"When I Cut My Hair"

WHEN I CUT MY HAIR

when I cut my hair
at thirty-five
Grandma said she'd forgive me
for cutting it
without her permission

but I cried out everytime
I touched my head
years from then
and Grandma dead
it came back to me last night when
you said you wanted it all
your rich body grounding me safe
the touch of your hair
took me out
I saw pigeon feathers
red wool
and fur

and it wrapped me
with the startled past
so sudden
your hair falling all around us

I touched center
and forgave myself

by Rayna Green

---

Rayna Green is a Cherokee poet, editor and Director of the American Indian Program at the Smithsonian Institution.

This poem exemplifies very well what Malika Booker, who was in KL last week to perform and conduct workshops, described as the "narrow and deep" approach to writing a poem, which I interpret as the poet zooming in on a particular memory and excavating it, in writing, in its contextual and consequential entirety. According to Malika, this "narrow and deep" approach should reveal four things: "I", incident, epiphany and emotion. Thus, the "I" in "When I Cut My Hair" is quite clearly located in the first-person narrative, the incident is what a lover says and how it reminds her of her grandmother and the cutting of her own hair, and the epiphany is the fact that years later, she is able to forgive herself for that act.

But what I want to discuss is emotion.

This poem speaks to me, primarily, because it is a perfect rendering of the idea that the personal is political. Rather than treat multiculturalism and the loss of heritage in an objective and polemic manner, these issues are dealt with via the telling of a private story. While we do not know why she chose to do it, the poet/persona cut her hair at the age of 35, anticipating the chagrin of her grandmother. However, her grandmother says she will forgive her, and perhaps unexpectedly, it's the poet/persona's own guilt that is the hardest to bear. She carries this inner conflict for years, long after her grandmother passes away, until finally, a lover's words lift the burden away from her, allow her to let it go.

Traditionally, Cherokee women wore their hair long, cutting it only as a sign of mourning. Thus, the poet/persona's cutting of her hair was not as simple a thing as choosing a different style. Because the act in itself would mean a rejection of a fundamental cultural tenet, and because the poet no doubt is politically aware, it is a choice that is not without consequence. What she only comes to see later, however, is that the greatest consequence was the blame she inflicted on her self. Coming from a background where women's hair is an equally potent symbol (I trace maternal ancestry to the cult of Draupadi, who swore to leave her hair unbound until the day she could wash it in the blood of the man who wronged her, in defiance of social norms that equate unbound hair to unbound, unbuoyed women), I can understand the guilt that must have plagued the poet. If I may make a comparison, it is not unlike a woman from an Islamic background choosing to remove her burqa or hijab. In the modern world, a world in which we are losing, inch by precious inch, our links to our roots, it can be a deeply painful, even regrettable (as the poet illustrates) choice to make.

Particularly moving, also, is Green's way of showing us how we do, ultimately, retain our traditions: in loving. "it came back/ to me last night when/ you said you wanted it all/ your rich body grounding me safe/ the touch of your hair/ took me out/ I saw pigeon feathers/ red wool/ and fur// and it wrapped me/ with the startled past/ so sudden/ your hair falling all around us" she writes, in a richly detailed description of the moment preceding the catharsis that follows: "I touched center/and forgave myself". I know I cannot be speaking only for myself when I say that the desire to want to be loved in one's own language, in the manner that one's ancestors did, to be looked at in that aesthetic sense, is probably a universal longing. To have that, even once, is something many of us can only dream of. In this poem, experiencing this is doubly powerful: not only does she return to that secret, ancestral self with the touch of her lover's hair, she also finally finds what she needs to accept that she can still be that self, even despite the sacrilege she has committed.

"You Bring Out The Mexican In Me"

"You Bring Out The Mexican In Me"
by Sandra Cisneros

You bring out the Mexican in me.
The hunkered thick dark spiral.
The core of a heart howl.
The bitter bile.
The tequila l�ágrimas on Saturday all
through next weekend Sunday.
You are the one I'd let go the other loves for,
surrender my one-woman house.
Allow you red wine in bed,
even with my vintage lace linens.
Maybe. Maybe.

For you.

You bring out the Dolores del Río in me.
The Mexican spitfire in me.
The raw navajas, glint and passion in me.
The raise Cain and dance with the rooster-footed devil in me.
The spangled sequin in me.
The eagle and serpent in me.
The mariachi trumpets of the blood in me.
The Aztec love of war in me.
The fierce obsidian of the tongue in me.
The berrinchuda, bien-cabrona in me.
The Pandora's curiosity in me.
The pre-Columbian death and destruction in me.
The rainforest disaster, nuclear threat in me.
The fear of fascists in me.
Yes, you do. Yes, you do.

You bring out the colonizer in me.
The holocaust of desire in me.
The Mexico City '85 earthquake in me.
The Popocatepetl/Ixtacc�huatl in me.
The tidal wave of recession in me.
The Agustí�n Lara hopeless romantic in me.
The barbacoa taquitos on Sunday in me.
The cover the mirrors with cloth in me.

Sweet twin. My wicked other,
I am the memory that circles your bed nights,
that tugs you taut as moon tugs ocean.
I claim you all mine,
arrogant as Manifest Destiny.
I want to rattle and rent you in two.
I want to defile you and raise hell.
I want to pull out the kitchen knives,
dull and sharp, and whisk the air with crosses.
Me sacas lo mexicana en mi,
like it or not, honey.

You bring out the Uled-Nayl in me.
The stand-back-white-bitch-in me.
The switchblade in the boot in me.
The Acapulco cliff diver in me.
The Flecha Roja mountain disaster in me.
The dengue fever in me.
The ¡Alarma! murderess in me.
I could kill in the name of you and think
it worth it. Brandish a fork and terrorize rivals,
female and male, who loiter and look at you,
languid in you light. Oh,

I am evil. I am the filth goddess Tlazolt�otl.
I am the swallower of sins.
The lust goddess without guilt.
The delicious debauchery. You bring out
the primordial exquisiteness in me.
The nasty obsession in me.
The corporal and venial sin in me.
The original transgression in me.

Red ocher. Yellow ocher. Indigo. Cochineal.
Pi��n. Copal. Sweetgrass. Myrrh.
All you saints, blessed and terrible,
Virgen de Guadalupe, diosa Coatlicue,
I invoke you.

Quiero ser tuya. Only yours. Only you.
Quiero amarte. Aarte. Amarrarte.
Love the way a Mexican woman loves. Let
me show you. Love the only way I know how.


---------------------------


This time around, I'm sharing a poem by one of my favourite writers. Cisneros is a Mexican-American feminist poet and author, and this is from her 1994 poetry collection, Loose Woman.

It's a steamy, sexy, sensuous love poem -- and you can almost hear a celebratory parade in the background (or maybe that's only because I'm listening to baila right now). You can hear Cisneros reading her poem here. I'm unable to open the link myself, but maybe you can.

The basic structure of "You Bring Out The Mexican In Me" is that it's a list poem, a long reel of place names on a map of the interior, if you will. From the grandiose -- tragedies, heroines, legends -- to the personal -- tequila tears and single womanhood -- a whole plethora of memories emerges. Her lover has teased all of this out of her. He has made it possible for her to reach these previously esoteric parts of herself. She is all things -- the pre-Columbian, the colonizer, the colonized, the immigrant, the second-generation Chicana. And with sass and with tenderness, this is her response. It's a grand, horns-blaring kind of poem, but under it all, even during its most audaciously in-your-face moments, is a pervasive sense of awe and quiet gratitude -- hers is the kind of lover who restores her soul, smoothes over the scarring of life between cultures, repairs the fractures of her past. He brings out the Mexican in her -- he brings out her deepest knowledge, and deepest secrets.

"You", she says. You. Thus it's intimate. Who is this lover? Who or what provokes Cisneros thus? Does s/he exist? Perhaps it doesn't matter -- she needs the Mexican in her, with all its roaring glory and its hideous grief.

I am immensely influenced by Cisneros' work because to me, she's one of the few writers I've encountered who are able to successfully juxtapose a supposedly exotic identity with the supposedly more profane language of her expression. She navigates this interface with such skill -- and more importantly by far -- such sincerity, which is why she can offer up the most succulent exoticism there is and never once seem contrived or pandering to Orientalist tastes. And I applaud Cisneros for avoiding the use of a glossary, that most tell-tale of "exotic" devices, as doing so speaks volumes about the nature of her craft. In the case of this poem, I personally also feel it's unnecessary, because the spirit of the work shines nonetheless.

And speaking of influences, I've read some "after" poems based on this one (e.g. "You Bring Out The Klang Valleyite In Me"). Here's a suggestion to anyone who wants to take it up: if you like this, why don't we write our own after poems modelled on its structure and its soul, and share them, perhaps at the Puisy-Poesy reading? A few examples I found on the web are here (by a performance poet called Bao Phi -- this one's amazing), here (scroll all the way down) and here (this one's by a 6th-grader!). On that note, I'd also like to open up the floor again on the subject of Puisi-Poesy readings (or, if that's too intimidating, gatherings)... what are your thoughts? Would be great to hear from non-contributors especially.

"eating a $5 plate of string hoppers, I think of my father"

snoozing in front of Seinfeld on the beige on beige recliner
his belly folds after years
of american chop suey, hamburgers and Michelob
Nothing
he really wanted to eat
was ever on the shelves
of Iandolli's or the Big D
I think of that man
who cried three times in my life
once when appamma died
once when our dog died
& once when I sent him
a 99-cent package of tamarind candy
& he called me long distance after Ma went to bed
weeping from tasting tamarind
for the first time in thirty years


By Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
--------------------------------------------------


Leah Lakshmi Piepza-Samarasinha is a queer Toronto-based performance poet of Sri Lankan and Irish-Ukranian ancestry. She has just released her first book, Consensual Genocide.

I was thrilled to discover her primarily for one reason: her work is in the same biting, revolutionary vein as Gloria Anzaldua's and Cherrie Moraga's, not the weak, Western-pandering vein of many other women of South Asian heritage writing in English.

This poem captures the immigrant experience without having to resort to cheap tricks of exoticisation. Memory and dislocation are addressed here by comparing food -- string hoppers and tamarind juxtaposed beside everything available on North American supermarket shelves. What is especially admirable is that this poem could easily have veered into the whole Orientalist terrain (you know, "spices"). Instead, the poet accomplishes in just one mention of a 99cent pack of tamarind candy what Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni tried to convey via a whole novel.

It is often said that it is food, even more than language, that keeps us rooted to our origins -- and this poem demonstrates this in a raw, honest way. In remembering her father, the poet pays homage to his own memories. Eating string hoppers, a dish from his native Sri Lanka (at $5 a plate! So exorbitant is the price of home, so far away from it), she is taken back to a visual of him watching TV, the way his belly folds from years of eating things foreign to his tongue and his heart, presumably with little relish.

She then follows the trajectory of the food motif into memory. She details the only three incidents during which she herself witnessed her father's tears -- when his mother died, when their dog died, and when he called her long distance after she sent him that packet of tamarind sweets. In each of these three memories of hers lies a link to a memory of her father's.

The poet's website is here. I wrote to her, when I first heard about her a few weeks ago, but she hasn't replied. I am so excited that a Sri Lankan woman is coming out with work like this, and I intend to keep an eye open for more from her.