This Is What Happened In Our Other Life

by Julie R. Enszer

I’ve always believed that great lesbian writers write it all: poetry, fiction, essays, news stories. We have much to tell the world, and it cannot be contained in a single genre. Achy Obejas is another who proves this to be true. The publication of her first collection of poetry by A Midsummer Night’s Press demonstrates Obejas’ skill as a poet in conjunction with her award-winning work as a novelist and short story writer.

This Is What Happened in Our Other Life contains fifteen poems; all are intimate lyrics about love. Obejas’ poems are both narrative and musical. They often assert their power with an initial line that draws the reader into the poem with equal parts of directness and surprise. For instance, the poem "Legacies" opens the collection; it begins, "The first time I was inside a woman, . . . ." Provocative, yes. Then, in the second line, Obejas turns in a different direction and writes, "I was confused." Each line of the poem provokes and releases tension, insisting that the reader proceed to the next one. Thus begins the journey for the reader.

Obejas is a master of lineation, using it to elicit greater dramatic tension, to control the pacing of the poems in the eyes and ears of readers, and to demonstrate her prowess at creating perfectly conceived lines. Long after the collection has been read, reread, and savored, particular lines by Obejas linger: "All of your lovers come to you in April," "You check your correspondence and the world on the screen" and "the world breaks us all." She packages knowledge and revelation into her poems in ways that are both dramatic and memorable.

Obejas’ skill as a poet is not limited to lineation, however. Her attention to the sonic qualities of the language are striking in this collection. Internal rhyme certainly figures into her work, as does assonance and consonance, the usual tools of the free-verse, lyric poet.

In Obejas’ hands, however, these tools are used with care, and the results of her applied labors are fresh and new. In "Dancing in Paradise," Obejas writes of the body’s need to preserve memory, "we keep our eyes open,/ears keen, for marine smells[.]" The direct visual rhyme of "open" and "keen" are counterpointed by the slant rhyme between "open" and "marine." Both echo astutely in the eye and the ear in conjunction with the direct aural rhyme of "keen" and "marine." Similarly, in "Sleeping Apart," an unregulated rhyme scheme emerges rhyming "time-zone" and "telephone" and "dances" and "distance;" this subtle end rhyme serves to unite the lovers unexpectedly and delightfully by the poems conclusion.

Obejas careful attention to the sounds of her work not only demonstrates her skill as a poet but also reminds the reader that the journey through these poems is one controlled by the hands of the craftswoman whose skills transform words into art and the craftswoman into an artisan.

Perhaps the greatest power of this collection is its restraint. With only fifteen poems, each feels perfectly conceived and thoroughly complete. Spare and compressed are accurate descriptors for all of the poems, and the package itself responds to these attributes. A Midsummer Night’s Press has produced a small, perfect-bound book. For print fetishists, it is certain to be the object of great affection. It measures about the size of a 4x6 photograph, but it is not meant to be placed in an album; it is meant to be treasured and to be fondled. Obejas is lucky to have such care given to her first printed book of poetry and A Midsummer Night’s Press is likewise lucky to have Obejas’ collection for the first installment of their Body Language series.

 

Tip of the Week: Achy Obejas
By Ray Pride

The Cuban-born author—who spends her time crafting within these city limits—has two novels under her belt, "Days of Awe" and "Memory Mambo," a short-story collection sweetly titled "We Came All the Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?" and she was the editor of "Havana Noir," an addition to Akashic’s series of love letters to shadows, smoke and dimly lit alleyways (oh, she’s also an accomplished journalist). Her first book of poetry, called "This Is What Happened in Our Other Life," is predictably lovely, if far too brief. From "Sleeping Apart": "The nightmare itself/the somnambulist, time-zone/zombie unaware/bumping the furniture, telephone/eating its own tail." From "Sunday": "It was love that gave them careers/new wares, made them/dark-haired girls sifting rice/checking magazines for quick tests titled:/"Do you know your lover?"/"Is your marriage happy?"/ Everyday the air of nitrous oxide." That’s just a sample of the simple, serene sensibility Obejas can surface.

 

Stanza test of time
Achy Obejas comes through with her long-awaited book of poetry.
By Alicia Eler

FOR BETTER OR VERSE Obejas waited more than 20 years to release her first book of poetry.
It’s easy to procrastinate when putting together a project as daunting as a book—but putting it off for more than 20 years?
Havana-born, Chicago-based writer Achy Obejas first won a NEA grant for her poetry in 1986. Since then, she has published two novels, a short story collection, and worked as a Chicago Tribune arts and culture journalist. Last month, she celebrated the release of an anthology she edited, Havana Noir (Akashic Books, 2007), in which she translated many of the pieces.

But Obejas found that her highly personal and intensely emotional compilation of poetry, This is What Happened in Our Other Life (A Midsummer Night’s Press, $6.95), took the longest to unfurl.

“I like to think that a poem sort of floats above the banalities of things like calendars and clocks,” she says. “And I like that space that poetry puts you in—where all logic is suspended.”

After Obejas and Midsummer Night’s publisher Lawrence Schimel, a friend of hers, sorted through more than 100 of Obejas’s poems spanning from the late ’80s to March of this year, they decided on only 15 for this tight 30-page collection. Each poem is undated and seamlessly flows into the next, making the book read like one long love song. Hazy memories of Cuba, ruminations on mothers, and experiences of lesbian love and sex appear like short, candid portraits that, at the core, always return to a certain inner pain and conflict.

In the opening poem, “Legacies,” Obejas describes her first sexual encounter with a woman through a mixture of utterly straightforward, emotionally resonant free verse (“The first time I was inside a woman/I was confused.”). “Monday in April” recalls bidding farewell to a lover during a drive to the airport, infusing this love story with gritty urban details (“This is Illinois, Chicago, dead industry./The car like an iron lung.”).

“I wanted to give something to this person and say I miss you, but I didn’t want to do it with flowers and trees and fresh air,” says Obejas, 51. “I needed to define an urban [space] in this poem.” Here, as in her other pieces, the poem grabs hold of fleeting, tactile moments, enriching them with the underbelly of urban Chicago and soft, residual slices of memory.

In “Sunday,” Obejas contemplates through careful metaphor what her mother thought of her queer sexuality, and wonders what her mother was like as a young woman and what it was like for her to move from Cuba to America.

“When I wrote that poem, I was involved with a woman from Argentina and we were sort of contemplating the reactions of our mothers [to us being lesbians]—not so much our families, just our mothers,” she recalls. “And at the same time, I wondered who we are as the American daughters of Third World women. We probably don’t have anything at all on our mothers, who were edgy in ways that we struggle to imagine.”

Discussions of love between women as well as the Cuban exile experience aren’t new subjects for Obejas, whose second novel, Memory Mambo (Cleis, 1996), is told by 25-year-old Juani Casas, a lesbian, Chicago resident and Cuban refugee who is fixated on separating her authentic memories from her life as an exile. Similarly, Obejas’s other books, Days of Awe (Ballantine, 2002) and We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (Cleis, 1994), also delve into issues of sexuality and exile.

But in the new book, Obejas elevates emotions and experiences above everyday occurrences. The final poem, “Historia de Amor” is the only one written in Spanish. At first it seems to describe the parting of two lovers on an unnamed street: One looks back while the other does not. But Obejas layers on a second meaning.

“It’s about what happens in this country,” she says, “where so many of us who have become diasporic end up having some sort of ghost self.”

 

by Richard Labonte
December 17, 2007

This Is What Happened in Our Other Life, by Achy Obejas. A Midsummer
Night's Press, 32 pages, $6.95 paper.

The passion of lesbian sex, the ghostliness of living with a sense of
exile, and reflections on what her Cuban-born mother might have
thought about having a queer daughter: these are among the notions,
memories, and emotions packed into the 15 powerful poems in this
palm-sized chapbook. "The first time I was inside a woman/I was
confused," Obejas - author of the novel Memory Mambo and editor of
the mystery anthology, Havana Noir - writes in "Legacies," the
opening poem. By "Dancing in Paradise," she is "willing, drunk,
unbuttoned." And, in "Sleeping Apart," she "can't will away this
heartache." That kind of candor, focusing as much on the pain of love
as on its sweet moments, invests these short, intense verses with a
bracing honesty, embracing both the thrill of sexual connection and
the ache of romantic failings. In other poems, Obejas touches on
family, identity, diaspora, and dreams - a large amount of personal
ground covered, elegantly, in a small package.

 

By Arin Brenner

Achy Obejas is a Cuban-American, lesbian writer and journalist who has won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism as well as awards and fellowships for her novels and poetry. This is What Happened in Our Other Life is a chapbook of poems that explore love and loss, and the connections between lives, bodies, and memories of a homeland.

Obejas’s poems use strong images to evoke emotions from the reader, as when she says, “Your promise is the rose petal on the sill/remembering the garden” or “Now they see themselves the snail on the tank.” When talking of mothers, Obejas calls them, when they were younger, “little wind-up toys/as shiny and urgent as pearls.” These tangible images and beautifully wrought comparisons convey an intimacy and truth that the reader will not only grasp onto but also recognize in his or her own past; yes, one can say, reading these poems, that is what it felt like; I remember that’s how it was.

The poems often contemplate not just love, but love after it is lost, as well the feeling of being torn between the here and now and the remembered, far-away home. The echoes of these pains haunt This Is What Happened in Our Other Life, leaving the poems to parse out, in small ways, how to live life through such losses.