Forging New Histories through Poetry: Disembodiment, Multiplicity, and Nostalgia in Chicana and Crypto-Jewish Poetics

Abstract: How have female poets constructed identity against restrictive, reified narratives of history? And how can poetics serve as a tool and method in crafting these new narratives of identity? This paper places in conversation crypto-Jewish and Chicana poetry of the late twentieth century to demonstrate the Borderland poet's role in crafting and recrafting identities and histories of displacement, colonial violence, and resistance. Examining the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Miriam Herrera, and Isabelle Medina Sandoval, I reveal a shared poetics of disembodiment and of multiplicities which allow the writers to escape limiting discursive formulations of their lineages. A poetics of disembodiment—an etherealization of the female body from a singular time, place, or identity—allows these writers to craft a self who travels freely through history. As she moves through a restless syntax—a syntax of multiplicities—she gathers identities and stands as curator of her own history. Each poet emerges from a distinct set of material and rhetorical oppressions and so navigates differently the difficulties of forging an alternative lineage which reflects multiracial and multiethnic inheritances in the Borderlands. Yet all of the poets redress imbalances in how their histories have been remembered through the poetic line. My comparative approach unveils the limits and potentials of nostalgia as both a productive and distortive discourse, the place of primary and secondary homelands in diasporic poetry, and the role of poetics in not only reflecting but shaping communities' relationships with their histories.