by Dalia Hajir
Voices, like ghosts, always win.
They can walk through walls or move furniture.
Rosa Alcalá, “Voice: An Essay,” 2017 Collection, MyOTHER TONGUE
A poem isn’t fully finished once it’s written; reading it aloud is an art. Rosa Alcalá, writer, translator, and teacher, is a genuine reading artist. Behind a stand, she enriches her performances with gestures and changes in tone, considers each line break, and stresses syllables and rhythmic patterns, so her listeners remain engaged and enchanted by her stories. She expresses herself naturally, inviting listeners to involve their feelings and rethink their past. Addressing themes such as memory, politics, conflict, language, social classes, and identity, Alcalá’s delivery is organic, her words haunting.
Image caption: Rosa Alcalá. courtesy of Rosa Alcalá.
Born and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, to Spanish immigrants, Alcalá lives in El Paso, Texas. She is currently the head of the creative writing department and bilingual MFA program at the University of Texas at El Paso. She has written three books of poetry: Undocumentaries, The Lust of Unsentimental Waters, and MyOTHER TONGUE. In this last collection, written between her mother’s final days and her daughter’s birth, Alcalá exploits the vastness of language and its imperfections. The title is a play of words between “My other tongue” and “Mother tongue.” As a daughter whose mother tongue is different from that of her mother’s, Alcalá’s poems center on the misunderstandings between languages; as a mother herself, she addresses the complications of becoming a mother while letting go of her own.
In MyOTHER TONGUE’s first poem, “The Story to be Written,” Alcalá writes:
You came
to give your children
– a cliché –
something
to get them started – into breathing
I came fully into
my own
and can
barely
kiss you
with these wavering
words – you cannot
–anyway –
make them out
(reading glasses or
not)
Immediately, the poem appeals to the eye. Her carefully chosen words, thoughtfully placed spaces after each line break, and staggering dashes between words visually represent hesitations, self-interruptions, and cracks in the speaker’s voice. The words fade out repeatedly throughout the poem, achieving a devastating mood in which the speaker longs to reach for what drifts away. Perhaps Alcalá recognizes her mother’s hardships while immigrating to the United States to give her children a better future. She highlights many parents from many countries (“– a cliché –”) having endured the same for their children.
Until age 22, Alcalá grew up in the Riverside section of Paterson, a working-class neighborhood filled with factories where her parents worked. As she explains during a 2015 interview with Ae Hee Lee for the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, hers was “the last house in the corner before the factories began.” Her father worked at a dye house, and her mother held various assembly line jobs near the same neighborhood. During a presentation for the Naropa University in 2018, published under the title Allen Ginsberg Visiting Fellow: Rosa Alcalá, Alcalá says her mother was a seamstress, making clothes for her coworkers on the weekends. Therefore, the textiles are metaphors she can’t “get away from.”
In the prose poem “At Hobby Lobby,” from her collection MyOTHER TONGUE, Alcalá writes, “My mother kneeled down against her client and cut threads from buttons with her teeth, inquiring with a finger in the band if it cut into the waist. Or pulled a hem down to a calf to cool a husband’s collar. I can see this in my sleep, among notions.” Since her mother’s sewing machine was in her bedroom, Alcalá revisits, through dream-like qualities, the memories of her mother sewing clothing next to the bed.
Her parents spoke Spanish and never learned English, creating pressure on Alcalá to choose one language over the other. As a result, she wrote “Paramour,” a poem about having an affair with the English language. The poem, part of her MyOTHER TONGUE collection, is right on point about how it feels to have a hyphenated life, much like Jhumpa Lahiri expresses in her short story “My Two Lives,” to incorporate English as a second language.
Image caption: Rosa Alcalá Sketch by Brontë Procell. Courtesy of Brontë Procell.
Read “Paramour” here in its entirety:
Paramour
English is dirty. Polyamorous. English wants me.
English rides with girls and
with boys. English keeps an open
ab and never sleeps alone.
English is a smooth talker
who makes me say please. It’s a bit of
role-playing
and I like a good tease. We have a safe word
keep forgetting. English likes
pet names. English
has a little secret, a past,
another family.
English is going to leave them
for me. I’ve made English a set
of keys. English brings me flowers
stolen from a grave.
English texts me, slips in
as emojis, attaches selfies
NSFW. English has rules
but accepts dates last minute. English makes
booty-calls. English makes me want it.
When I was younger, my parents said
keep that English out
of our house. If you leave with that miserable,
don’t come back.I said god willing
in the language of the Inquisition. I climbed out
my window, but always got
caught. English had a hooptie
that was the joint. Now my mother goes gaga
over our cute babies. Together
English and I wrote my father’s
obituary. How many times
have I said it’s over, and English just laughs
and says, c’mon, señorita, let’s go for
Chinese. We always end up
n a fancy hotel where we give
fake names, and as I lay my head
to hear my lover breathe,
I dream of Sam Patch plunging
into water: a poem
English gave me
that had been given
to another.
“So many people have said that they like that poem or that it speaks to them in some ways…” Alcalá remarks during the interview. “Some of us feel like we don’t belong to the English language… and that we don’t belong to the Spanish language either… We’re always estranged from both.” Like in most of her poems, she does not expect to convey universality with “Paramour” but appreciates when people find parts of themselves in her words or when others who don’t experience the same learn a bit more from those who do. The division of speaking two languages can stir questions and instigate confusing thoughts, like butterflies lingering in our brain as thoughts we can’t quite catch. So, when a poet like Alcalá finds the right words for what has never been written, we feel a sense of validation, a gratifying ahá! moment. The unique connection Alcalá forms with her readers is evidence no one should drown their feelings but rather confront them, express them, and use them to connect with others in an authentic, healthy way.
Alcalá’s poems flare with tension due to endless questions about her cultural identity. When asked what the role of identity in conflict is, she responds:
I think many of us are conflicted as to our identity. There’s this sort of initial conflict that is posited as loyalty. What are you going to be, and who are you going to identify as? Are you going to identify as the same identity as your parents? And then you’re bringing home these ideas of Americanness, and various strains of Americanness that put you at odds, so I think I felt very much like the formation of my identity was in conflict constantly and that I was constantly shifting to appease. I was more American here and more Spanish there.... What do those two things become? What is, then, the community that I’m a part of that doesn’t have to choose? And by choosing, that conflict isn’t resolved. The choosing of a community is also about allowing the conflict to remain and be part of a constant process of change, because I think that if conflict is resolved, then you don’t grow. Because it’s always about kind of re-examining where you are and re-examining why you are, and questioning, you know, your loyalties, and if you should have them, to begin with. So that comes into the work naturally because it’s how I think of myself. I
t took a lot of time and courage for Alcalá to accept the lack of an understanding between being American or Spanish. Her work also challenges readers to face inner conflict and allows some questions to remain inconclusive.
Alcalá’s story of becoming a writer begins in first grade when she writes a small book for class. Inspired by a popular song of the time, “The Candy Man,” she titles it The Can Man, a story about a man who collects cans and turns them into toys for children. Delighted at her creation, her teacher shares the book with another teacher. “That was that first moment of oh! People will talk about something I made!” expresses Alcalá, who later says, “I felt, I can get this love. People can show me that something I do has value.” She smiles, much like her first-grade teacher, and is happy to see her daughter make her own little books.
Image caption: Rosa Alcalá. courtesy of Rosa Alcalá.
As a child who liked writing fiction stories, Alcalá was drawn only into poetry during fourth grade. There was an anthology she loved so much she did not want to give the book back. Her teacher sent a note to her home saying she had to return it, so Alcalá hid the book and said she had already done so. “I’d lied because I wanted this book so badly,” Alcalá tells Lee in the Institute for Latino Studies interview. She says that even though she considers herself a “very good girl and a very good student,” the book meant so much to her that she chose to keep it and imitated the content within. It was at this moment that she first considered herself a poet.
She has two older brothers, one of which gifted her a poetry book by Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, which he bought, knowing very little about poetry. Alcalá, a high schooler at the time, argued with her mother that morning, so her brother brought the book home with a kind message written in it, wanting to make her feel better.
“His voice felt so contemporary to me. It felt so alive, and it was kind of muscular,” Alcalá says of O’Hara, whose writing style can be the literary equivalent to Jackson Pollock’s expressionist paintings. His poetry feels spontaneous, deceivingly effortless, and deeply vulnerable, qualities represented in the collection’s distinctive cover of a naked man. Contrary to what Alcalá had been reading, O’Hara’s style made her realize poems do not have to rhyme and can be about everyday anecdotes, like “going to buy records” or “meeting with friends,” and still be mindful of the qualities that make poetry, poetry. This epiphany greatly influenced Alcalá, who then ventured into the world of contemporary American poetry.
Until then, Alcalá primarily read the works of the romantics, particularly Charlotte Smith, a pioneer of romanticism. Eventually, she discovered William Carlos Williams, Federico García Lorca, and Nathaniel Mackey, whose poetry in graduate school “just kind of blew my mind,” she exclaims. Entranced by the beautiful way his philosophical ideas merge with his “musicality,” Alcalá thinks of him as a great scholar and poet. Through him, she learned scholarly writing does not have to look purely academic; it can also be “poetic.”
Alcalá continued learning about other poets and explored different styles, opening herself more to what poetry can be. In “Voices: An Essay,” also from MyOTHER TONGUE, Alcalá possibly is in conversation with several other writers and poets, including Mackey. It is a thought-provoking poem, comparing voices to ghosts and poems to haunted houses. The voices of those who have passed away haunt the speaker and several others in the poem. Alcalá argues that ghosts wander through poems, leaving hints for readers in their trails:
“We say, someone / must have died here,” and “We ask / questions into / abandoned rooms / the answers / not apparent until / we play back / what we’ve taped / on our sensitive recorders.” This poem, another example of her mastery, merges complicated definitions, cultural quirks, and puzzling emotions into compelling stories.
Entering the academic world as a student working toward her MFA and Ph.D., Alcalá found herself at a loss. “I think it’s probably a foreign country to anybody who enters it,” admits Alcalá during the Lee interview. “Academia has its own sort of culture, or various cultures depending on where you go, and certain rules and behaviors that you have to learn.” Because of her family’s working-class background, it was a “real culture shock.” But she received help. Alberto Tehara stepped in as a mentor and has remained integral in helping her navigate through academia. Now, Alcalá passes on that mentorship to her students. Many are going to college or graduate school for the first time. Others come from “workingclass backgrounds, [are] children of immigrants, immigrants themselves, or live in Juárez and travel into El Paso to take classes,” all to which Alcalá feels “a kinship with their struggle.” Knowing how hard it is to learn the nuances of academia, Alcalá teaches her students to let go of the shame and not be afraid to ask for guidance, for they are not alone in the journey of education.
Rosa Alcalá, an endearing, caring poet, surprises readers with sharp, tense, and emotional work. Her approach to poetry is cathartic, mixing everyday anecdotes with the burdens of more significant experiences, touching readers close to home in ways that hurt and yet heal. It is as if Alcalá sculpted each poem in MyOTHER TONGUE with every possible visual tool, enabling the reader to sense the mood of certain poems at first glance. “The Story to be Written,” which emanates melancholy with its swirling lines and fading words, is an example. A reader flips through the pages and lands on a poem that swirls or fades, then thinks, Oh, this must be a melancholy poem. Or a reader discovers a poem with words in bold and capital letters in the middle of the page and ponders, She must have been angry.
In a video titled Jack Kerouac School: An Interview with Rosa Alcalá, she acknowledges that all the arts speak to each other similar to how the mind and the body work together. If we apply this to culture, then treating our identity as a question needing an answer is to assume that culture is pure. But culture, much like love, is never pure. Therefore, it is about letting go of the hardestablished ways of acting and letting ourselves explore the open field of ambiguity.
