Real, NataliaDr. Kirsten Bartholomew OrtegaPolitical Poetry6 November 2006Bifurcations in Lorna Dee Cervantes’s

Emplumada

Chicana poet and professor Lorna Dee Cervantes was born in San Francisco onAugust 6, 1954 to an American mother and a Mexican father. Her upbringing involvedbeing exposed to sexual abuse, domestic abuse, poverty, and racism, if not directly thenindirectly through her friends (as evidenced, for example, in her early poems “Beneaththe Shadow of the Freeway” and “For Virginia Chavez,” the latter of which I willdiscuss). Her poems employ the narrative form and are conversational, direct—evenblunt—and unpretentious. Meanwhile they are precise, brimming with emotion that’smeasured; the poems are economical. The content of these poems breaks away fromstereotypical sex/gender roles and embraces the solidification of self-identity andempowerment when possible, particularly through nature and heritage, and at other times(as I will show) highlights the tension and bifurcation of identity intrinsic to Chicanaculture.She received her B.A. at San José State University and received her Ph.D. inphilosophy and aesthetics in 1979 at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Thatsame year she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant and began teachingcreative writing at the University of Colorado, where she is currently an AssociateProfessor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program. She has publishedthree volumes of poetry:

Emplumada

(1981)—which received the 1982 American Book

Real2Award—

From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger

(1991)—which wonboth the Paterson Prize for Poetry and the Latino Literature Award—and

Drive: The First Quartet

(2006), which includes five books of poetry. Her poems have been translatedinto five different languages and appear in over 160 anthologies. She has been awardednumerous honors, including two National Endowment for the Arts grants, the LilaWallace Writer’s Award, and a Pushcart Prize.Cervantes is of Mexican and Native American ancestry, which has profuselyaffected her life and consequently her work as a poet, which is often of anautobiographical nature; however, she has clarified the situation thus: “Don't believeeverything you read and everything I write is not about me” (Lorna Dice). She continuesto get published widely in literary magazines and anthologies; she is the co-editor of

Red Dirt

, a cross-cultural poetry journal and founded and published a journal,

Mango

, whichfeatured the work of Latino poets. At the time of

Emplumada

’s publication, Cervantesdescribed herself as “a Chicana writer, a feminist writer, a political writer” (Voices fromthe Gaps). She constitutes a seminal figure in the struggle by women of color for respectand attention in academia, particularly to women who share in her Chicana background.Cervantes conceived of herself as a writer from childhood and began writingpoetry at the age of six. She discovered Shakespeare and the English Romantic poets(Lord Byron is one of her favorites and even shows up in “For Virginia Chavez”) in thehouses her mother cleaned. To prevent racial and ethnic prejudice against their daughter,her parents instructed Cervantes to solely speak English both in and outside the home.The eventual discovery that the color of her skin didn’t match her self-image asconnected to her parlance provoked a bifurcation in her identity, something Chicana/os

Real3are known to suffer from, and something which plays a fundamental part in the essenceof the Chicana/o mentality. Chicanas must struggle not only to develop a personalidentity, but also must do so by compounding their divided cultural identities, bothpatriarchal—Chicanas are oppressed through their skin color and their sex/gender. As aChicana, Cervantes displays the intricate problem of reconciling being brought up in oneculture while preventing the loss of the other. In her case, deprived of the Spanishtongue, her ability to delve into her heritage is further truncated (and resulting as well ingrammatical and spelling errors). The poem “Refugee Ship” displays her personal,cultural dilemma:

Mama raised me without language.I’m orphaned from my Spanish name.The words are foreign, stumblingon my tongue. I see in the mirrormy reflection: bronzed skin, black hair.I feel I am captiveaboard the refugee ship.The ship that will never dock.

El barco que nunca atraca

. (41)

The speaker senses the lack of a connection between her body and her reflection—hermestiza heritage clashes with her own self-image (Gutierrez Spencer, 74). The speaker islinguistically deprived of her Spanish heritage, and her skin prevents her from achievingfull integration into the United States culture she was raised in. She thus remainsculturally homeless, her self-image fragmented (Gutierrez Spencer, 75). It is notable,given Cervantes’s conflicted relationship with Spanish, that it manifests itself through the