Aaron Abeyta, Featured Writer
A Recorded History, The Language of Poetry as a Means of Cultural & Communal Preservation
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Aaron Abeyta, Featured Writer A Recorded History, The Language of Poetry as a Means of Cultural & Communal Preservation |
For me the language of poetry has always been associated with place, people, culture, and remembering. I grew up in a family where a person's story was a way of preserving the past. For some reason preservation does not seem to be a major concern of current generations. Somehow we have lost our idetity in some sort of secret surgery where the anaesthetic of assimilation and English-only has been delivered to us drop by drop by some i.v. we unconsciously wheel around while it numbs us. Like any surgery, we do not remember that actual procedure, the cutting away of history, language, culture, stories; rather, we wake one day in some recovery room of our own making (jobs, money, success) and find that there is a soreness, a pink scar where something forgotten used to exist.
My abuelito was all about remembering. If there is anything that I will take from his legacy, it is that humans need language to express memory. Without the syllables of a word uttered or rendered on paper, the memory is a smoky dream that dies with the dreamer, but a word expressed records someone's story in a place it never before existed. Can a word save a community, a language, a people? Some people will say that it can't. I am not entirely claiming that poetry or literature is a savior, but I do believe that for the person being written about, it is a bit of redemption, a personification of that smoky dream realized.
For me the languages of Spanish and English have always co-existed, much like the histories of two communities co-existing. We live in a nation that advocates one language. It is like saying that there is only one history. I offer that two histories are better than one, three superior to two and so on. The story cannot be given solely to the archeologist's brush, left for the dust of descuido to be swept away, recorded like the small bones of a once larger living thing. A prayer of mine is that language, poetry, a story, can keep a way of life from disappearing. For my abuelito and for my people, I hope that I can honor something living like a story even after the teller of stories has left us, to give back with words after the makers of words have chosen silence.