Van- Family & Childhood

There are subtle ways that poets of color speak about family and childhood that subvert the western genre, sometimes by deconstructing it’s ideas/themes and other times through the poetics of reconstructing the realities of our own lives. I know I find it particularly difficult to write about childhood and family without diving deep into fictionalizing it, even if only slightly, because it becomes daunting to write anything linear, anything recognizable on the page that take shape in comparison to the family identity/structure/dream that has been imposed on us that is also a site to be gravitated to—gravitated to out of shame, gravitated to out of curiosity of what we missed out on, gravitated to for our own understanding of what it is that we should hate. If that didn’t make sense: I’m trying to escape having to even make contact with the colonizer’s fantasies of family and childhood, that is to keep his bloodlines safe and to elongate their and his childhood. Hard to do when that fantasy and con/quest destroyed the families and innocence of other peoples.

I can’t think of a better poem to capture just this than Ramiro D. Rodriguez’s Dancing Through a Beating (I assumed that 238 was supposed to read 258). “I spin, I squat, Move back, Move forward, Take a deep breath, And do it again.” This piece moved me, to tears, down to my floor. Family sometimes is what we lost, some deep past of what was that we fight for, actively (such as the narrator here) or passively. Inside us we know that family is also those who come after us, those who came before us, those around us. Childhood is not just our childhood, it is that of our father’s and our mother’s and our grandparents and all who came before us. It’s not just our childhood, it is that of our children, the children around us, the children they have, the children we hope will walk the earth long after us. “A warrior for peace. A warrior for love. A warrior to open doors For our young people going forward into the next 7 generations…”

Rodriguez reconstructs our realities on the page, and arguably a part of decolonization is to do so, to stray away from longing to have your settler/master’s fantasies to be as unhappy as he is. “I dance through the beatings of my life. I dance through the beatings of my inner demons. I dance through the beatings of my father’s abandonment, The choices I have made in life, the degradation of the police.” Rodriguez finds a way to collapse these issues, these beatings, these internalized and externalized selves, all storming inside our one body after colonial terror gets beaten into us by any and everyone touched by it. He characterizes these pains as one and uses one dance to heal and resist. I’m offering this poem in ceremony, this one I have to keep the rest of my life. 

When reading Bermejo’s Boys of Summer, I thought of The Eagles ’84 hit (which I’m thinking isn’t too far of a stretch). The Eagles’ The Boys of Summer is a vastly different conceptualization of loss of childhood, where merely aging away from childhood innocence and dreamscapes is the violence. A dark comparison, to say the least, to Bermejo’s poem, that speaks to that sunny summertime safety to grow up and be scarred by overbearing parents, to want to blend in, perhaps angst of who or where to be when one gets older. 

Except Bermejo’s poem juxtaposes the American summertime fun with the pure terror and agony of a bombing. And “the mothers and fathers gather outside the hospital and scream into the air because they couldn’t give their boys a safe place to play.” It does not say that “their” mothers and fathers gather, but that “the” mothers and fathers, which I read as a gathering beyond their parents, perhaps beyond parents, perhaps generations gathered, perhaps anyone who loved and gave care to the children that could not be protected, came out and gathered and mourned. I can only read it this way when I reread the piece and notice that the mention of parents and family before is possessive, twice there is “his mother,” so it isn’t too far fetched to assume some intentionality here. 

It’s written with restraint. The poet uses third person narration, which creates a distancing effect but also achieves the span of space she covers. The poet gives you a bit of a warning, things are getting less “summery time fun” by the time that ship prepare it’s shot. But she doesn’t just unravel the piece from there, we are guided elsewhere, to what seems to be other lives or maybe thoughts made earlier in the victim’s lives. We are lifted to another place and/or time merely in the white space between two stanzas. How does this shatter the norms of childhood, of family? Outside of what I’ve already noted above, I’m actually not sure that it does. 

I want to push myself to see how it does, truly, but can only think about what I am given: the children around the world, wanting to be normal, advantaged or disadvantaged with various proximities to safety and death. The children in Gaza make references to famous soccer players as they play their game. To me, that seems like they are striving to be just like any other kid around the world, and romanticize those famous players who made it out of their brown countries of origin. Perhaps just by giving us the portrayal of the longing for this, even if I still find to be within the colonial longing (which is extremely valid to long for), it does some shattering and some reconceptualizing. Maybe it is not merely what is on the page, but what readers are made to investigate, made to understand, beyond finishing the last line…