Silabas De Viento/Syllables Of Wind by Xánath Caraza (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Silabas De Viento/Syllables Of Wind by Xánath Caraza DaMaris B. Hill SILABAS DE VIENTO/SYLLABLES OF WIND. By Xánath Caraza. Lawrence, KS: Mammoth Publications. 2014. Syllables of Wind, Xánath Caraza’s second collection, is an in-depth examination of identity and collective memory, demonstrating how each rests in the tongue and is formed in language. In this volume, Caraza continues to impress the reader with her abilities to paint portraits of people and places, honoring modernist poets. Like Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and William Carlos Williams, Caraza privileges expression through [End Page 131] precise visual images. Additionally, she chooses language that frames her attention to visual details within the collective memory of “spaces” and “borderlands.” The collection is as deep and expansive as the sea and equally necessary for an intricate understanding of the complexity of American artistic/cultural production. Caraza’s poems illustrate a complex understanding and sense of knowing that casts the self as having a global identity that predates the recent attention to patriotism and national borders. One of the ways Caraza complicates popular notions of national borders and identity is that these poems bear witness to the sea being a connecting force. Rather than one that separates nations, the sea in her poems is the conduit between Mexico, United States, Spain and Morocco. In her poem Incalculable she captures the seascape to illustrate Costa Tropical, Andalusia, Spain. The lines in this poem help the reader to understand the Alboran Sea as a “Sea that found other cultures,” “sea that forged the cosmic race,” and “sea of linguistic currents.” In this way, Caraza reframes the sea and its shores as a welcoming space of hybridity, rather than privileging the sea and shore’s history of Roman and Muslim religious/political conquest. Therefore the sea images also acts as a space where the poems seem to brush upon the collective consciousness of readers. In addition to historic references and literary allusions, Caraza’s poems attend to the spiritual and divine presences associated with spaces. The collection does more to correct and rewrite the ways that time and identity are situated in a Western context; it incorporates the collective spiritual beliefs and practices of the Oaxaca, honoring the divine and indestructible energy that predates the discovery of the New World, Spanish colonization, and Catholic tradition. The opening poem The Serpent of Spring and accompanying image by Adriana Manuela foreshadows Caraza’s attention to the indigenous spiritual traditions that framed the Nahuatl mother tongue. Considering that the collection is written in at least three different languages, Nahuatl, Spanish, and English, I found myself slightly frustrated by the fact that I am not literate in Nahuatl and cannot enjoy the poems in her “mother tongue.” Due to the classical, historic, and religious allusions in Caraza’s work, I believe the collection has cultural currency in addition to its literary merit. Caraza’s framing of identity is one that speaks to the fluidity of borders and definitions of identity. In this substantive collection readers are permitted to extend notions of identity outside the context of nationality and recent her/histories. DaMaris B. Hill University of Kentucky Copyright © 2015 Mid-America American Studies Association