, she became involved in support work for Central American liberation struggles; finally she could use her Spanish for more than keeping secrets from her children. At last we could talk as compañeras and put the impossibly fractured mother-daughter relationship to one side. Over the years I've learned plenty about how and why a person can lose access to parts of her life: sometimes they're lost to memory, but often not; often the words are lacking, or the people willing to hear the words, and able to understand them. I wonder if my mother's experiences were in Spanish, or in French, and if that perhaps limited the people she could discuss them with. I wonder if they were too bound up with family -- not a happy family, to say the least. In one of my first published poems I described my mother as "the daughter of an ogre and a saint." The ogre -- her father -- used to tell her that because she was born on Halloween she was a witch; if she'd been born a day later she would have been a saint -- my mother could fill in the unspoken words as well as I can: like your mother. One of my own mysteries, which I poke and prod and nudge at often, is why I was so strongly drawn to border-crossers from such an early age: T. E. Lawrence was the first and most tenacious, but there were plenty of others, spies, expatriates, misfits of various kinds. Unlike my mother, I grew up in one town and rarely went anywhere. I inherited quite a few of my mother's contradictions and insecurities (my father's too). I wonder if I've become the border-crosser she didn't dare acknowledge in herself.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||