One of the late Jacques Derrida’s most useful exercises in linguistic play was to hyphenate “represent.” The word that appears after the alteration, “re-present,” offers transformed definition and application. To re-present something, especially a memory, is to present it anew, but also to mark, mangle, and manufacture a different present. The present now, which is forever fleeting – already vanished at the instant that we can acknowledge it, moves according to the meaning and implications of the presentation. To “re-present” is to save memory from nostalgia. It is to promise life after death.
Martín Espada, one of America’s most brilliant and courageous poets, is in the resurrection business. His poetry consistently seeks to resuscitate the lost, whether it is lost people, lost values, or lost hope of a flawed and fragile democracy. In one of the many beautiful poems for his father, he makes the plea, “Haunt me.” “I welcome the ghosts. I invite them in,” Espada once told me during an interview. With his new collection, Jailbreak of Sparrows, the poet assembles a gang of ghosts, re-presenting them with dramatic and powerful verse, while also re-presenting many ideas currently under the fires of fascism: the humanity of immigrants, the rights and dignity of the poor, the movement for justice on behalf of Puerto Ricans, and Latinos more broadly, and finally, the beauty of poetry. At precisely the moment that the United States is slouching toward an especially stupid form of authoritarian rule, Espada’s poetry resonates like a grace note.
While political and corporate power subject immigrants to secret police detention, deportation without due process, and for all practical understanding of the term, terrorism, Espada spotlights their stories, taking from his own testimony as a Puerto Rican poet and former tenant lawyer, his late father, Frank Espada’s experience as a community organizer, and his observations as an activist. While foot soldiers for censorship, racism, and imposed ignorance remove books from the shelves of schools and libraries, and demand the closure of anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, Espada gives a tour of the nightside of the American myth – the apartments without central heating where tenants who struggle to speak English risk incineration with space heaters too close to the bed, the white neighborhoods where Puerto Rican teenagers endure harassment and ridicule. While bigoted comedians refer to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” and bigoted politicians laugh, Espada showcases Puerto Rican pride. While autocratic imbeciles demean the value of the liberal arts in education, Espada writes poetry.
And it is extraordinary poetry.
Jailbreak of Sparrows begins with two memoiristic sections in which Espada leads the reader through his childhood, his undergraduate years at the University of Wisconsin, and his time as a tenant lawyer, mainly for Spanish-speaking Latinos, in Boston. The first poem provides the book with its title. In a five-page narrative poem covering Espada’s family history, and touching on topics ranging from colonial oppression of Puerto Ricans to disability and acts of protest, such as smuggling copies of a socialist newspaper, Espada refers to “verses that flew like a jailbreak of sparrows from the poet’s hands.”
The reference is not to his own work. Instead, it becomes something of a mission statement. The jailbreak of sparrows flying out of Espada’s hands throughout the subsequent poems carry messages, large and small.
It is only appropriate, albeit almost tragic, that the second poem, “My Father’s Practice Book,” charts a jailbreak of sparrows that, initially, failed to take flight. Frank Espada, a documentary photographer, sought to capture the Puerto Rican diaspora, travelling throughout the island and the United States after receiving a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Working low wage jobs to pay the bills, Frank Espada believed that his book of photography, The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Themes in the Survival of a People, would save him, his family, and help to save the cause of Puerto Rican liberation. In painful detail, his poet son writes about how he kept a practice book to write his signature, trying to get it just right. It didn’t happen. The book never sold well. Years later, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and Duke University would show and archive his work.
“He would never hear about the box labeled Frank Espada at the Smithsonian American Art Museum…”, Martín Espada writes. Some ghosts do rise up.
In the poem that follows, “Loot at This,” Espada recalls his father helping a homeless man in New York, stealthily handing him a twenty-dollar bill. “Look at this,” Frank Espada said when seeing the man. Martín Espada closes the poem, “Look at this was all he said, and all he had to say. Look.”
Like a father commanding his son to look at the injustice and sadness of “a man with white hair and a white beard” reaching “into a dumpster” to “pluck out a bag of potato chips,” Espada tells readers to look – to look at punk white teenagers denigrating the memory of Robert Clemente, and adult professionals with the mindset of punk white teenagers denying housing rights and basic services to impoverished immigrants. Espada tells us to look at the unnamed, uncounted catastrophes that walk through our city streets.
In “Your Card is the King of Rats,” Espada writers about he and other Legal Aid lawyers stating the case for donations at a luncheon of the Bar Association:
“I dealt my magician’s deck of cards:
Polaroids of rats in glue traps, roaches fatter and juicier than any raisin in the cereal box, the fountain of a toilet brimming a brown soup, snapshots we passed out to judges for injunctions to bless the landlords. How I wanted to call out and amaze all the lawyers at lunch: Is your card the king of rats? Is your card the queen of roaches? Is your card the ace of excrement?”
Espada’s poetry has evolved over the course of his multi-decade career, becoming more narrative-driven, even while the images have acquired inescapable vividity. The images are consistently striking, and often surprising, but never gratuitous. His acts of remembrance are “re-presentations” that demand attention to people, scenes, and stories that typically provoke indifference; images that are unable to break through America’s forcefield of apathy. For example, a scene in a law school classroom when Espada spies a white student writing in his notebook that all of the Puerto Rican and Black students are unqualified affirmative action admissions who white students have to pay to support, and then digs the paper out of the trash can to show his classmates of color, transforms from anecdote to epic. It illustrates the racism and white entitlement at the heart of American history. Espada, in the poem, does not merely uncrumple the paper. He is “smoothing the wrinkles like a man ironing his shirt.” Smoothing the wrinkles makes the shirt presentable, and like a shirt, the words are put on those they insult. Perhaps, the words are put on as a weight. Perhaps, they form an apparatus to straighten the back for a fight that continues into the present.
Humor is a vital resource in any struggle, and Jailbreak of Sparrows offers several moments of amusement. Espada proves that he can write with a comedic touch about lighthearted moments. There is a funny poem about him waking up in laughter after having a dream that an unnamed, prestigious character actor is throwing Swedish meatballs at him in the middle of an awards banquet. In another poem, Espada recalls working as a bouncer, dealing with clever drunks, and finally, he turns the laughter on himself after catching his reflection in the mirror while grocery shopping in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. The KN95 mask makes him resemble a moa.
“Love Song of the Moa” is one of the eight love poems he writes for his wife, Lauren Marie Espada, a former social worker, high school teacher, and great poet in her own right. A few of her heartbreaking stories from the wars of education in poor neighborhoods provide material for Espada’s poetry. He writes about Lauren Espada’s failed attempt to rescue one of her students from an abusive boyfriend, and her challenges tutoring illiterate adults.
One constancy that is unavoidable is the realization that all of Espada’s subjects, including himself (a Puerto Rican poet and college professor) and Lauren Espada (a poet and public school teacher) are currently under attack. The severity of the attack ranges, as a National Book Award-winning writer is hardly in the same predicament as an undocumented migrant picking vegetables, but without exception, the people that Espada profiles in verse are those who the death cult in power has deemed expendable. The fascist myth that has arisen like a tornadic cloud over American society separates the saved and the damned. In the latter category are those who are not “real Americans,” either members of the “elite,” which includes community college instructors and print journalists, or pawns that the elite use to destroy the once great fatherland, such as undocumented workers, refugees, and poor Americans applying for government aid.
Lest anyone forget the stakes, or the violence troubling not only abstractions like the “American soul,” but the actual lives of millions of people, Espada returns to remembrance in his final section of Jailbreak of Sorrows. America’s most poetic president employed the phrase, “mystic chords of memory.” Espada plays those chords, fusing together a sound coming out of communion with the dead and love for the living.
In his new collection, Espada has poems paying tribute to a professor who became a mentor, a bookstore owner named after Eugene Debs, a Puerto Rican politician advocating for more just and equitable policies in Espada’s small hometown, victims of racial profiling and police brutality, and those who were murdered by an anti-Latino terrorist during a mass shooting in the El Paso Wal-Mart.
It is often said that poetry takes the abstract and makes it concrete. Espada’s poems begin with the concrete – the all too real, all too painful concrete. He doesn’t transform the concrete into the abstract. Instead, he hurls the concrete into the world of self-serving abstraction. Like throwing down the photos of sewage seeping out of a toilet at a tony lunch, or pointing to a homeless man desperate for a few discarded chips, and saying, “Look,” Espada uses his sophisticated sense of artistry to place images, scenes, and stories in our faces. The poems confront our humanity, or lack thereof, demanding a response – sometimes the most immediate option is only silent contemplation.
Martín Espada’s poetry demonstrates why politicians and voters operating according to the fascist impulse have targeted literature as part of their war on civil society and social justice. Espada’s work itself has been banned from a school system in Tucson, Arizona, and the penal system in Texas. The censors want to remove books from shelves, because for all of their ignorance, they, at least, understand that story and poetry activate empathy, while presenting an alternative vision of societal organization. When the president, the governor, the Fox News host, your neighbor says, “Don’t care,” as in don’t care about the migrant risking death to cross over into the United States with hopes of suitable employment and human rights, don’t care about the Latinos ducking bullets behind a clothing rack, don’t care about the grown man who can’t read, literature can say, “Look.” Espada says, “Look.” The poems represent and re-present them, demanding attention and inclusion, and not in the merely fashionable sense of the term, but as imposition on the formation of ideology; the ideology one takes into the voting booth, the street, the workplace, the classroom, everywhere.
One of Espada’s closing poems is “The Snake.” With dripping contempt, Espada describes Donald Trump reciting “The Snake,” a fable that he tells his hate-blind crowd is a warning about immigration. A “tender” woman takes in a wounded snake, nursing it to health, only to find the snake has turned on her, giving her a venomous bite. When the woman asks for an explanation of the snake’s betrayal, the snake answers, “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”
Racist, vile, preparation for deportation and execution: This is how the sitting president depicts his fellow human beings. This is what his audience applauds and adores.
Espada ends the poem with the following:
As they slept – the bikers and the cops, Uncle Sam and the State of Liberty, the millionaire on his magic pillow – adolescents from Guatemala scalded the killing floors at the slaughterhouse in Grand Island, Nebraska, their hoses like snakes spewing rivers that bubbled in the steam. Around them, the blades of skull splitters and bone saws waited for their fingers to slip, fangs lurking in the murk of early morning, in the daze behind the goggles on the faces of adolescents from Guatemala, sleeping the next day at Walnut Middle School, shaken awake by teachers who spotted the acid burns on their hands.
Espada interrupts the fascist abstraction of human beings with charred flesh. His poetry does not observe. It intervenes.
