Contemporary Poetry

192 contemporary poetry

Returning home as an adult, the son fi nds three scrolls, one which
details two persimmons ‘so full they want to drop from the cloth’
(p. 19 ). He presents this picture to his blind father who reas-
serts through touch, memories of the past as well as a sensual
patterning of evocation. These are persimmons he has painted
‘blind’ with his eyes closed ‘hundreds of times’ (p. 19 ). Evoking
both familiarity and cultural identifi cation, the persimmons are
fi nally translated into a pattern of mourning and remembrance;
the memory of their shape and texture are equated with the
immediacy of recollecting ‘the scent of the hair of one you love’
(p. 19 ).

INTERLINGUAL POETICS: LORNA DEE CERVANTES

Lorna Dee Cervantes’s fi rst volume of poetry Emplumada ( 1981 )
was credited with showing the barrio life from a Mexican-American
woman, or Chicana’s perspective. The emergent wave of fi rst-
generation Chicana poets writing in English was responding to a
degree to the emergent politics of Chicano writers beginning in the
1960 s. Appeals for the reclamation of a spiritual homeland lineated
in the Amerindian myth of Aztlán were key to the early Chicano
manifesto by Alberto Baltazar Urista, ‘El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán’
( 1969 ):

We the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern

land of Aztlán from whence came our forefathers reclaiming

the land of their birth and consecrating the determination

of our people of the sun, declare the call for our blood is our

power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny.^57

The rewriting of these rhetorical positions from a female per-
spective was central to the development of Chicana writing. The
pivotal writer and critic Cherrie Moraga describes that, as women:
‘we sought and believe we found non-rhetorical, highly personal
chronicles that present a political analysis in everyday terms’.^58
Cervantes suggests that Chicana poetry is a poetry of ‘the observer
class’ and points towards gendered differences: