SOURCE: “Many Colored Poets,” in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 6, No. 12, September, 1989, pp. 29–31.

[In the following review, Randall explores the similarities of style and theme among the poems of Paula Gunn Allen, Chrystos, and Castillo.]

… only you, unblessed conqueror,
father of my son, remained ignorant,
boastful of a power you would never own.
You stride the continents of your fool's
          pride
not knowing why it is I, Malinche, whose
          figure
looms large above the tales of your con-
          quests …

(from “Malinalli, La Malinche, to Cortes, Conquistador,” by Paula Gunn Allen)

… In the scars of my knees you can see
children torn from
their families bludgeoned into govern-
          ment schools …
Our sacred beliefs have been made into
          pencils
names of cities gas stations
My knee is wounded so badly that I
          limp constantly
Anger is my crutch I hold myself
          upright with it
          My knee is wounded
               see
                    How I Am Still Walking

(from “I Walk in the History of My People,” by Chrystos)

… Men try to catch my eye. i talk to them
… And they go away.
But women stay. Women like stories.
They like thin arms around their
          shoulders …
Because of the seductive aroma of mole
in my kitchen, and the mysterious
          preparation
of herbs, women tolerate my cigarette
and cognac breath, unmade bed,
and my inability to keep a budget—
in exchange for a promise …
Oh Daddy, with the Chesterfields
rolled up in a sleeve,
you got a woman for a son.

(from “Daddy with Chesterfields in a Rolled Up Sleeve,” by Ana Castillo)

Paula Gunn Allen, recently 50, is a Laguna Pueblo/Sioux/Lebanese woman whose critical work as well as her poetry and fiction have reached a powerful maturity. Born in 1939, she was raised on a Spanish land grant in New Mexico. Her life and work move back and forth between the landscapes of her growing, her culture in its traditions, and the scholarship that has made that heritage a documented resource for us all.

Allen is best known for The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Beacon Press, 1985). Before that there was the volume of critical essays and course designs she edited, Studies in American Indian Literature, published in 1983. Her novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (Spinsters' Ink, 1984) reminds us of her great richness with words. Skins and Bones is her sixth book of poems; previous volumes go back to 1975. Allen teaches Native American Studies at the University of California in Berkeley.

Only seven years younger, Chrystos nevertheless probably belongs to the next full generation as this is measured in the literary context. Her work is younger, sung to a different beat. Not Vanishing is her first book of poems. She is also Native American—tribe or tribes unspecified in her book—but unlike Allen, who grew up in a rural landscape, hers is the urban ghetto experience. “I was not born on the reservation,” she warns in a prefatory note, “but in San Francisco, part of a group called ‘Urban Indians’ by the government. I grew up around Black, Latin, Asian & white people … Don't admire what you perceive as our stoicism or spirituality—work for our lives to continue in our own Ways. Despite the books which still appear, even in radical bookstores, we are not Vanishing Americans.”

In some interesting ways, Chrystos' and Allen's lives have moved in opposite directions: Chrystos left the life of a cityscape ghetto for Bainbridge Island in the state of Washington, where she's been living and writing for the past ten years. Allen traveled from the land grant country of northern New Mexico to California's Bay Area.

Ana Castillo, slightly younger than Chrystos (though not by enough writing years to constitute a different generation), comes from a Chicago tradition similar to the one that produced the wonderful Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros. Castillo's several previous books of verse go back to 1977 (Otro Canto), and her novel The Mixquiahuala Letters (1966) brought her critical acclaim as “a leading Chicana voice.” Like Cisneros, she writes powerfully out of the Mexican-American culture of her youth. Her use of Spanish, however, is a much more central element in her work.

Two poets from two very different American Indian backgrounds and one Mexican-American from Chicago, all three women share a lesbian identity. Although the current crop of strong women writers are certainly not all lesbians, I would argue that lesbians are authoring a particularly powerful and often cohesive cultural creativity. In the three books under review, the explicitly sexual lesbian identity is forceful in Chrystos' work, an underlying presence in Castillo's, and simply a part of the fabric of Allen's world view.

These are all poems of identity: moving back in time, conjuring, inventing, reclaiming memory and using it powerfully. And these are statements of identity by three important women poets of color. These poets' voices are as different as Williams' is from Eliot's, and it is distressing that they will probably be lumped by more than one promoter of our many-peopled culture under the category “women of color.”

In “Of Color: What's in a Name?” (Sojourner, February, 1989), Vivienne Louise reminds us that “women … classified under the term ‘of color’ are members of distinct ethnicities. We are African, Asian, Latin, Native Americans … to align simply along lines of oppression is weak glue for self-affirmation.” Ana Castillo illustrates Louise's point. In “We Would Like You to Know” she writes

we are not all brown.
Genetic history has made
some of us blue eyed as any
German immigrant
and as black as a descendant
of an African slave.
We never claimed to be
a homogeneous race …
We are not all victims, all loyal to one
          cause,
all perfect; it is a
psychological dilemma
no one has resolved …

(“We Would Like You to Know,” pp. 67–68)

Or from Chrystos' “I Am Not Your Princess”:

Sandpaper between two cultures which
          tear
one another apart I'm not
a means by which you can reach
          spiritual understanding or even
learn to do beadwork …
Look at me
See my confusion   loneliness   fear
          worrying about all our
struggles to keep what little is left for us
… I'm scraped
I'm blessed with life while so many I've
          known are dead
… See my simple cracked hands which
          have washed the same things
you wash …

(pp. 66–67)

In this poem, like many in Not Vanishing, there is righteous anger and a plea for a common meeting place.

In her moving effort to retrieve a spurned history, Paula Gunn Allen begins her collection with “Songs of Tradition” and moves through “Songs of Colonization” and “Songs of Generation.” We have learned to expect such attention to history from this author of The Sacred Hoop. I found the poems in the first section, “C'koy'u, Old Woman,” the most provocative and exciting. They comprise a deeply female journey in the tradition of Muriel Rukeyser, Jane Cooper and Adrienne Rich, whose work has brought so many of our foremothers to life. Allen's sense of history also moves along a road cleared by the likes of Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano in his trilogy Genesis of Fire.

And Allen takes on difficult foremothers. She explores complex figures like La Malinche, Pocahontas and Sacagawea, by beginning with images of their lives prefaced by short passages from more often heard male voices. Then her renditions take off on their own, free of sweetened metaphor or an urge to turn it all to right. Listen to these lines, from “Molly Brant, Iroquois Matron, Speaks”:

… But
we had forgotten the Elder's Plan.
So it was we could not know
a Council Fire would be out,
… We had not counted on fate—
so far from the Roots of our being
had we flown …
That's how it is with revolutions.
Wheels turn. So do planets.
Stars turn. So do galaxies.
Mortals see only this lifetime
or that. How could we know,
bound to the borders we called home,
the Revolution we conspired for
would turn us under
like last year's crop? …
I speak now because I know
the Revolution has not let up.
Others like my brother and like me
conspire with other dreams,
argue whether or not
to blow earth up, or poison it mortally
or settle for alteration …
Still, let them obliterate it, I say.
What do I care?
What have I to lose,
having lost all I loved so long ago?
Aliens, aliens everywhere,
and so few of the People
left to dream. All that is left
is not so precious after all—
great cities, piling drifting clouds
of burning death, waters that last drew
          breath
decades, perhaps centuries ago,
fourleggeds, wingeds, reptiles all
drowned in bloodred rivers of an alien
          dream
of progress. Progress is what
they call it. I call it cemetery,
charnel house, soul sickness,
artificial mockery
of what we called life.

(pp. 10–13)

Skins and Bones is filled with lost history, wisdom and humor. Poems like “Eve the Fox,” “Taking a Visitor to See the Ruins” and “Teaching Poetry at Votech High, Santa Fe, the Week John Lennon Was Shot” offer a particular mix of American Indian humor with the raw context from which it emerges; and the joke only superficially provides a cover for the serious statement even as it salts our lips for more.

The ruins of the second poem are not ancient Indian dwellings but Allen's family:

                    Joe, I said when we'd gotten inside the
chic apartment,
                    I'd like you to meet the old Indian ruins
                    I promised.
                    My mother, Mrs. Francis, and my
                              grandmother, Mrs. Gottlieb.
                    His eyes grew large, and then he
                              laughed …

(p.22)

Ana Castillo's use of Spanish, Chicago street lingo and English in My Father Was a Toltec is exciting and—forerunners notwithstanding—absolutely new. “Electra Currents” reads in full:

Llegué a tu mundo
sin invitación
sin esperanza
me nombraste por
una canción.
Te fuiste
a emborrachar.

(p. 4)

I would translate this: “I came to your world / without invitation, / without hope / You named me for a song. / You went out and got drunk.” In Castillo's book there is no translation, as there is none for much of the new Hispanic poetry. I can only assume that this is because these poets wish we would make the effort, in deciphering their work, that millions of Spanish speakers in this country must make to read our English texts.

Energy: if I were limited to one, perhaps that's the word I would use to define Castillo's voice. Much of Castillo's energy—the impulse that infuses her poetry—comes, I think, from her intense movement through language and languages. Like Allen, she uses history—a much more recent history, to be sure—in the organization of these poems. The Toltecs was a street gang to which Castillo's father belonged. The book's first section is called “The Toltec,” and the poet's identity is assumed and redefined within it. In the sections “La Heredera” and “Ixtacihuatl Died in Vain,” Castillo searches for fore-mothers. And the book ends with the poems of “In My Country,” where the various threads pull together.

Castillo's snapshot images are wonderful: “Saturdays,” all that goes into “Daddy with Chesterfields in a Rolled Up Sleeve.” “Woman of Marrakech,” “Encuentros,” “Mi Comadre Me Aconseja,” “Traficante, Too” and many more. From “A Christmas Gift for the President of the United States, Chicano Poets, and a Marxist or Two I've Known in My Time,” the following is for me the perfect response to the Alan Blooms who would crush literary relevance:

Rape is not a poem.
Incest does not rhyme.
Nor the iridescent blue labor
of the placenta that follows
giving birth. These are not thoughts
great books have withstood time for,
so unlike the embellishment of war
or man's melancholy at being
neither earth nor heaven bound.
My verses have no legitimacy.
A white woman inherits
her father's library,
her brother's friends. Privilege
gives language that escapes me.
Past my Nahua eyes
and Spanish surname, English syntax
makes its way to my mouth
with the grace of a clubbed foot.

(pp. 52–53)

From the masterful long work, “For Jean Rhys”:

… He talked throughout the night, gave
                    300 pages
of his unwritten memoir:
the stint
in military school,
narrow escape
from the Jesuits,
the uncle sent to Siberia,
and the present wife,
whom he first loved
in dreams.
She hardly edged in a word
like the last body in the metro
before the train goes off.
She smoked his cigarettes and
drank the bordeaux,
all the while, not losing sight
(in that practical manner
he so obviously detests)
that she was only there
due to circumstances.
At last, calculated sighs, even tears
punctuated with a “Well?”
to heighten the drama.
“Well what?” she replies.
“Well, will you have sex
with me or not?”
Well,
she could have gone to a park
sought asylum in a police station:
“I've been robbed.”
100 report forms, the sun up
she'd go out to mix with the crowd.
All she needs is sleep,
in a safe place …

(pp. 30–31)

Of the three poets, Chrystos' range of inquiry and denunciation/annunciation is the broadest. With Castillo, she shares a mixing of Spanish and English, and although Castillo's exploration of linguistic possibilities is more inventive, Chrystos also sometimes virtually creates another language born of her particular use of both. The organization of Not Vanishing is very different from the other two books; as the table of contents announces, the poems are “arranged in roughly chronological order, in the pace of one of my readings.”

“You Can't Get Good Help These Daze,” “I Walk in the History of My People,” “The Silver Window,” “Bag Lady,” “White Girl Don't” and “Water” are among the truly memorable pieces in this book. “Yesterday He Called Her a Pig” is a love poem:

he's a white man / she's Black
she's his boss / he was egged on by some
          politically correct
white lesbians
it's better to avoid the subject of colors
Today I swept her floor   washed her
          sheets
cleaned her kitchen   bought food
arranged a bouquet of bright
red carnations
I love her   want to be an eraser for her
Bear her insult   more insults
I let in light
put her books in a careful stack beside
          the bed
brought flowers
it didn't help.

(p.22)

Much of Chrystos' attention is aimed at the system's quick catalogue artist or the well-meaning liberal. She deflates our faulted conclusions with deep insight:

They call Indians & Negroes a thief. Now one of these people they stole from their own country & the other one they stole their own country from. Now you tell me who is the thief? WHO is the thief? & lazy! HA! I never seen nothing lazier than a white man. Even built a machine to sharpen knives. Ridiculous. Some spit & a stone is all you need. Listen, I've cleaned white houses since I was 15 & I'll tell you nobody is lazier. They'll vomit in a sink & not even bother to rinse it down. Wait for the cleaning woman to come. I spit at them. Yes I do. Sit everyday on Fifth & Pine & I spit at them going by. They ACT like I'm not there but you'll notice they stay out of my range …

(“Bag Lady,” p. 64)

It's an honor to be able to review and recommend books like these three. We need these voices like our old/new world, as we need air, struggle, change.