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The Justice Dept on Netroots Radio Presents: "When People Gathered Simply to Listen to Fire" [1]
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Date: 2022-12-04
Rosario did not live long into our digital age and certainly never saw or
dreamed screens in every hand, much less flooding every head. Already
it was bad enough, she said, that telenovelas in her beloved México
had displaced both Homer and Scheherazade, not to mention the days
when people gathered simply to listen to fire. A neighbor brings the last
of his garden’s kale, which I take to a ninety-eight-year-old friend
whose eyes well up at the thought of strong kale soup and how very kind
most people are. A woman who sets the example of at least one mitzvah
every day, what she calls the absolute minimum for anyone human.
My neighbor, the one with the kale, is the son of a double immigrant.
His father was a Catalán who decamped to France—guess when—
and later northern California. I’ve wondered if this man was among
the huge crowds that survivors of the Abe Lincoln Brigade
attracted in Berkeley well into the late nineties. Delmer Berg,
last of the twenty-eight hundred Lincolns, died in San Francisco,
February 2016, one-hundred-and-one years old. Today a gardener
raises index and middle finger in front of his eyes, a sign for “Let’s
look at it.” We are both speaking Spanish, but his thinking is it never
hurts to repeat, whatever the case. See what I’m saying?
The Mexican women in my family see beyond the usual senses.
Always have done. My Yucatán Maya-Spanish grandma asking ¿Qué te pasa?
when clearly she already knew. Whatever it was. This year on her birthday,
thirty-five years after her death, a calla dormant in my garden for seven years
sends up a tiny bud that blooms days later on her elder daughter’s birthday.
That daughter, my mother. The calla, my mother’s favorite. Last year we
buried Mami in a basket under dozens of callas tied with hand-woven Mexican
belts. See what I’m saying? I don’t know if the Greek women in my family
have second sight because I don’t know them. But I do know a second cousin
I’ve never met searched the internet for kin of her grandmother Amirza’s
little brother who left their island for America at fourteen, never to be seen
by his family again. This cousin found me via a TV documentary where I
recount the confusions of a mixed-blood descendant of the Mexican revolution.
María Zouni Tsimourtos was born on Imbros, but the family left when
the Turkish government took the last Greek farms in 1964. Our great-
grandmother, mother of Amirza and my grandpa, was named Sultana,
commonly a Turkish name. And here am I, a mestiza’s mestiza who wept
only one of the many times I’ve been called half-breed. I know irony like a
second skin, haphazard skein of blood weaving a cloak of many stories
and tongues. My neighbor, the one who grows kale, spoke French as a
first language, not Spanish. Because his father was raised speaking Catalán,
not Spanish, then wisely favored French safety just across the border
and later put his son in San Francisco’s French American Bilingual School.
Oh, do see this world chasing its million and one tales, sight unseen,
all language common mistranslation yet most precious lost and found.
[END]
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