ANNUCIATIONS:
PERSONA LITERATURE
AND THE VOICES OF TRAUMA

And yes, the literature underscores, this does go on happening all of the time: the racial, sexual, gender- and age-specific violences that are both silenced and intrinsic to those "common knowledges" that suffer in the interstices between "knowing and unknowing."

This section traces the efforts at conferring visibility and referential content on the experience of pain. The literary device of perspective, particularly in persona poetry, is emblematic of the confines and expanses of representation in text. If a concern with the appropriation of codes underpins much authorial attention to language, in the study of violence and trauma, then the use of varying points-of-view can be understood to lend an appreciation of the difficulties of access to visibility.

Of special interest are the methods by which the perspectives of the victim and perpetrator are privileged in individual works. In this context, an exploration of the controversies surrounding persona literature is instructive: this section reviews works in this genre by Ai, Wendy Rose, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other contemporary writers, who have appropriated the perspective of the perpetrator in developing themes of racial and sexual violence.(27) Here, the device of voice operates as an instrument of annunciation or disclosure, through which immediacy, intensity, and further psychological authenticity are integrated into the works.

The poet Ai is perhaps the leading exemplar of this form. In her collection Sin (1986),(28) there is a stunning array of such works, in which the poet speaks as personae ranging from the Kennedy brothers, to the anonymous "Émigré" or "Prisoner," to the priest who confesses he has sexually violated an orphaned child. The incisive intelligence and stylistic elegance of these works are without peer.

In the last of those works mentioned above, "The Priest's Confession," there is the wrenching account of a man severed from his faith in his god and himself. "I didn't say mass this morning," the poem begins, "I stood in the bell tower/ and watched Rosamund, the orphan,/ chase butterflies, her laughter/ rising, slamming into me,/ while the almond scent of her body/ wrapped around my neck like a noose" (39). The imagery of the bell tower and the noose recur here as leitmotivs, as do the images of bells, water, and bread.

"She was twelve," the priest tells us about the child, and that, grieving the loss of her mother, the child asks to come into his bed. He carries her to his room, and watches her exposed body as she sleeps. "I nearly touched her," he confesses. "I prayed for deliverance, but none came./ Later, I broke my rosary./ The huge, black wooden beads/ clattered to the floor/ like ovoid marbles/ and I in my black robe/ a bead on God's own broken rosary/ also rolled there on the floor/ in a kind of ecstasy" (39-40).

This first image of severance from God is reinforced in the memory which follows it:

I remembered how when I was six
Lizabeta, the witch, blessed me,
rocking in her ladder-back chair,
while I drank pig's blood
and ate it smeared across a slice of bread.
She said, Eat, Emilio, eat.
Hell is only as far away as your next breath
and heaven unimaginably distant.
Gate after gate stands between you and God,
so why not meet the devil instead?
He at least has time for people.
When she died, the villagers
burned her house. (40)

The proximity of heaven and earth, faith and uncertainty, sin and redemption, are traversed with great difficulty throughout the poem. The availability of evil, for the priest, is always too close at hand; the arrival at purity, as the witch-woman says, "unimaginably distant." The bell here symbolizes the reverberation of these divisions:

I lay my hand on the bell.
Sometimes when I ring this,
I feel I'll fragment,
then reassemble as some other thing-
a club to beat,
a stick to heave at something:
between the act and the actor
there can be no separateness. (40-41)

"Every weapon has two ends," writes Elaine Scarry, in her powerful tome The Body in Pain. "In converting the other person's pain into his own power, the torturer experiences the entire occurrence exclusively from the nonvulnerable end of the weapon. . . .It does not matter that there is always an extraordinary disjunction between the two levels of need. . ." (1985, 89). Yet, this very disjuncture is what Ai's priest seeks to bridge, or to close off entirely: he wishes to become the weapon -- "a club to beat,/ a stick to heave at something" -- rather than remaining the hand that holds it.

Scarry provides further that, with the crucifixion of Jesus in the New Testament, the "weapon" has only one end, as God's position, represented by his Son, is explicitly recorded as sentient (213). Ai's priest, however, invokes both the human sentience of the scream and the Biblical figure of Joshua, in urging the love of his god:

Lord, I crave things,
Rosamund's bird's nest of hair
barely covered by her drawers.
I want to know that you love me,
that the screams of men,
as loud as any trumpet,
have brought down the gates of stone
between us. (41)

In the second section of the poem, however, it is clear that the priest's pleas for divine intervention have gone unanswered. To this issue, Judith Lewis Herman, in her study of trauma, provides that:

In situations of terror, people spontaneously seek their first source of comfort and protection. Wounded soldiers and raped women call for their mothers, or for God. When this cry is not answered, the sense of basic trust is shattered. . .Thereafter, a sense of alienation, of disconnection pervades every relationship, from the most intimate familial bonds to the most abstract affiliations of community and religion. (51-52)

 

Having called upon and lost his god, the priest turns to the incarnate figure of the child:

and I laid her down.
I bent her legs this way and that.
I pressed my face between them
to smell "Our Lady's Roses"
and finally, I wanted to eat them.
I bit down, her hair was like thorns,
my mouth bled, but I didn't stop.
She was so quiet,
then suddenly she cried out
and sat up;
her face, a hazy flame,
moved closer and closer to mine
until our lips touched.
I called her woman then
because I knew what it meant.
But I called you God, the Father,
and you're a stranger to me. (42)

This estrangement, in the third section of the poem, is not assuaged by sexual possession of the child. The need for reconnection with his faith, and the growing sense of despair, become a compulsion toward death, emblematized in the image of the noose and the bell:

I pull the thick rope
from the rafter
and roll it up.
I thought I'd use this today,
that I'd kick off the needlepoint footstool
and swing out over the churchyard
as if it were the blue and weary Earth,
that as I flew out into space,
I'd lose my skin, my bones
to the sound of one bell
ringing in the empty sky.
Your voice, Lord. (42)

Empty of faith, but possessing a distraught certainty, the priest conceives of his death as "a journey not home/ not back toward the source of things,/ but away from it, toward a harsh, purifying light/ that keeps nothing whole. . .Yet, I know I'd have climbed/ and climbed through seven heavens/ and found each empty" (43). Now, the leitmotivs of the bell tower, bread and water are called upon, once more. The poem ends:

I lean from the bell tower.
It's twilight;
smoke is beginning to gray the sky.
Rosamund has gone inside
to wait for me.
She's loosened her hair
and unbuttoned her blouse
the way I like,
set table,
and prayed,
as I do-
one more night.
Lamb stew, salty butter.
I'm the hard, black bread on the water.
Lord, come walk with me. (43-44)

The annunciation of culpability, as in "The Priest's Confession," can function to secure testimony on both the silent and silenced experiences of trauma. Thus, within the subgenre of persona literature -- and, perhaps, only here -- it is possible to assuage the tensions of innocence and agency. That there may be a chilling empathy or ambivalence toward the perpetrators in these works is an aspect of their effectiveness: violence is notated as evolving not through a stark, singular hatred, but a larger, systematized network of complex, intricately related negations of the individual, interpersonal relations, and the extended community.

In Ai's "The Mother's Tale," for example, a Latina mother addresses her son on the issue of heterosexual relations: she tells of her youth, where she once sliced her husband across the face for dancing with another woman. "I was young, free," she tells him, "But Juanito, how free is a woman?-/ born with Eve's sin between her legs,/ and inside her,/ Lucifer sits on a throne of abalone shells/ his staff with the head of John the Baptist/ skewered on it." For these reasons, the mother instructs, "so my son,/ you must beat Rosita often" (33). Here, the resonance of Salome's desire for the head of John the Baptist links her with Lucifer, recalling the paradigm discussed earlier, of women's sexuality spawning treachery.