Gina Piersanti
Elmaz Abinader
Poets of Color and their Ecologies
January 26, 2019
This poem threw me for a bit of a loop. The first paragraph left me searching for a clear point of view, or an obvious and specific subject, and I was unable to find one. Right off the bat, “The thing” sheds its skin. We’re left to fill in the blanks. Lovers, a girl, a child. All nameless and hard for me to envision. Each line painted a new vignette, different images flickering through my mind. There is little punctuation. Ideas are fragmented. I wonder what ideas this poem was born from. There are a slew of words about nature and bodies; water, river, snow, skin, breasts, spine, knees. My brain started putting words into categories to try to make sense of the words I was reading. There are many mentions of birth; “I flail in the womb”,“The afterbirth waiting to be milked”, fetus gifts, wronged child, lost child. I find that birth is often sanitized and sterilized in our popular culture. It is associated with the medical realm, not the natural. In movies and television we see it happening in clean, orderly hospitals full of doctors, machines, and fluorescent light. The blood is often emitted. The natural world far removed from something so common and natural. This poem connects birth back to nature, to the river, to the snow. It also connects it to the bloody, the painful, the nightmarish. Words like poison, revenge, bleeding, greif, and scar litter the page.
Part II has a different rhythm to it, a different voice. It repeats a pattern of two lines and a new paragraph, two lines, and a break. It is shorter, more space around the words. Sandwiched between much denser, wordier sections. This change in writing style suggests a change in speaker, perhaps the mother instead of the child. The second part feels more calm and orderly, more even and organized. The ideas still seem abstract to me, fetus-gifts and alien beings creating strange pictures in my brain, but the lines are less densely packed.
My brain has been trained to try to pick out narratives, and it’s fighting to make sense of it all, although I imagine that isn’t the point to this piece. It almost reminds me of the Supremes song “Love Child”, where Diana Ross sings about children born out of wedlock. Phrases like “Lovers come and go” and “Because we parented the creature” led me to this connection. The child is “lost”. The context of the birth, of the conception, seem chaotic and difficult to pin down.
At first read the parts of this poem that stood out most to me were the jarring and violent words, the ones that painted twisted, bloody pictures in my mind. A few reads in, however, I saw the same sentences that first made me wince as almost magical. For example, the line “After she conceives the Earth will burst”. This felt apocalyptic to me at first, threatening. It felt like the woman was being punished. Now, thought, there seems to be some kind of cosmic connection between woman and world. The Earth is in tune with her body, she has the power to shake the whole planet. Maybe burst is not a bad thing. Even the mentions of blood, of beastial fear, start to seem less evil and more natural. More honest, instinctual, normal, part of life. There is no birth without blood.
In some ways I find the synthesis of nature and birth beautiful, and in some ways a little disturbing. Perhaps this is partially because I know birth is natural and bloody. But I think I’m also weary of the gendering of birth, the association of both women and the Earth as “abundant” and “bountiful”, which seems to go hand in hand with objectification and exploitation. Birth is so often associated with womanhood, which of course, is problematic and exclusionary in more than one way. I don’t think this poem is making any claims about tenants of womanhood or the riches to be extracted from the Earth, it just reminds me of the other typical and worrisome ways women and land are written about.
Lastly, I’m curious about the spiritual, magical, or even mythic qualities of this poem. I picked up on mentions of enemies, “medusas”, monsters, and “the goddess”. It gives this poem, which feels so deeply rooted in the earth, a sense of otherworldliness, drama, an old epic, passed down by word of mouth.
Gina, i loved going through your process with you. It’s like the brain on poetry and how we start with the pieces and see how they fit. Sometimes to a meaning, sometimes to only a feeling or a picture. It was interesting to witness how the images in the poem, line and tone contributed to your experience, elmaz
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