post-colonial convulsions

Went to hear Professor Ann W. Fisher-Wirth (University of Mississippi) Fulbright Scholar and Distinguished Professor of American Studies/ Uppsala today where she gave a lecture entitled ‘Still the Question Remains, What Space for the Sacred in This Century?’: Contemporary Environmental Poetry.” and left feeling like a jerk.

I had some many feelings evoked that I lost sight of everything and just let my indignation flow.

For the first, it brought out childhood memories from the local environment in my city (Tijuana) and then I thought how the powers to be are making tomorrow’s rebel. Only to fight again and reclaim our places in this society, that is, nothing changes.

Then I thought how much more Swedish poetry deals with nature, everything is nature for them, about sacredness, as far as poetry and writing goes. Then I began thinking more of this “new” theory in the English language and its militancy tones, this is where the sorrow goes in, as if propaganda to incite indignation to actively engage itself in this encouragement to denounce the wanton destruction of nature.

Curiously enough she remarked somehow the strange weather we had back in September 2002 as beautiful and wonderful. She gave a decent picture but that only brought out snickers out of me. I remember how the swedes were all alarmed about the strange summer, looking for all kinds of omens, from the greenhouse effects to the ozone holes, all kinds of conspiracies were being swung to explain the strange phenomena.

Somewhere I drifted and wrote:

When we see, hear, smell and speak
and decide to put it in ink
it is akin to putting squares in circles.

This is what outraged me: she spoke of the butterfly Monarch and how “campesinos” are destroying the habitat for them. I never heard how the supply and demand makes this possible. I lost it. Poor thing, she only dealt with a theoretical approach to a certain form of literature and here I went bezerk with “demonisation” and all sorts of evil things the “other side” does. Ugh!

Although it did bring about an interesting thought though.

I realized that in poetry some people do only research to evoke feelings of sorrow just to gain favor for one’s view, this might be somewhat naive but I found it interesting.

I hope there isn’t any grudges left … My old Chicano in myself was woken from its lull ….