The Personal & The Political

EL PORTAVOZ

anoche se murio el portavoz del movimiento
tal vez por suicidio,
quizas por estar tomado-

La conciencia ya no sembraran
los granudos con gritos recios;
Ni jamas nos inspirara
el canto de poetas pericos.

Anoche en este momento,
con dedos tiernos y un cepillo antiguo
peine pelos negros y largos,
mis manos;
dos aves anamorados preparando su primer nido
a tu cabello liso tejieron,
acariciando...

y tu trensa humildemente brillaba
en nuestro silencio


From "Black Boy" by Richard Wright:
My mother opened the door and stared curiously at the pile of magazines that lay upon my pillow.
"You're not throwing away money buying those magazines, are you?" she asked.
"No. They were given to me."
She hobbled to the bed on her crippled legs and picked up a copy of the Masses that carried a lurid May Day cartoon. she adjusted her glasses and peered at it for a long time.
"My God in heaven," she breathed in horror.
"What's the matter, mama?"
"What is this?" she asked, extending the magazine to me, pointing to the cover. "What's wrong with that man?"

With my mother standing at my side, lending me her eyes, I stared at a cartoon drawn by a Communist artist; it was a figure of a worker clad in ragged overalls and holding aloft a red banner. The man's eyes bulged; his mouth gaped as wide as his face; his teeth showed; the muscles of his neck were like ropes. Following the man was a horde of nondescript men, women, and children, waving clubs, stones, and pitchforks.

"What are those people going to do?" my mother asked.
"I don't know," I hedged.
"Are these Communist magazines?"
"Yes."
"And do they want people to act like this?"
"Well..." I hesitated.

My mother's face showed disgust and moral loathing. She was a gentle woman. Her ideal was Christ upon the Cross. How could I tell her that the Communist party wanted her to march in the streets, chanting and singing?

"What do Communists think people are?" she asked.
"They don't quite mean what you see there," I said, fumbling with my words.
"Then what do they mean?"
"This is symbolic," I said.
"Then why don't they speak out what they mean?"
"Maybe they don't know how."
"Then why do they print this stuff?"
"They don't quite know how to appeal to people yet," I admitted, wondering whom I could convince of this if I could not convince my mother.

"That picture's enough to drive a body crazy," she said, dropping the magazine, turning to leave, then pausing at the door. "You're not getting mixed up with those people?"
"I'm just reading, mama," I dodged.

My mother left and I brooded upon the fact that I had not been able to meet her simple challenge. I looked again at the cover of the Masses and I know that the wild cartoon did not reflect the passions of the common people. I re-read the magazine and was convinced that much of the expression embodied what the artists thought would appeal to others, what they thought would gain recruits. They had a program, an ideal, but they had not yet found a language.

Here, then, was something that I could do, reveal, say. The Communists, I felt, had oversimplified the experience of those whom they sought to lead. In their efforts to recruit masses, they had missed the meaning of the lives of the masses, had conceived of people in too abstract a manner. I would make voyages, discoveries, explorations with words and try to put some of that meaning back...