WHAT DOES YOUR BLOOD SPEAK?4.18.17

 Mucha Muchacha, too much girl by Leticia Hernadez- Linares represents what it means to write into identity.  Linares' work creates poems  written for herself and her reflected  identity in ways that only someone who confidently embraces that identification can write. Her voice is Latina, clearly marked by the  narratives that were not translated and the insertion of Spanish with no hesitation for translation. She was not worried about the voice being translated because she was writing for those who identified with her language and words. Mucha Muchacha is firmly located in one specific identity, and the book is valuable for its "rooting" into the culture."To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul"- Simone Weil( From Langauge For a Century).
Not only does her use of non - canon dialect and language create an identity safe place, her references to memories created within  her Latina culture assisted in  securing a safe space that welcomes the love and critique of Latino/a social identity . " Memory is never complete. There are always parts of it that time has amputated. Writing is a way of retrieving them, of bringing the missing parts back to it, of making it holistic "- Nawal El Saadawi ( Language For A New Century). Linares' writes about the memory of a Sunday morning ritual in her poem Shuco. She utilizes the description of the breakfast contents to illustrate what is happening in her social context. The voice sounds like it is the recollection of a Sunday morning spent as child- the poem sounds like a memory recorded- a memory retrieved.  She writes, "Lucky to escape a civil war, we invent our own combat. unclassified, our fatalities become residual...looking for three black beans, bits of seed, Cracker Jack surprise, we scrape the dead from the bottom of the bowl." Her bowl of what I know as oatmeal is  illustrates more than a meal, it represents what she is consuming within her cultural boundaries, the gender norms, missing children, the dead and lost of her community, the porridge acts as "quicksand" to it all. The beauty of being an insider and writing from that perspective lies in the ability to affectively evaluate the contents of the cultural, when done with love even the broken pieces are cherished an therefore able to be healed.   "The imperfections are invaluable because they are markers of identity. He loves his cycle, whether lost or broken, as he does his life, for the simple reason that it is his own"- Bimal Nibha, Cycle. Like Nibha I feel Linares  is witnessing those imperfections within her identity, but not scraping the cycle of life as junk, but embracing it as a part of what it means to be her.


Now the question remains, who are you? I found the poem from the Language text  titled  Two Voices by D.M. Thomas to be a instrument of evolving into identity( or out of). The use of the following questions and responses really resonated with me... "in what language do I pray ? Do I meditate in language? In what language am I trying to speak when I wake from dreams?... Do I think of myself as hyphenated? No. Most of the time even as you, I forget labels. Unless you cut me. Them I look at the blood. It speaks to Armenian." WHAT DOES YOUR BLOOD SPEAK? That is who you are ?