::In My Mother's Kitchen: Thoughts::

I have been thinking a lot about food, because I am teaching a class on food. I like to eat, I like to experiment with ingredients in my kitchen. But when I approach food as the raw material for my scholarly and creative reflections and productions, I am primarily interested in these things: food and its relationship to concepts of power, food as a site of power, food as a site of resistance, food as a site that exists as an intersection of social processes like labor, commodification and consumption. Because I am interested in the labor that happens around food production, I am also interested in the valence of the kitchen-space. Kitchen the space within which most domestic food production happens. Kitchen the space which has, for so many centuries of human history, has been seen as the space where women belong. I can flip the equation around, and also say, because I am interested in gender, I am interested in the history and politics of the kitchen. I have been trying to find poems and memoir-pieces on kitchen. And this is one of the first things that came up when I did a Google search with the keywords In My Mother's Kitchen.

IN MY MOTHER'S KITCHEN

Fragrance of fresh tortillas and corn stew

Fills my mother's kitchen

Sparsely furnished

Crowded with warmth

Soot-grayed walls, secretive and blank

She moves gently in and out of light

Like a dream just out of reach

The morning light gives her a halo

That plays upon her crown of dark hair

Strong brown hands caress soft mounds of dough

She gazes out into the warming day

Past sagebrush hills, out towards the foot of Black Mesa

How far would she let the goats wander today

Before it rains

Childhood dreams and warmth

Tight in my throat, tears in my eyes

The radio softly tuned to a local AM station

News of ceremonies and chapter meetings

And funerals

Flows into the peaceful kitchen

Lines upon her face, features carved of hard times

Lines around her eyes, creases of happy times

Bittersweet tears and ringing silvery laughter

I ache in my heart

My mother's gentle movements light up dark corners

Her gentle smiles recall childhood dreams still so alive

My mother moves in and out of light

Like clouds on days of promising rain

—Shonto Begay

And here is Begay's website: http://shontogallery.com/wp/

What struck me about this poem is the way the poet reveals the little details of the mother's kitchen. There are so many images in this poem, much like the classic confessional/memory poem tradition of American poetry. But, all those image-work have been mobilized towards a specific impulse : to construct the mother's kitchen as an abode of peace, and the mother as a figure who embodies all that is "gentle" in life. Given Begay's personal and creative history, I am seeing in this poem a well-known trend: constructing the kitchen and the mother that provide refuge against the outside world : the world of funerals, tears and chapter meetings. In other words, the colonizing world which is only capable of generating trauma. But then, the mother in this poem is hardly a "real" figure : she "moves in and out of light", she is like a "dream that is out of reach." Yep, she becomes the classic national allegory. The allegory of the indigenous "American" nation that hasn't been born, that probably will never be born, and therefore, like the mother of this poem will always be a little elusive, its dream-like quality providing solace during moments of stressful contacts with the "mainstream" world.

But this is not just all. I am also thinking about how this elusive mother-figure keeps appearing in male poetry throughout the world. And not just the mother figure, the figure of the allegorized woman, Like Jibanananda Das's classic imageries of "kishorir chal dhoya haat" ( the young girl's rice-washed hands). In spite of their huge geographic and cultural difference, what is common in Begay and Das's kind of metaphor-making is that, it transforms women's actual labor into romanticized allegories, symbolizing some kind of inaccessible, elusive antithesis to the trauma of the outside world. So, when I read poems like this, I cannot help asking: where is the actual labor of the mother within the space of the kitchen? How does the mother-figure's frustrations and hysteria get reproduced within the kitchen space? How does the kitchen become the space where women's trauma (as against the "outside" world and its identification as the space for male trauma) gets constituted, articulated, expressed? And last but not the least, how does the mother herself see this kitchen? Does this ever become the space for expressing her creativity? What I am seeing as I am reading these lines I just wrote, what are the questions that we need to ask in order to de-naturalize the idea that kitchen is the essential space where women find belonging, and somehow, that's inherent in the very constitution of women. Unfortunately, in spite of the beauty of his images, that's what Begay's poem ends up doing.

As I am struggling through these questions, I find myself writing some poems which try to answer these questions. So far I have written six such poems. All of them are pretty short. But I am enjoying writing them. And along with finishing the first draft of the dissertation and teaching, that's what I have been up to.

Joanna Fuhrman's 1968

“The Summer We Were All Seventeen”

From Pageant by Joanna Fuhrman, pg. 4

It was 1968. The clock read 10:43.

The Vietnam War was trapped in the television

like a moptop Rocky Road ice cream cone.

I was hungry ALL THE TIME,

munching on barbeque-flavored soy chips,

slurping pumpkin ravioli with a trimmed white poodle

named Betty Friedan.

It was the year I found twenty pointy virginities moist

in the fangs of a runaway wolf.

The year my voice broke like a lake and I sang

renegade karaoke naked beneath my sparkly trench coat.

Even the sun was an eyelid—

no one could see the rest of the face.

*

Dear Radio,

we love you

even though

we all know

you’re a big-time phony—

we call you

the secret hiding place

of rock and roll,

but we all know

the real

rock and roll

invented

by Arthur Rimbaud

with flaming tambourines

and multi-breasted albino

oranges

you crushed

years ago,

destroyed with your

beautiful

fangs.

*

In 1968 I was the inventor of bonfires and tie-dyed ball gowns,

the inventor of insomnia and transcendent typos. Every song ever

played was written by a monkey on a laptop.

every drum ever destroyed burst with centrifugal liquid lasers.

I was William Carlos Williams dancing

naked in front of the mirror while my wife and children were sleeping.

I was Li Po singing

on the peeling fire escape, smoking pot and cracking jokes about Taoism.

It was 1968 for a whole twenty minutes.

The television broke like fireworks. The television

exploded

like sprinklers.

It was 1968 for a whole century. It was 1968

when we made love beneath

the rainbow canopy of candy GI Joes

and gave birth to a Janis Joplin Cabbage Patch Doll.

Jimi Hendrix swallowed

the ashes and dove headfirst into the My Little Pony blow-up pool.

I was twenty years old

or I was six years old. I devoured every radio,

eating the wires.

I hooked my veins to the electrical current

and wrote emails to Gilgamesh twenty-four hours a day.

I illegally downloaded Steal this Book.

I fell down on the green carpet and stared at my bedroom’s cloud wallpaper.

I saw my face forming in every two-dimensional puff.

It was the summer

of free vowels,

damp noses, exfoliating

participles.

I was nostalgic for the idea of poetry

more than poetry itself.

I injected caesuras in the veins of my toy cadaver

and wrote the word “revolution” all over my friend’s plaster cast.

Rain-soaked toddlers photographed me

and sold the negatives on Ebay.

I covered every centimeter of my body with discarded gun wrappers.

I covered my head with a floating chuppa and sewed a colorful bikini

out of a discarded hijab.

I wore the whole city around my waist as a dangling belt.

Everyone could hear me jangling

from the other side of the globe.

----------

There is something about this poem which disturbs me immensely. 1968, here, appears to be a highly commodified year, era. There is a sarcasm in the tone here, and I think, sarcasm can often be put to really effective uses in poems. So, if I have to read it really against the grain, I will say, this poem mocks the commodification of dissent in the 1960s. But I just want to step back a little bit and ask: was 1968 only about commodification? Was it only about rock and roll, girls with flowers in their hair, and playing revolution? So, I can't really help pointing out that this is a poem that has been written out of the white, middle-class unconscious of the American empire. Yes, the references to a young woman's coming-of-age is interesting here, but even that has been explored through the mediation of a commodified culture, which thrives on appropriating dissent. Where is Black Panther, Young Lords, the demands for Ethnic Studies programs in this poem? Where is race? Where is even feminism? Not to speak of the fact that 1968 means something very different for me, for folks in the Third World. I mean, in India, we are still struggling with the legacy of 1968, what with the Indian state declaring Maoists to be the "biggest internal security threat." Today's Maoism that literally emerged out of the Naxalite movement of the 1968. There can be lots of criticisms of it, some very serious ones. There can be rejections of it too. But it meant a LOT more than a culture of commodified dissent mediated through a highly structured culture industry. Not to speak of the immensity of the state violence that was unleashed.

So I have been trying to write a poetic response to this one. It's happening in bits and pieces, but I think I am getting stuck in between a very familiar language of Leftist nostalgia, and a more inwardly drawn language of individual exploration? How to write about individual experiences of witnessing and participating in a moment of global political upheavals?What happens when one throws gender in the mix? I don't know don't know don't know...but hopefully will get to know...something...a little bit more than what I do now...

Conflict, Writing, My Poems

One of my co-workshoppers in the UCLA Extension class I am taking said something interesting about my poems. According to her, my poems have a sense of conflict which is largely missing from the poems she reads. This made me think a lot about readership. For one thing, I don't really know who she reads. But the poets I read and love to read, all engage with conflict, and sometimes multiple forms of conflicts. Maybe I read "political" poets more. Although, I would say, all poems, all texts are political. It's what kind of politics they are engaging in, and how, that makes all the difference. I am thinking, what does it mean to write about conflict? That there are inequalities in the world? That people who do not enjoy power and privileges question their own locations, and ultimately engage in resistance? That we all occupy contradictory material and subjective positions in life? All of the above?

Something I need to think about more.

This somehow also makes me think about Mary Pipher's book Writing to Change the World, which I just finished. It has lots of great insights to begin with. But, what I find lacking is specifically an engagement with the question: how does one write from a place of simultaneous anger and hope? What if one is expressing one's love in writing through an expression of anger? Personally, I think, Pipher is not that willing to deal with systemic dimensions of power. Consequently, she also does not think of writing as something that can sharpen the contradictions inherent within the workings of power. At the end of the day, although I don't think she intends it that way, the book ends up suggesting ways to dissolve the conflicts, rather than let them ripen.

If I have to be non-pc about it, it's a little too hippie-dippie for me. Although there were some great insights, from which I can learn. Also, she has a good bibliography of all kinds of books-- children's books, novels, memoirs---and I need to dig into some of them!