Mixed Race Studies

Earthquake Weather

University of Arizona Press
1996
87 pages
5.5 x 8.5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-1630-8

Janice Gould

It’s unmistakable, that strangely calm air and sky that signals big change ahead: earthquake weather. These are familiar signs to Janice Gould, a poet, a lesbian, and a mixed-blood California Indian of Koyangk’auwi Maidu descent. Her sense of isolation is intense, her search for identity is relentless, and her words can take one’s breath away. Sometimes accepting, sometimes full of anger, Gould’s work is rare, filtered through the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of a lesbian of Indian heritage. Over and over again, she speaks as an outsider looking in at the lives of others–through a doorway, out of a car window, or from the shambles of a broken relationship. Showing a steady courage in the midst of this alienation, her words are also stark testimony to the struggle of an individual caught in social and emotional contexts defined by others. In Earthquake Weather, as in an evolving friendship, Gould opens herself to the reader in stages. “I did not know how lonely I was / till we began to talk,” she writes in an opening section, setting the introspective tone of what’s to come. She begins with a focus on those universal truths that both bind us and isolate us from each other: the pain of loss, the finality of death, our longing to see beneath the surface of things. Next, the poet turns to her growing-up years during the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. She describes a family in turmoil and an Indian heritage that, oddly, was one of the factors that made her feel most disconnected from other people. And she writes poignantly about her increasing alienation from prescribed sexual roles. “What’s wrong with me? / Where do I belong? Why / am I here? Why can’t I / hold on?” Finally, as in a trusting friendship, Gould offers the reader vivid word portraits of relationships in her life–women she has loved and who have loved her. Erotic and deeply personal, these poems serve as both a reconciliation and affirmation of her individuality. “Yet would you deny / that between women desire exists / that in our friendship a delicate / and erotic strand of fire unites us?” The poems in this book, says critic Toby Langen, are most powerful for their “courageous drawing on experience and feelings.” They will speak to many general readers as well as anyone interested in questions of gender and identity, including students of literature, lesbian/women’s studies, social/cultural studies, or American Indian studies.

Itch Like Crazy

University of Arizona Press
2002
121 pages
6.0 x 9.0
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-2177-7

Wendy Rose

Among Native American writers of mixed-blood heritage, few have expressed their concerns with personal identity with as much passion as Wendy Rose. A mainstay among American Indian poets whose work addresses these issues, she is a writer with whom readers of diverse ethnic backgrounds have consistently identified. In her latest work, Rose returns to these major motifs while exploring a new dimension: using poetry as a tool to delve into the buried secrets of family history—and all of American history as well. Confronting questions of personal history that itch like crazy—the irritations that drive human existence—she acknowledges and pays tribute to her Indian and European ancestors without hiding her anger with American society. Rose’s poems are strong political and social statements that have a distinctly narrative flavor. Here are Europeans who first set foot on America’s shores while Taíno Indians greeted them as if they were visiting neighbors; Hopi and Miwok “Clan Mothers, grand-daughters, all those the missionaries erased”; and European forebears who as settlers pushed their way relentlessly west. Through her vivid imagery, she speaks to and for these ancestors with a sense of loss and an itching caused by the biases provoked by ethnic chauvinism. Itch Like Crazy is a finely crafted literary work that is also a manifesto addressing contacts and conflicts in the history of Indian-white relations. By presenting another view of U.S. history and its impact on the Native Americans who are her ancestors, it offers a new appreciation of the issue of “tribal identity” that too often faces Native peoples of the Americas—and is too often misunderstood by Euro-American society.

Read an excerpt here.

Cue Lazarus

University of Arizona Press
2001
76 pages
6.0 x 9.0
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-2074-9

Carl Marcum

A ’77 Pinto. Two boys “a few months from their driver’s license.” And in the back seat, a ghost of the present observing this scene refracted by memory.  In this collection of poetry by Carl Marcum, a young man traces his rise to consciousness, his coming of age in the Southwest as a medio, an individual of mixed race. Displaying his Hispanic heritage as fact, emblem, and music in his poems, Marcum balances hip humor with larger themes of loss and reinvention to paint a work of seriousness and imagination, wrestling sense from the giddy rush of experience. The lead poem, “Cue Lazarus,” conveys the sense of loss that permeates the collection, revisiting time the author spent with a friend he now knows will die. It sets the tone for the explorations to follow as the poet haunts his past: death, traumatic experience, the uneasiness that comes from being unable to forestall tragedy, all combine to create a sense of paradox, that he who endures becomes a ghost compelled to haunt his own life. As poetry becomes a subtle game of language, experience is refigured as an array of possibilities; Marcum finds meaning and epiphany through close observation as he revels in images of constant motion and sustained search. Here is a suite in celebration of Chevys (“That Camaro ran nearly on machismo alone”) and a prayer for breakfast (“I’d like to renounce the salt and pepper shakers / of this life. But the eggs are here / twelve lines into this poem / and getting cold”). He dreams of himself as Pancho Villa, “my poetry at the end of a pistol,” and invokes the spirits of poets past, “beggars on the media of Limbo, holding shabby signs: WILL WORK FOR TRUTH.” Ultimately, Cue Lazarus is about resurrection—of the spirit, of a life, of an identity. It marks the emergence of a vital new voice that, in baring his soul, reveals lessons as old as time.

Read an excerpt here.

Salt-sweat & Tears

Cinnamon Press
March 2007
80 pages
21 x 14 x 0.8 cm
Paperback ISBN 10: 1905614187; ISBN-13: 978-1905614189

Louisa Adjoa Parker

Of Ghanaian-British descent Louisa Adjoa Parker explores issues of identity, belonging, family and relationships in raw, honest, but crafted pieces.

Mulatto Girl

See the mulatto girl walking
down country lanes and fields, her
head held high, her skin the colour
of caramel boiling on the stove.  See her smile
in the knowledge she is not the first
to walk this green and pleasant
countryside, she has history stirring within her limbs
she has Africa’s heat and England’s cold rain
pumping through her blood, her
DNA a beautiful mix of gene pools
scattered across continents.  She is strong.
She show Africa in a way the English hide.
She shows an eighteenth century master’s love for slaves.
She shows a slave’s contempt.
She shows twentieth century people brave enough
to cross a line made of different tones of skin,
to love in spite of hate.

See the mulatto girl walking
down country lanes and fields, her head
held high, her quadroon baby girls
held on her hips, her hair thick and frizzed, lips
half full, there are no
white men dressing her in robes and jewels,
but see her smile, see her sway, as she walks
with her head held high.

Sonata Mulattica: Poems

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
2009
240 pages
6.3 × 9.3 in
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-07008-8

Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English
University of Virginia

In a book-length lyric narrative inspired by history and imagination, a much celebrated poet re-creates the life of a nineteenth-century virtuoso violinist.

The son of a white woman and an “African Prince,” George Polgreen Bridgetower (1780–1860) travels to Vienna to meet “bad-boy” genius Ludwig van Beethoven.  The great composer’s subsequent sonata is originally dedicated to the young mulatto but George, exuberant with acclaim, offends Beethoven over a woman. From this crucial encounter evolves a grandiose yet melancholy poetic tale.