Forests, Once and Future

"Between 1850 and 1900, 85% of Vermont's land was deforested."
-- Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller NHP Park Ranger

As July turned to August, I began a new writing project – spending time in, ruminating on, and writing about our National Parks. I’m taking advantage of the travel required for my No Word for Welcome book tour to explore our national parks and our relationships to them. Like many American childhoods, mine included a string of visits to national park service sites, from Sequoia to the Lincoln Memorial. Growing up in a military family and moving every few years, the National Parks were one of the few constants for my itinerant family.

I’m spending two months as Writer in Residence at Vermont’s only national park, a hilly woodland that is only slightly larger than two urban parks close to my heart: Seattle’s Discovery Park and Boston’s Franklin Park. At the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park (NHP), I’m beginning to seek answers to a question that has been knocking around my head and heart all my life: What does it mean to come from a place? As a military kid (a Navy Junior, to be precise) the idea of having a hometown has always been enormously foreign--and enormously attractive. Related to that question are two others:

What does it mean to be native to a place?  What does it mean to care for a place?



This historic bungalow where I work  at the Marsh-
Billings-Rockefeller NHP was built as the woodland
retreat of another woman writer in 1917.  

I spent much of the last dozen years exploring those questions in southern Mexico. The result of that exploration is No Word for Welcome. As I’ve settled into life here in Woodstock, Vermont, I’ve learned (to my surprise) that this area has quite a bit in common with Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Both regions are primarily rural; both regions were deeply changed by the construction of railroads and highways in the 1800s; both regions have suffered terrible deforestation. (You can read more about nineteenth-century isthmus history in this essay I wrote for the early American history journal Common-Place.) Vermont has passed through many economic eras: timber-cutting to clear land for farming, sheep-ranching to feed the textile industry of the Industrial Revolution, then skiing to feed the tourist economy. Through it all, Vermonters have struggled to maintain their homeplace’s rural character and restore its ecological health--after saws, sheep, and ski-lifts have destroyed it. 

It is somehow both inspiring and disheartening to find the same cycles everywhere: We arrive; we wreak havoc; we realize our mistakes; we endeavor to repair. Between 1850 and 1900, eighty-five percent of Vermont’s land was deforested. Now, the once-again green hills of Vermont give me hope for the increasingly bare hills of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

(And speaking of hope, I must give deep thanks to the K2 Family Foundation in Maine and 4Culture in King County, Washington, for making my new writing adventure possible.)

Welcoming No Word for Welcome

"When the last tree has died, when the last fish has been caught, then we’ll understand that we can’t eat money."


Here in San Francisco the sun is finally out, the soy lattes mean serious business, and the independent bookstores are vibrant and welcoming. (And for a Seattle girl, each of those details is crucially important.) Tonight, one of those bookstores, The Booksmith, will host the official welcome of No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy.

My book’s official release date was June 1, but for the first couple of weeks I focused on emailing everyone I know (over eleven hundred people, I learned, by cobbling together address lists that span more than a decade) and getting a radio campaign rolling (five interviews so far), thanks to some generous friends and my brilliant publicists.

Isthmus residents tell Mexico's then-President, Vicente Fox,
"The Isthmus is not for sale" at demonstration in 2001 that drew
more than three thousand people. (WLC 2001)

Now it’s time to get started on the truly fun part: getting out and talking to people. Tonight’s book release is co-sponsored by International Development Exchange, IDEX, an organization that I’ve known and admired more than fifteen years. Before I began the work that led to No Word for Welcome, in the late 1990s, I worked for an Boston organization that might be considered IDEX’s Atlantic Coast sister: Grassroots International. I admired IDEX from afar, for the canny mix of solidarity and financial support that they offer grassroots organizations around the world. When I lived and worked on Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec (2000 to 2002), IDEX was an active part of a tri-national North American coalition that sprang up to support the isthmus organizations pushing back, as economic globalization pushed down on them.



The slogan of "The Collective"
Working Group of the
Isthmus," founded by a half-
dozen isthmus activists (and me)
in 2000. (WLC 2000)



(If you’re wondering what that’s all about, you can read the first chapter of No Word for Welcome at my publisher’s website, for an introduction. The short version of the story: as a saying usually attributed to the Cree puts it, "When the last tree has died, when the last fish has been caught, then we’ll understand that we can’t eat money.")

 I am grateful to share my official book launch tonight with two shining examples of my favorite kinds of institutions: an international grassroots organization and a local independent bookstore. Gracias, Booksmith and IDEX!

And tomorrow it’s on to Los Angeles!

The Light of Translation

“You can’t think of it as a transfer from one language to another, because we would be left with something horrible in Spanish. You must think of them as parallel poems, a poem created in our language and another poem in Spanish. Both versions uphold their respective literary traditions.”

And so poet / educator / activist / translator Irma Pineda explains the difference between the Zapotec and Spanish “versions” of her poems.

Poet Irma Pineda, photo courtesy of the poet.

Born and raised in the city of Juchitán, where she still lives, Irma Pineda has been writing poems since childhood. She now has five published collections of poems, one of which had a print run of more than ninety thousand copies.

Juchitán is the only city in Mexico in which an indigenous language dominates – not just on the streets and in homes, but in the mayor’s office. Like eighty-five percent of Juchitán’s residents, Irma’s first language is Zapotec – a language whose literary history reaches back two thousand years. The Zapotecs were probably the first society to invent writing in the Americas -- long before the Maya.

February 21 marked the UN's International Native / Mother Language Day. Linguists estimate that half of the languages currently spoken in the world will have fallen silent by 2100. It's a fact that fills me with panic, grief, and a urgent desire to spread Zapotec poetry far and wide.

Irma Pineda creates her poems in Zapotec, then recreates “parallel poems" in Spanish.And then, I create a “parallel poem” in English. Learning that Irma considers the Spanish and Zapotec versions of her poems to be parallels, not translations, freed me as a translator. I’d made hesitant attempts at translating the work of Zapotec poets in years past, but stopped because I don’t know Zapotec and couldn’t read the original poem. Pineda’s process allows me to think of the Spanish version as a new original that stands on its own.

My office in Oaxaca, December 2010.

I spent the month of December 2010 in Oaxaca, completing first-draft translations of forty of Irma’s poems. After I completed the translations, I spent four days with Irma in her home, reviewing my drafts.

Here is one of Irma’s poems in all three languages. “Light / Biaani’ / La Luz” appeared in the Sarasota, Florida literary journal
New CollAge in 2010.

Light

Light allows the vocation of looking at walls,
discerning colors that fill faces.
Light floods bodies,
draws silhouettes,
phantom shadows
that taunt the nighttime solitude
of one fragile figure
held on the wall of fear.


Biaani’

Ne biaani’ zanda gu’yu xi cá cué’ yoo,
zanda gannu’ xhi dié’ lú binni.
Biaani’ riguiñená ni nexhe guidxi layú,
rutie’láadi binni,
rutie’ bandá’ dxaba’
cuxidxi ti nuu xtubi lu gueela’
ti miati da
sucá cué’ yoo cadxibi.

La luz

La luz permite el oficio de mirar paredes,
adivinar colores que llenan rostros.
La luz inunda las formas,
dibuja siluetas,
sombras fantasmales
que se burlan de la soledad nocturna
de una figura frágil
sostenida en la pared del miedo.

This is the first poem that appears in Irma Pineda’s first collection of poetry, Ndaani’ Gueela’ (En el Vientre de La Noche), published by Casa de la Cultura de Juchitán, Mexico, in 2005. The poems in this collection were written by the poet with the support of a grant for indigenous writers from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (Mexico’s National Endowment for the Arts). They appear here with the persmission of the author.

Notes on a Poetics of Indexing

"Anglo-Americans: all look alike, 29"

That is one of the first lines in the index for No Word for Welcome. I recently reviewed that index, a project by turns frustrating, illuminating, and entertaining. I approached the task with dread, avoiding it for as long as possible. Not because I fear order or laborious detail – even my spice rack is alphabetized – but because it required reading my book Yet Again.

As almost any author can tell you, when your book is close to publication, reading the phone book in a viper-filled pit seems more attractive than reading one’s own manuscript one more time.

To my surprise and relief, it wasn’t all that bad. Yes, it was strange to see a portion of my brain, and a dozen years of work and experience, plotted out as a list of five hundred and fifty topics. But as I worked my way from Acapulco and American season to Ernesto Zedillo and Zoque, I enjoyed laughing at myself, and delighting in the poetry of simple entries like the one above. The lack of ornament and embellishment of "Anglo-Americans: all look alike" gives it more power than the long passage to which it refers.

Some entries offered word-problems, puzzles to solve: How to translate El Día de la Raza?

The indexer had chosen "Day of the Race," a homely term that seemed too easy to misinterpret. I asked several friends for suggestions. "Mestizo People’s Day," one suggested. Well, I can assure you the istmeños in the Oaxacan town where I lived were not celebrating mestizaje. One of those istmeño townies, a human rights lawyer who is now the Executive Director of Long Island’s amazing Workplace Project, thought the holiday first needed a name-change in Spanish, to "Día de la Resistencia." (I agree, but that’s, unfortunately, beside the point.) A friend who teaches Latin American literature suggested "don’t translate it, explain it." (Great idea, but not possible in an index.) Another friend chimed in: "Roots Day?" (Conjuring Alex Haley?)

The index offers an explanation that’s pertinent here: istmeños (people of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec), xxiii

The explanations that the indexer offered for some terms created their own poetry:

"bienvenid@s" (de-gendered greeting), 170
chahuixtle (corn disease, something bad), 8, 9, 53, 274
cual mitcats ("missionary's child," one who fawns on foreigners), 190
protagonismo (unwarranted self-promotion), xv

An index’s flat, uninflected presentation, its egalitarianism, struck me as both humorous and elegant. Joke and metaphor, deep theme and small quirk, are all laid out with equal emphasis.

time: God's and Zedillo's, 68; as a spiral, xxiii, 152

A brief explanation of how istmeños refer to "regular time" and "Daylight Savings Time" (imposed throughout Mexico by former president Ernesto Zedillo, but ignored in the countryside) is on a level playing field with my realization that the istmeños’ sense of how time passes matches my own lifelong experience: it’s not a line, it’s a spiral.

My favorite entry:

immigration, 74-75; and Central Americans, 63; for employment, 30-31, 118-19, 184; from outer space, 154

As for Día de la Raza, I ended up choosing Kathleen Alcalá’s suggestion: "Day of the People." An incomplete translation, to be sure, but if a reader wants the full story, she’ll have to read the whole book.

No Word for Welcome leads to Many Words for Welcome

On June 1, 2011 University of Nebraska Press will publish a book I wrote called No Word for Welcome. It's about three villages in southern Mexico, and how the people who live in those villages have dealt with the global economy. They have not had an easy time of it, hence the book's title. When I started No Word for Welcome -- a very long time ago, in the late 1990s -- I worked as a grassroots organizer. (Thanks to President Obama, I no longer have to explain what that is.) When I finished writing that book, more than decade later, I'd become a full-time writer and editor. A word worker. A story smith. I have always been a book binger. Since long before kindergarten. In spite of my book's title, I love words. Here, at "Many Words for Welcome," I will share some of the words that fascinate, agitate, or just plain stop me  in my tracks.