José Torres Tama’s recent
collection of poetry, Immigrant Dreams
& Alien Nightmares, is a retrospective collection of work from 1989,
when he was cultivating a dynamic performance voice and finding his poetic
themes. It traces his early spoken
word experiences that were nurtured at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café; his move to
New Orleans; Katrina; the rebuilding of New Orleans by Latino workers; and his
research into the Creoles of New Orleans.
The book represents twenty-five years of cultural and political
interrogations and interventions that wish to speak to the pain of the
dispossessed, the shallow nature of contemporary capitalist culture, and the
connections between and among indigenous peoples as they move and are moved
around the world.
The introduction by Torres
Tama is an unusual one for a collection of poetry. It reads like a teacher’s manual that is
geared to help an instructor teach the material to students. This isn’t a bad thing. One virtue of Torres Tama’s poetry is
its accessibility; even if the poems aren’t textbook examples of sophisticated
meter or prosody, they offer visceral, rhythmic, and intense language that
connects human emotion and visions to the harsh geopolitical forces within
which we move. The
introduction foregrounds this accessibility with a discussion of his influences
and an outline of his life. His
discussion of these influences describes his creative conversation with writers
such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Pablo Neruda and provides the reader with guides who
travel a similar road in the Latin American tradition of poetry that speaks
truth to power. It provides
enough biographical material to understand that his poems parallel the
geography of his life and some of the major events of the last twenty-five
years. The introduction gives us a
slice of the poet’s intention so we can go with him instead of behind him. And he really seems to want us with
him. In the collection, we often read
the refrain, “Can I get a witness?”
Torres Tama speaks directly to his readers and asks us to read more than
the words. We are asked to
participate in the analysis and respond to it.
The first section,
“Immigrant Dreams on Fire,” is a powerful incantation of an urban, immigrant, experience
of race and class. The rhythm hits
hard and direct with a dystopic reality that doesn’t come from a wild imagination
as much as the realities of people’s lives. These poems, more so than the others,
speak themselves off the page, animated by anger and sorrow. For example, in “Symbolic Opponent
Syndrome - SOS (Save Our Sons)”, we read
I am... I am... I am...
I
am the contact zone where copper fear
transforms duty into hate.
You
only know me through your Ray Bans,
and I become darker by the minute
because moonlight makes me shine from
within.
One of the strongest pieces
in this section is an extended meditation on urban decay, racist
gentrification, and the people who must survive it. It contains typical spoken word
conventions such as terms that gesture ironically to consumer capitalism as a
shorthand for the shallow and superficial representatives of the ideological
bonds that holds buyers and sellers in thrall (“M-I-C-K-E-Y ... Why?”) But this
poem moves deeper and melds Spanish and English in the story of a woman whose
apartment building goes up in flames, very possibly to force renters out and
bring luxury condos in, and whose three daughters die in the fire.
Nelly
had a plan as the
fires
grew around
her and
her three daughters.
¡Tenemos que brincar mi’hitas!
¡Tenemos que brincar!
Es la única
manera de escapar el fuego.
. . .
The
shell of a building remained, unharmed, and was rebuilt for
condos
with a view of the Manhattan skyline. After three
months
in the hospital, Nelly walked away with a cane in hand
and a
plane ticket back to Ecuador. Half her body was burned
and her
whole heart was pulverized.
I
can’t even scream the outrage
porque el sueño
sabe más que tú.
Like
the building, Nelly is an empty shell and there is no expression of outrage
sufficient to her loss. The human
cost of a ruthless profit-driven world is laid bare in the drama of one women’s
dream turned nightmare and three lost lives. The poem circles around this drama with
lyrics from West Side Story and
“early childhood memories… of big torrential rains, / giant pyramids of mangos
at the market, and petite / Indian Mestiza women selling ripe halves of
avocados at traffic / lights” that function to complicate the tragedy with memories
of natural beauty, huge geo-political forces that move people out into new
futures, and those forces sacrificial victims.
The
second section of the book, “Between the Pen and the Sword” contains ten
sections that could be understood as Tarot or Lotería cards that describe as
they predict a path out of the dilemmas of being brown and poor and with a
voice that demands expression.
Section three follows 2001-2004, and we can see the poet maturing. The violence of young men begins to
reluctantly fade as the poet observes,
I
rather be home in a hot candlelight bath,
or in
loins of another muse,
than traffic prison in a sports utility vehicle
listening to a Starbucks version of fabled
renamed rebel tune Born
to be Mild.
The
poet’s rejection of conventional life speaks to the aging process and the need
to contend with decisions and choices of a life that didn’t end in the
bloodshed that ended many young black and brown men’s lives.
Sex
and New Orleans are major players in this section, which continues to evidence
the shorthand of references to popular culture as a stand in for a deeper
expression or analysis of contemporary culture. Gestures to Burger King, the King of
Beers, the Hard Rock Café or Catherine Zeta-Jones are playful and occasionally
poignant or precise. But there are
too many of them. They become white noise in the poems and obfuscates
rather than enlightens. They shut
down the mind. Torres Tama is a
better poet than what these superficial gestures indicate. Perhaps the all-too conventional
inebriation that is de rigueur in much poetry about New Orleans seduced Torres
Tama, too, and resulted in hangover-produced lines such as, “gladly surrendered a legion of brain
cells / in wanton frolic, having reached oblivion with Margaritas, / Rum and Cokes,
and Black Russians, with Mardi / Gras friends…” The reader wonders if these experiences
blurred the ability to come to terms with just what is meant by the lists of
pop culture icons and commodities that overpopulate the poems throughout the
entire text.
The
fourth section focuses on Katrina and the aftermath, emphasizing the divisions
and realities of race that the storm made apparent. The section begins with a shamanic
tirade and admission that “I am a shaman,
therefore I am a showman and a
shyster too.” The opening invocation, “Se
Habla Spanglish Here,” is an indictment of American racism and stupidity,
but it seems out of step with the rest of the section. The ego-driven voice of this poem jars
against the beautiful, if painful intimacy of the subsequent poems that attain
their power in their reach for fullness in the detail, as opposed to brashness
in the narrative voice. The pathos
of “The Black Angel,” the “property Piranahas” and the “national eviction”
represent layers of experience that are a part of the yet-incomplete tapestry
of Katrina. “Meditations on
Evictions in Katrina’s Wake” is an excellent example of Torres Tama’s potential
as a poet. The three parts increase
conceptually outward in circles that force a necessary reckoning of the greedy
landlord’s relation to the national theater of greed. The narratives are compelling and the
language is tight:
Walking drawings on my back
from one century to another,
feet burn with unforgiving blisters that recalls Habla
risk of renting illusions for mortal baggage
that
grows with daily habit of living.
We
are forced to remain alongside the poet, carrying those drawings because we,
too, have that “daily habit of living.”
But we aren’t allowed to rest in the intimacy of the personal because
the poet keeps us going, forcing us to acknowledge that each forced move is a
little death:
I offer this requiem
because evictions resemble scorpion nightmares,
sudden venomous sting of homelessness,
and what is home when you rent temporary dreams,
when the gentry want your neighborhood’s lifeblood
because Katrina allowed plantation power to take root
and forced-fed a shock doctrine
of
disaster capitalism as recovery medicine.
This
book of poems tends to stay at the level of the large, the general, and the
mythic. When it does descend to the
earthly and the humble, its quiet power can be formidable, as it is in the
story of “The Black Angel” an elderly African American man who arrived at the
poet’s house a few days after the storm, confused:
We watched his fragile figure,
one foot and the other,
a black angel make the slow trek,
and never saw him again.
Don’t know if he ever…
the black angel escaped,
or walked into anger of more people abandoned,
whether we should have walked with him
along the river to some unknown safety.
It haunts me… remembering the black angel.
Mr. Melvin’s fragile figure fading along Decatur
because
I don’t know…
This
admission of uncertainty reaches beyond the justified anger at disaster
capitalism and embraces the difficulty of human relationships in a devastating and
politically-made crisis. This embrace is tightened when we read
the next line, “Nos convertimos en un tribu.” We became a tribe, but one that was unable to fully take care of our own
members. Some, like Mr. Melvin, were
left on their own. Whether the poet
intended this abrupt irony or not, it conveys the absolute desperation of the contradictions
and that shape crises and deepens our responses to them.
While all the sections in this book have a
narrative quality to them, the last section, “Alien Nightmares: For My Brown
Paper Bag People / Los Valientes” brings a narrative to life that is not
sufficiently well known outside New Orleans. The trauma of the storm continued as
Latino workers (the brave / los valientes) came
Resembling a migratory locust of reconstruction
angels,
they descended upon the fragile pueblo in
thousands,
miles y miles, by foot, by car, by
trains
The Latino workers “reignited engines of the tourist
industry” but found themselves trapped in the
motor.
Promised twelve hundred dollars per week,
promised and promised to be paid
on the final Friday of the third week,
but on Thursday night before the much-awaited pay day,
New Orleans Police raided their encampment,
an abandoned factory building with three hundred cots.
All of them ran, fled, the sound of sirens,
the chaos, the fright, la migra,
la policía, auxilio, socorro.
How
convenient for the contractors, don’t you think?
The stories in this section move from Latinos
rebuilding New Orleans, sometimes at the cost of their lives, to Torres Tama’s
history of immigration as a child.
As he points out, New Orleans was Spanish before and for much longer
than it was French. The poet’s
history, the Latino workers, and the Spanish legacy are all important
characters in this section that indicts ICE, NOPD, racism, poverty, and the
carelessness of brutality. The last
poem of the book, “Metafiction 2014:
Between Barack and the GOP Hard Place on Immigration Reform” concludes
the text with intelligence, wit, and bite.
The poem traces many of our hopes and disappointments that encircle Barack
Obama’s presidency. On the one
hand, “Our eyes seduced by movie handsome / dark knight from Harvard Law.” But later,
“Broken, I called friends across the country,
could not believe Yes, We Can! man
a rerun of other Presidents for the killing fields,
when you argued more freedom bombs in Afghanistan
. . . .
Well, we gave you votes you turned to daggers
because our relatives are bleeding on buses going back,
and sons and daughters left behind
are traumatized homeless on our streets.
Obama, channel the courage to be a son of light,
of America El Norte in transition,
have the nerve to be your father’s dream—
not another nightmare for mothers and fathers
who are forced to migrate because
the empire strikes back by decimating
economies below the border.
The section’s narratives of disappointed expectations,
worker exploitation and political outrage, do not end with hopelessness,
however. In a brilliant conclusion
of humor and optimism, we read,
Because there is
NO GUACAMOLE for immigrant haters,
and, Obama, I can’t even let you go near
the chips!
The conclusion confers power where it
belongs: in the hands of Latin Americans, citizens or not. Here, the poet reminds us of the centrality
of Latin American culture—central not just for capitalism’s insatiable
demand for marketable “ethnic” food, but central because of the labor power of
workers, the creativity of artists, and the daring of families who insist on
surviving. They all
have been and will continue to be an integral and necessary element of la vida en los Estados Unidos.
Immigrant
Dreams and Alien Nightmares should be read and passed around. It should be read
out loud, but it should also be reread quietly and carefully. Torres Tama
should keep writing. If I were able
to give him advice, I would nudge him to de-center the ego that is too
prominent in too many places. The
shamanic voice needs to listen more closely to the voices of the people in the
narratives. To the reader, I would
say that these poems call us to glare harshly and in bright light at the dark
corners of the American Dream. This
scrutiny, guided by these poems, has never been more necessary.
