[a] 124-225
[b] In Un Agitado Viento, the second half of the book, Anzaldúa prints her poetry from a variety of voices and in a variety of styles. Some poems are mostly English, others are a strong mixture of English and Spanish, and others are wholly in Spanish. Anzaldúa’s poetry covers a lot of themes, including field labor, sexuality, childhood, race, the Borderlands, and womanhood.
Many of the poems deal with violence, including the poem of the woman killing a dove (“White-wing Season“ 124) and “Cervicide“ (126). “Cervicide“ refers to the killing of the deer, representative of the killing of the Self. Often violence in Anzaldúa’s poetry is associated with gringos, as is the case in “Cervicide“ where young Gloria has to kill a fawn because the white police are coming and will arrest her father if they find they have it. Anzaldúa’s poetry shows how oppressive systems cause not only violence to people, but also how those who are oppressed must do violence upon themselves (resorting to killing fawns, or, metaphorically, themselves, or their womanhood, especially when we consider the word “cervix“ embedded in “Cervicide“).
Patriarchy, woman’s sexuality, and family often collide in Anzaldúa’s poetry, as it does in “Immaculate, Inviolate: Como Ella, a poem that describes Anzaldúa’s relationship with her grandmother. In this poem, her grandmother conveys how she does not talk about sexuality, how her husband would “take out his palo, his stick / and do lo que hacen todos los hombres / while she laid back and prayed / he would finish quickly“ (132). It is also revealed that Anzaldúa’s grandfather had children by other women, and we see how intricately linked the power of men, the repressed sexuality of women, and the transmission of culture are.
Anzaldúa works to create vivid imagery of the working life. She vividly describes the toil working in the fields has on the narrator in “sus plumas el viento“ (138+). Her poem “El sonovabitche“ describes the maltreatment of immigrant workers by an employer who has hired them illegally and then reports them the day before he has to pay them. The worker tells the narrator about peeing in their shoes while traveling and “sabe Dios where they shit“ (148). The narrator enters the room and demands the payment from the employer after talking to a worker, and threatens to hang him by his balls if he does this again (150).
Anzaldúa has a masterful way of playing with voice and assuming the voice of others. In “We Call Them Greasers,“ the narrator is a white man who drives families from their land, rapes women, and orders he lynching of Chicano men (156-157). The title of the poem “We Call Them Greasers“ reveals that the white man does not regard these people as people, but rather as a thing, “Greasers,“ but it is interesting that he calls them grease, when he is the oily, slimy one.
In addition to recreating “real“ settings, Anzaldúa also uses her poetry to exemplify what she has discussed in her book. She has discussed the “alien“ within her and within the new mestiza consciousness. In “Interface“ (170), Anzaldúa describes an alien part of her that moves from phantom into reality, becoming a lover. In “that dark shining thing“ (193), the narrator begins to conflate person (first and third) and gender (the female narrator with an other “he“) with the conflated pronoun “he/me/they,“ echoing her insistence in her book that she is both man and woman. Her poem “Cihuatlyotl, Woman Alone“(195) describes the internal struggle of fighting against culture, of being written by culture, and of writing yourself.
Her poem “To live in the Borderlands means you“ (216) exemplifies what it means to live in the Borderlands, to be neither of one group or another, but also of both. You are “caught in the crossfire…carrying all five races on your back“; “people walk through you, the wind steals your voice“; you are “half and half—both woman and man, neither— / a new gender“ (216). Anzaldúa concludes this poem by telling us that “To survive the Borderlands / you must live sin fronteras [without borders] / be a crossroads“ (217).
[c] I think you can tell by the detail that I went into discussing Anzaldúa’s poetry that I really enjoyed it. In fact, I would probably say that as a reader, I payed more attention to Anzaldúa’s poetry than I almost ever do when reading poetry. It was amazing and very emotionally moving. I found myself distraught, bordering on tears, when I read “Cervicide.“ I found myself cheering on the narrator of “sus plumas el viento“ when she threatens to hang the man by his balls, and distraught and angered by the story of men having to piss and shit themselves. I loved the multivocality of Anzaldúa’s poetry, and the way she interweaves voices and languages is exemplifying of what Anzaldúa calls her writing: “hibridization.“
I feel remiss as a reader because when I came across a poem entirely in Spanish I did not take the time to translate it (or do my rough translations). This was because as I read tonight and as I am journaling now (though this will later be posted on my blog), I am not online or near a Spanish-English dictionary, so I can’t translate it. Also, I am simply running out of time to finish this book, so I’m trying to be a little more savvy with my time. I feel like I am missing quite a bit, though, when I don’t read the poems that Anzaldúa has not offered translations of.
[d] In “sus pluas el viento“ (138), is Anzaldúa describing a rape in the second stanza? With any multivocal presentation, we have to wonder how much of this is real lived experiences of Anzaldúa’s and how much is fictionalization (for example, did she really threaten the jerk who turned in his employees? was that fantasizing on her part? was it someone else?).
[e] We see a lot of oppression in the poems in this section of the book. White men and white culture is dominant, and we see how violence from above (from white men) causes violence within the oppressed culture and within the self. The poems about labor show how white men are profiting off of the labor of Mexicans and Chicanos.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands: La Frontera. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999.
