Tropical melancholia

I get gloomy as I read Levi-Strauss these days. Perhaps I shouldn’t think of his recent death as I read stories of his days in the thick forest of Brazil. But death looms. I am so used to reading dead white men, I am less used to seeing them arrive at death. A posthumous tale.

The pages of Triste Tropiques, stained yellow with time, seem a shade darker now. A spectre of what has come and gone; the passing of time. He died while I was in the fields of Brazil, and now I chase his shadows in the hallowed halls of academia, in a university he lectured in, the dormitories once described by him “as musty cellars and stale wood embers.”

If only I could conjure his spirit, cast new meanings in anthropology about Brazil; perhaps ask him where my dissertation might go. He will tell me: “into the forest.” I will say “there are so many, which one?” He would say “there is only one that will give meaning.”

It is strange, this exercise of talking with the dead, but I have done it for so long. It seems so normal, so natural to speak to the walls of those I read. I speak to my mother when I look up to the moon. The fog becomes my council.

I could not finish an essay, a few years ago, since Clifford Geertz passed as I was in the midst of a trenchant critique. His death hung heavy over my words. Eerily enough, I had begun the piece with a narrative about the Yale Anthropology department’s annual treck to Malinowski’s grave.

The apotheosis of our star academic forefathers, this idolatry, might indeed, be one of our own rituals, and worthy of analysis. But death struck. I did not know how to make the active passive. I said goodbye, and tucked the manuscript into the recesses of an old hard drive, never to be looked at again.

I don’t think I run from death, but maybe I should run to it. There are so many answers when life is in question.

Fictions of Ethnography

Perhaps I have a particular obsession with the way people envision themselves in their mind’s eye. The kinds of everyday Cartesian conversations we have with ourselves in the mirror. Don’t think Lacan here, although recognition would be nice. Think more Homer Simpson’s think bubble, a monosyllabic stroke of irony like “fat” followed by “donuts.”

I think folks have an inclination to want to see themselves part of a larger whole, bits and pieces of reflections, membership belonging so they have a way to fit themselves in, to figure themselves out. And we have days when look in the mirror and feel like lions ready to take over the world. Or others that lead to carbohydrates. And coffee. But if you are like most of us, you wanted to fit yourself into something warm, like your mother’s womb – or a great group of people. The posse.

We see this with so many cross cultural examples, the identity politics that form from cultural or religious memberships. But we mustn’t take for granted that subcultures enforce their own, at the very least, aesthetic politics. Gothics off to listen to industrial electronica, house clubs on the south side of Chicago, raves in Texas. Just a few Americana ones. They are not always linked by nationality, but rather the kinds of cliché’s that crop up in high school. The skater dude with the rocker chic. The nerdy girl with the boy from band.

I traveled through groups in high schools like I travel through countries today, so much so that given my understanding of critical anthropology, I feel like a bonafide cultural poacher, a poser.
And I like to pose, and what’s wrong with that? I feel like its not too different from learning several languages. Could it be that they don’t like nomadic me?

I know too well that these groups territorialize like all other spaces where representation is wanted. These subcultures cross national boundaries, even social economic status. Funneling certain sensibilities that go beyond the usual analytics or race, gender or class. Do you know that song?

These subtleties from within a culture are much more powerful than one might think. They are the counter linkages of counter culture that add depth to the banalities, and overweilding dominant society. And yet, it seems like the market always speaks for us. Buy this. The state tells us what we can do. Don’t run that red. Citizenship is something we perform. Religion helps to sooth the uncertainty of it all. As does ice cream. As does the Smiths. May the foodies of the world unite and takeover, because the shoplifters are dj-ing.

I have purposely peppered the narrative with reminders of my life before anthropology. I do this to make sure my discipline, perhaps my newest group, hasn’t changed me too much…but I fear I got lost in my own rhetoric, fear and anxiety, about writing about culture, led me to remember the very fictions of my ethnographic past. From mod to booty bass, I kept it real in each circumstance, and when in rome, I wore vintage. Cause its all I could afford.

Ann's Winter

The year was 1997. A pale classroom in
the Ivy League of the Mid-West,
a leftist poetry teacher
cums over Ginsberg.
A Student of Lowell
future tense Guggenheim recipient,
writer of immigrants
maids, janitors
and other red topics and less than people.


One brown militant student:

in a green garbage man jumper,

long, black ringlets hanging over
cha-cha intonations

panther-like leather jacket,

combat boots, Che buttons,

cherry red lipstick,

and fuck the 5.0 patches


There were poems of Puerto Rican revolutionaries
Ann mistook for soccer players.
Phrases she likened to magical realism
if food or el guiro
(Maybe even el cuatro)
were mentioned.
Footnotes she overlooked
(“because poems should not have to contain explanations”).

One Indian friend
mastered stanzas on the postcolonial--
where cows and Bombay folks
shat near the same buses. And the smell
slipped in a history of
British fish, chips, cheap scotch.

The genuine poet/students
wrote like learned ethnographers,
not lived (in)ner city youth.
Spoke so damn good
Or well?
And chose rhyme and meter
over real cleaning lady moms,
illiterate dads and the feeling faces
of the glum
colonial reality
present.

Ann is a Marxist. A word stylist
put out by Capitalism’s
unwashed hands.
The worker is not
mute. But silence is a syndrome.
Ann shifted the
same muzzle on the
Brown Girl’s
confessional poem--
enunciated with tattered blacks
and blues.

Ann’s enjambments stayed erect.
She never realized the Brown Girl
through all the cotton colored mutterings.

But Ann just wanted to talk
(no harm in theory, right?)
about cleaning toilets.
Mild revolutions taped to her tail
as she
Spic(ed) and span(ed) her way into
guilty remedy,
faking the funk

Brown Girl
just
hunched down
at a snail’s pace
and rode the windpipes
of someone else’s value.
She imagined
prostituting Ann
in front of her peers;
shredding her poems
like Plath to Hughes;
spitting on her
Understanding Poetry Book,
making sure to land on Keats
while keeping Langston resistant, dry.

But utopia loomed low
and “el paseo boricua”--
A Division Street Meditation Poem,
thrown under its
Rican low-rider
when Ann thought the
neo-independista members
were kicking balls around.

Gooooooooool
Gooooooooool

Brown girl
never
played anything
but softball, tennis.
She remembers those
clean matches
of working class, urban
savings.

Ann: Hüsker dü?

Noses Turn

pigeon tongue
packs a punch
toothless
caps
in
blonde cities

buildings meek
hung over
shy

eyelids taped
to 80's punk
and records
spinning
germs
into needles

30 degree angles
crossed parallel
fists
a little more
and noses
turn

He Collects Trash

Saturday was Friday
Leaning out
Window
(Hipster window)
Smoking
My
9th Camel Light

He collects bottle cans.
He collects trash.

I drank the consumption of both our commodities.

"Quiero ayudar mucha gente un dia. No con mis palabras,
con mis aciones."

Cold
23 degrees
After Christmas
Before Easter
I want to wrap
Everything I own
Under his cart.

I got debt.
I got books,
Learned ideas.
A white man.
White girl's ass,
Straight hair
But Latina loans.

Click. Clash. Trash.
He collects trash.

artistic differences

He lifts his shoes to his hands; not his hands to his laces.

I always bend down to take off my shoes.

He lifts.

I bend.

We could never work.

The Negative

The Negative

I don’t know if it’s the dark cloud
Back again
In a fit of silent fury
Happening
From practice

Love not
Must fuck the bastard
Painted in me.

The negative
Of my person.

Silence.

Still

Grand Strasse

On grand strasse
There are
Scarves for curtains
Yoga mats for sofas

I live with a
Girl: “My pretend sister”

We turn
Spells on
Crusty punks
Hipster boy-men
White never seemed so dark, lonely and dirty
White never seemed so dark, lonely and dirty

Crazy hopefuls
Half-witted fools
Dashes of this and that
Lazy over-thinking(s)
Artsy musings
Longwinded brunches
Painters in lawyer suits
Lifted
Just been lifted
To brighten the ugly of white

Turning Bottles Into Empty

Swallow a drink
For every one
You
Can’t take
No more

Tremor hands
Quiver lips
Thin like blades
You can taste it
You can taste it

I see your eyes
Turn
Bottles
Into empty
Beggin’ space
To give you
land

This poison runs in blood
Thick like
Wood
Against
A
Baby’s
head

I can beat you
I can break you
Down

With will

But you spill
Your past
Into my glass
And after five
I can’t feel the
Difference
Between death and life

Mood after mood
Promise after promise
I fall
I call you

Then

Stumble like your
Daughter bitch
Free to
Ask
For more
Until the
Storm reaches
Danger
And
I pass my glass
To my boy

Time
Stands still
When the
Rapid water
Moves beyond the
Overflow
And the
Swallow
Is all the poetry
Left in
Generations
Of dead

Fumbler

A.

She fumbles feelings like
A novice juggler with balls
Or a dyslexic artist
Painting by numbers
Or, or, or
Until tuckered metaphors
Smell like forced smiles
Upper lip so close to
Nose that
Everything of inside
Seeps outside
And corners of the mouth
Almost reach
The two listening wings
Unwashed air
Retreats in.

B.

He handles lies like
A veteran couture seamstress
Or an Olympic hurdler
Leaping forward
To sneak
A toss in time
Or, or, or
Until a sudden tick
Surfaces
The Micro overstays
His welcome
And the lisp pronounces
Himself louder

Dead

Images hit the wind
I walk in front of me
Former pasts leave puddles
In place of footsteps
Nothing to trace but the ripple
Circles make for graver mistakes
In a space of straight lines
I aim for the fire
But my voice drops like a
Rock in my watered shadows

I stop.
I feel. Dead. Likened to
To bodies down in the ground
I can’t seem to skip.
Round and round me
Comes a web
Trapping pretty ladies
And their unmade babies
Wave my hands
Nothing breaks the sight
Of what I’m becoming

Dead. Flat. Affect me. Affect me.
Drown me.
Hold down my head until I gasp.
Dead. Flat. Affect me. Affect me.
Drown me.

in love with a schizophrenic

Words
Primal symbols
This and that
From how to when
And back into a cockeyed distance
He lives in single thought
Orders
Can’t tame that beast
On high alert
I say: Code Orange
He stands in place

I speak in tongues to barely
Hear him
But I
I, I said I, I
Love my crazy owl
Howling deep inside

He wears bells on his temples
Lizards in his hands
Sounds like screams
And whispers lost in
Trepid dreams

in love with a schizophrenic