[This week my
two Summer session courses—an FSU grad class on Ethnic American Lit and a MAVA
class on the Literature of Work—conclude. So for this week’s series I’ll
highlight and analyze some of the texts we read in both courses! Hope your
summers are going well!]
On a
challenging, controversial, and crucial poem about work and war.
I’ve written a
couple of posts here about the wonderful poet (and fellow Massachusetts public
educator) Martín
Espada: this one on his
work overall, and this one on his
great poem “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper?” (1993). I taught “Who
Burns” as part of my MAVA class, and found that it connected just as well with
this cohort of students (vocational educators) as it has in my undergraduate
and graduate classrooms. It’s a perfectly structured and evocatively written
poem, so its engagingness is no surprise; but it also hits upon some universal
questions: the relationship between our past and present selves, whether
changes in our lives and identities make us different people and even perhaps
take us away from our roots and heritage, how formative experiences and worlds can
shape us even as we at the same time leave them behind, and more. Which is to
say, “Who Burns” most definitely challenges us to think about some shared and significant
issues, but it does so in a relatively unobjectionable way, without the
possibility of inciting too much disagreement or debate.
The same cannot
be said for another Espada poem I taught in this class: “Alabanza:
In Praise of Local 100” (2003). From its opening dedication “for the 43
members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100, working at the Windows on the World
restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center,”
Espada’s poem already suggests sensitive and potentially controversial subject
matter. But in its final stanza, having moved through complex tributes to a
number of those WTC workers (in both life and death), “Alabanza” becomes far
more complicated and potentially controversial still: linking the destruction
of the WTC Towers to the subsequent US bombings of Afghanistan, pairing the “two
constellations of smoke” that “rose and drifted to each other” from these two
nations and worlds. Given that trailers for the 2006 film United 93 were apparently greeted by
audience
cries of “Too soon!,” I can only imagine the responses Espada’s 2003 poem,
and again that last stanza in particular, might have produced. Of course
Afghanistan was just as full of innocent victims as the WTC, but to pair and
intertwine the two settings so directly so soon after the September 11th
attacks is at least a purposefully provocative poetic act.
But of course
purposeful provocations often have profound points (I’m a poet and, well, I
guess I kind of know it!), and I would argue that one of Espada’s is precisely
the link between the less objectionable earlier stanzas and this far more controversial
final one. “Alabanza” implicitly makes the case throughout those opening few
stanzas that these 43 working-class, immigrant victims of the 9/11 attacks were
less well-remembered than most of the other white-collar workers killed when
the Towers fell, an exclusion—or at least an elision—that reflects broader
narratives such as who represents America, what forms of work are more visible
and valued, and how we tell the stories of tragedies and traumas. And shifting
our collective narratives and understandings along those lines might, the last
stanza more explicitly suggests, also shift the way we think about the world
and war, about who is most affected by such global traumas, and about what role
work and class might play in those kinds of unfolding histories. There are no
easy answers to such questions, but Espada’s poem demands that we ask and
consider them, and that’s an important (if certainly challenging) effect.
Next reading
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this text? Other readings on work you’d highlight?
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