By Hope Fischbach
An interview with Lorena Alvarado, author of red line lullaby (dancing girl press, 2017)
HF: Your chapbook, red line lullaby, opens with an epigraph from C. Calvo: “Sobre la mar de mi sangre, un toro bravo llegó,” or in my translation, “Over the sea of my blood came a fierce bull.” I did some research and found that this is a line from a song written by César Calvo and performed by Susana Baca. “De España nos llegó Cristo” imagines Spain as a bull charging over the sea to Africa to kidnap and enslave Africans. This is a powerful line with which to begin your collection. Can you talk about how you encountered this line from Calvo and why you decided to use it in red line lullaby?
LA: The first time I heard this song was in Santa Cruz, California, almost twenty years ago, where I was part of a musical ensemble called Voces. This ensemble practiced and performed the folklore of the Spanish speaking Americas, particularly South America: among many others, cumbias, huaynos, chacareras, zambas and New Song classics. “De Espana nos llego Cristo” was part of the repertoire one of those years, and both the rhythm, the melody and the theme of this Peruvian tondero has remained with me ever since, a haunting critique of anti-black racism, and slavery, specifically. When I was in Chicago, where I started writing this collection while I did my postdoctoral studies, the theme of the bull kept emerging, as well as the color red, its primal connotation blood. And Calvo’s line and Baca’s voice singing this song returned to my mind, too. The bull as Spanish conqueror and as the city’s basketball team name, the bull as wounded animal in a bullring and as basketball fan in the street, it all collapsed in this poem.
HF: The poem “red line lullaby III” has an intimate, personal feel to it, even though the speaker seems to be talking about a stranger on a train. Is this poem based on an experience that happened to you “in real life,” or was it something you imagined as part of daily life in Chicago? Can you tell us more about what inspired the poem?
LA: In answering, I’d like to reconsider your question. In many ways, we cannot separate “real life” from our imaginations. To a great extent, what we imagine, how we see the world and ourselves, becomes our life: How about we think of poetry not as an either/or phenomenon of the real, but essentially always stemming from the dialectic between material and thought? Our lives lead our imaginations, and vice versa, so it is difficult to point out where one begins and the other ends. Life unfolding in the spaces of public transportation has always attracted my senses. It was a space I’ve been familiar with since I was a child growing up in Los Angeles—who was riding, what they carried, what they wore, what they spoke about, etc. Although I distinctly remember the woman on the CTA [Chicago Transit Authority] train that inspired this poem, as well as the flag painted onto her pinkie nail, in that scene I could see how women like her (non-English speaking, non-white) carried America, how America demanded to be carried by them, although America never did the same for them. In a way, I have seen this woman all my life, the women I come from, the women that sustained me.
HF: This work carries a recurring idea of ghosts and remnants of the dead, yet the collection also seems to be predicated on the immediacy of the situations and people that the poems describe. To what extent do your thoughts and beliefs about death and the afterlife play into this work and into your poetic imagination as a whole?
LA: As much as death surrounds us and is part of life. Prisons and detention centers and borders. As much as those persecuted or escaping or preyed upon live within me and around me, immigrants and their daughters born with little saved, or with all stolen. Poetry is as much about what we don’t see: the neglected, disappeared, erased. No need to go too far away in time or space to notice what we’d rather overlook. I’d rather not see the person asking me for money, even though I can smell him, and I can hear him telling me “good morning.” We can see how the mechanics of death work in our everyday lives, but also the mechanics of life, of the defiance against living a life unseen—be it a plant, an animal, or a human, and her work.
HF: Can you talk about your views of daughter- and motherhood? There is a distinctly feminine element to this work, particularly in “paradise is far from the freeway” where you highlight the idea of (in)justice toward mothers and daughters in a way that seems pivotal to the poem.
LA: Yes, that poem is a reckoning with the murder of women, with femicide. It is often the female relatives, the mothers in particular, that fight to bring their daughter’s murderers to justice, often to no avail. In general, that bond between women, in this case mothers and daughters, where both care and look out for one another, really threatens a system of patriarchy and violence against women, particularly against women of color. This is a global deadly ill, the misogyny where women can be violently disappeared—often by their boyfriends or husbands or lovers—with impunity. I did not think of the theme of motherhood, or daughterhood, when writing the poem, but it is indeed a crucial aspect of these snapshots, and it informs my current work in a more conscious way.
But this beautiful question requires a more substantial answer about motherhood and daughterhood. Adrienne Rich wrote that “this cathexis between mother and daughter—essential, distorted, misused—is the great unwritten story.” Indeed, this relationship is often written about in terms of conflict and pain, in competition and struggle, if it is written about at all (Rich notes that in reading ancient literature, it seems daughters did not exist). But there is also a pedagogy of love and survival, embedded within the context of relationships between women (cis or trans), legible only to those living this exchange. I’m not talking about mothers or daughters in merely an essentialist way: as daughters, we may have mothers beyond the biological, and vice versa. In this way, we may expand our conception of mothering and being a daughter. In my Mexican Spanish practice, we could call our daughters both mami/mama and mija, both said with equal intensity of affection, the love for one that fills us with ambivalence and life, and the tenderness toward a young girl for whom we could be a first model of warmth, love, body, skin, smell…. We may feel a motherly bond with another woman, we may feel a tenderness, a desire to love and attend to, another woman, without it being necessarily romantic in nature, but this could also be part of it.
The motherhood and daughterhood in the poem is indeed about an enduring commitment for justice and memory and love for another woman, often in the most dangerous or hopeless or antagonistic situations.
HF: Aside from Calvo, can you discuss influences that you had in mind as you wrote red line lullaby?
LA: The work of poet Marisela Norte encouraged me to write the pharmacy poems, the supermarket poems, the bus and train poems. I was grateful for and captivated by her poems about the lives of (Los Angeles) buses and of the urban borderlands of the same city, of the lives of “las vidas de ellas,” as she writes in the powerful opening poem of peeping tom tom girl. ire’en lara silva was also a wonderful inspiration as well, her work was key to my growth as I competed this collection—she urged me to write from my gut, to let go of the analytical voice so valued in the academic writing I was trained in. Whether I was successful or not is of course my own responsibility, but I did turn to her work in times of doubt and uncertainty, as I continue to do now.
HF: The final poem implies the injustice in the lines “She mistakenly / adds green pepper / apologizes” (“indiana highway rest stop”). Could you discuss this stanza, and the poem as an ending to the work, in the context of your own experiences as a woman and as a creative person?
LA: This poem conjures those restaurants or gas stations where you would stop briefly to get what you need on your way to your destination. Often these small towns on the road, or that lone gas station, are merely steps, not stops, never destinations onto themselves, with people whose faces we barely look into. Of course, they are also home, they are the origins of everything. This is another moment of encounter with people working in these seemingly transient spaces, people employed in fast food chain restaurants. Food is prepared and paid for with little eye contact. But for me, that exchange of brief words—the order or the apology—shows both a humanity and an inhumanity at the heart of our systems of living, making money, or consuming. Often, the apology is feminized, but it is also something we are forced to say to those above us in the economic or racial hierarchy.
In a way, this is a poem that is less an end and more a continuation. It is the stop I am at, but also a reminder that we are on the road anytime we write, that writing is a road we’ve drawn on our map.
Lorena Alvarado is Assistant Professor at the University of California, Merced. red line lullaby is her first chapbook.
Hope Fischbach is an emerging writer and poet. She has published poetry reviews and author interviews in Cleaver Magazine and Speaking of Marvels, and her own poetry and flash fiction appear in Lee Review. A South Carolina native, she currently resides in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Additional Links:
Lorena Alvarado:
https://gasp.ucmerced.edu/content/lorena-alvarado
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIzOdj_nPVw
Hope Fischbach:
https://www.cleavermagazine.com/re-poems-by-andrea-blancas-beltran-reviewed-by-hope-fischbach/
https://spkofmarvels.wordpress.com/2018/11/14/andrea-blancas-beltran/