Another America/Otra America Read online

  Copyright © 1992, 1998, 2022 by Barbara Kingsolver

  Spanish translations copyright © 1992, 1998, 2022 by Rebeca Cartes

  Introduction copyright © 2022 by Barbara Kingsolver

  Translator’s Note copyright © 2022 by Rebeca Cartes

  Cover design by Ann Kirchner

  Cover image © 2021 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York: Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe / Art Resource, NY

  Cover copyright © 2022 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Originally published in hardcover by Seal Press in 1992

  Third Trade Paperback Edition: February 2022

  Published by Seal Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Seal Press name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kingsolver, Barbara, author. | Cartes, Rebeca, translator. | Kingsolver, Barbara. Another America. | Kingsolver, Barbara. Another America. Spanish.

  Title: Another America = Otra América / Barbara Kingsolver ; con traducción español por Rebeca Cartes.

  Other titles: Otra América

  Description: Third trade paperback edition. | New York : Seal Press, 2022. | Bilingual text: English poems and Spanish translations.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021030903 | ISBN 9781541600386 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781541600577 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Kingsolver, Barbara—Translations into Spanish. | America—Poetry. | LCGFT: Poetry.

  Classification: LCC PS3561.I496 A8718 2022 | DDC 811/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030903

  ISBNs: 9781541600386 (paperback), 9781541600577 (e-book)

  E3-20220129-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  INTRODUCTION TO THE 2022 EDITION

  INTRODUCCIÓN A LA EDICIÓN 2022

  INTRODUCTION TO BARBARA’S POETRY, A TRANSLATOR’S NOTE BY REBECA CARTES

  INTRODUCCIÓN A LA POESÍA DE BARBARA KINGSOLVER

  NOTES ON THE POEMS

  NOTAS ACERCA DE LOS POEMAS

  I. THE HOUSE DIVIDED / LA CASA DIVIDIDA PLAZO FIJO

  DEADLINE

  LO QUE ESCUCHÓ EL CONSERJE EN EL ELEVADOR

  WHAT THE JANITOR HEARD IN THE ELEVATOR

  TOQUE DE DIANA

  REVEILLE

  ESCENAS CALLEJERAS

  STREET SCENES

  ESPERANDO LA INVASIÓN

  WAITING FOR THE INVASION

  JUSTICIA

  JUSTICIA

  II. THE VISITORS / LOS VISITANTES REFUGIO

  REFUGE

  A SACCO Y VANZETTI

  FOR SACCO AND VANZETTI

  LAS ENTRAÑAS DEL MONSTRUO

  THE MONSTER’S BELLY

  EN EXILIO

  IN EXILE

  ESCAPE

  ESCAPE

  III. THE LOST / LOS PERDIDOS BIOGRAFÍAS AMERICANAS

  AMERICAN BIOGRAPHIES

  ESTA CASA QUE NO PUEDO DEJAR

  THIS HOUSE I CANNOT LEAVE

  DIEZ CUARENTA Y CUATRO

  TEN FORTY-FOUR

  RETRATO

  PORTRAIT

  ORANG-OUTANG

  ORANG-OUTANG

  POEMA PARA UNA VECINA MUERTA

  POEM FOR A DEAD NEIGHBOR

  POR RICHARD DESPUÉS DE TODO

  FOR RICHARD AFTER ALL

  LA PÉRDIDA DE MIS BRAZOS Y PIERNAS

  THE LOSS OF MY ARMS AND LEGS

  IV. THE BELIEVERS / LOS CREYENTES LLEVANDO EL TIEMPO

  BEATING TIME

  ME PONGO UN NOMBRE

  NAMING MYSELF

  APOTEOSIS

  APOTHEOSIS

  UN SIMPLE MILAGRO

  ORDINARY MIRACLE

  MELANCOLÍA INFANTIL

  BABYBLUES

  EL PAN DIARIO

  DAILY BREAD

  VERTIENTE

  WATERSHED

  POSESIÓN

  POSSESSION

  CEMENTERIO DE FRANKFORT

  FRANKFORT CEMETERY

  V. THE PATRIOTS / LOS PATRIOTAS PADRE NUESTRO QUE AHOGAS A LOS PÁJAROS

  OUR FATHER WHO DROWNS THE BIRDS

  LA MAÑANA EN QUE DESCUBRÍ QUE MI TELÉFONO ESTABA INTERVENIDO

  ON THE MORNING I DISCOVERED MY PHONE WAS TAPPED

  LA HIJA DEL MEDIO

  THE MIDDLE DAUGHTER

  EN LA CIUDAD RODEADA DE GIGANTES

  IN THE CITY RINGED WITH GIANTS

  LA SANGRE REGRESA

  THE BLOOD RETURNS

  RECUERDA: LA LUNA SOBREVIVE

  REMEMBER THE MOON SURVIVES

  LOS OJOS DE TU MADRE

  YOUR MOTHER’S EYES

  DISCOVER MORE

  PERMISSIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ALSO BY BARBARA KINGSOLVER

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  Introduction to the 2022 Edition

  For writers, looking back on our early work is a precarious business. There’s trepidation, always, for the landmines of naivete we’ll step on, along with bursts of relief for a few nice turns of beginner’s luck. But beyond the writing, what looms large is the younger self staring back at us. In reintroducing this book three decades after its first release, I’ve had to sit down and break bread with a woman in her twenties, barely more than a girl, with a passion for writing she had always pursued very privately. At that age I was still nowhere near ready to declare myself a writer, but I did share a few poems with friends, who encouraged me to brave open mic readings, or even submissions. At what point, though, does youthful writing reach publishable maturity, and how can the writer know? It’s usual to look at craft as the defining essential, but my instincts told me something else: a writer needs skill, yes, but also knowledge. I couldn’t see imposing myself on readers unless I had something useful to tell them. Up to that point in life, I really hadn’t. My childhood, strange and dappled as it was, felt like a murky pool without much context or ethical clarity. That was about to change. This collection of poetry, written mostly in the early 1980s, I pushed into the world as my first adult work.

  I’d moved to Tucson, Arizona, as a new college graduate with empty pockets and vague plans, unprepared for the revelations that would soon ink themselves onto my psyche. In my original introduction to this book (published in 1992) I put it this way: “I came to the Southwest expecting cactus, wide open spaces, and adventure. I found, instead, another whole America. Not picture postcards, or anything resembling what I’d previously supposed to be American culture. Arizona was cactus all right, and purple mountains’ majesty, but this desert that burned with raw beauty had a
great fence built across it, attempting to divide north from south. I’d stumbled on a borderland where people perished of heat by day and cold hostility by night.”

  I was learning to call this prickly landscape my new home, paying the dues of young adulthood in all the ordinary ways of love and loss, poverty and menial jobs. But I met some people who were not ordinary. They ran an underground railroad, providing sanctuary to hundreds of Latin American refugees who faced death in their own countries but were legally barred from ours. They understood that what’s legal and what’s morally right are sometimes at odds. Beyond just knowing, they acted, risking their own safety because they couldn’t live with the immoral choice of allowing innocents to die. I found I agreed, and soon was sharing my home with refugees, listening to stories of terrors they’d fled. I was stunned to learn that the brutal regimes in their countries—El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile—were supported and armed by my government. Our taxes helped train and fund the armies that strafed, tortured, raped, and murdered civilians. And our taxes paid the border patrols that stopped these war-weary families, turning them back to fates that really could be worse than death.

  I wasn’t prepared for the knowledge of what one nation will do to another. Knowledge arrived, regardless. I saw things I couldn’t unsee, heard anguished or sometimes eerily detached accounts of what these women and men and children had endured. I fit the pieces together, understanding my own complex position in the brutality that was forcing South and Central American and Mexican people onto this road, to shelter in my house for a while, then furtively move on. I’d used the word “American” all my life without thinking about these other Americans. The national myth I’d signed on to was a hypocrisy. Now that two-edged blade cut deep, slicing off layers of complacency, starting to shape the citizen and artist I wanted to become. I learned that every story has more than one side, and that the real crux of the matter might be the one you haven’t heard yet. I saw how truths that sit comfortably and righteously in one place can be utterly wrong in another. I learned Spanish. I learned to be still and listen.

  If I ever hoped to say something useful, it dawned on me that I should start learning there and then: that the American proverb has many angles, can be told in other languages. That injustice doesn’t disappear just because you look away. That unspeakable things can be survived, and should be survived, because sometimes there is joy on the other side. I learned all these truths from people who had lived them. Some of them became my friends, some disappeared into places I’ll never know. One became the translator of this book.

  The poems collected here, whatever other stories they may tell, are the record of an emerging adulthood. My unsettling political education helped precipitate my emotional coming of age. The book’s first two sections, “The House Divided” and “The Visitors,” engrave individual lives onto a freshly drawn map. “The Lost” confesses to the hopeless depths of the world’s brokenness, balanced by other poems in “The Believers” and “The Patriots” bearing witness to love, solidarity, and redemption. A handful of poems I wrote in the ’90s, as a mother of young children, were added to a subsequent printing, completing this small cosmos.

  Some of the writing refers to political events that now feel historically distant. The people’s rebellions against US-backed dictatorships in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala have all run their courses to different ends, varying from compromised improvement to tragic disappointment. Fledgling human-rights organizations in the US survived massive, intimidating government surveillance during the Reagan years (mine was one of the many phones tapped), and matured into a layered modern movement reaching from immigrant support into broader issues of economic, gender, and racial justice. The covert US operations supporting trade-friendly dictatorships in Latin America eventually moved to other continents, and were supplanted by the biggest game changer of all: NAFTA. With the stroke of a pen, cheap US-grown corn—subsidized with our taxes—was allowed to flood Mexico, immediately bankrupting some two million Mexican farmers and displacing whole populations. In the US, simultaneously (and not coincidentally), anti-immigrant rhetoric rose to fever pitch. With little discussion of cause and effect, we’ve fallen into a hyperbolic cultural shouting match: the bludgeon of xenophobia versus heartbreaking images of immigrant children in cages. And underneath all the noise it’s still lying right there, that ugly, double-edged American sword. Our own tax dollars are helping to push people north to our border and also building walls to turn them back.

  In the years since this book was first published, I’ve become a different writer in a different world. But I’m struck by what hasn’t changed. The ice-water shock of unapologetic racism recorded in “What the Janitor Heard in the Elevator” still delivers the same shudder. The routine humiliations described in “Street Scenes” are the #MeToo moments of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Loss remains an indelible qualifier of life, and so does hope. I stand behind these decades-old poems, because I still believe what I wrote then, to introduce them: that wars are everywhere, little or large, and every life contains its own world of clamor and glory. My home is far from the border now, but I still live among people who are running for their lives and people who rest easy with privilege. And others who work hard to find a place of honest living in between. My way of finding that place is to write one. This is my testament to two Americas, and the places I’ve found, or made, or dreamed in between.

  Barbara Kingsolver,

  January 2021

  Introducción a la edición 2022

  Para los escritores, dar una mirada atrás a nuestros primeros trabajos es un asunto delicado. Siempre hay temor, porque pisaremos las minas terrestres de la ingenuidad, pero también existen resplandores de alivio por los buenos giros de suerte para los principiantes. Pero más allá de las sutilezas de la escritura, se cierne sobre nosotros el yo más joven devolviéndonos la mirada. Al volver a presentar este libro, tres décadas después de su primer lanzamiento, he tenido que sentarme a compartir el pan con una mujer de veinte años, apenas más que una niña, con una pasión por escribir a la que se dedicaba en secreto.

  A esa edad todavía estaba lejos de estar lista para declararme escritora, pero compartí algunos poemas con amigos, quienes me animaron a enfrentarme a las lecturas de micrófono abierto, o a presentar mi trabajo a editoriales. Sin embargo, ¿en qué momento llega la escritura juvenil a la madurez necesaria para publicar, y cómo puede saberlo el escritor? Es habitual ver el trabajo del artesano como la definición esencial, pero mis instintos me dijeron algo más: un escritor no necesita solo habilidad, sino que también conocimientos. No podía interesar a los lectores a menos que tuviera algo útil que decirles. Hasta ese momento en mi vida, no lo tenía. Sentía que mi infancia, extraña y salpicada de claroscuros, era como una piscina turbia sin mucho contexto o claridad ética. Eso estaba a punto de cambiar. Esta colección de poemas, escritos en su mayoría a principios de los ochenta, fue de seguro mi primer trabajo adulto.

  Me mudé a Tucson, Arizona, con un título universitario, los bolsillos vacíos y planes indefinidos, sin estar preparada para las revelaciones que estaban a punto de grabarse en mi mente. En mi introducción original a este libro (publicado en 1992) lo dije de esta manera: “Llegué al suroeste esperando cactus, amplios espacios abiertos y aventura. Encontré, en cambio, otra América. Ni postales ni nada parecido a lo que antes suponía que era la cultura estadounidense. Arizona era cactus, claro que sí, y la majestad de las montañas púrpuras, pero en este desierto que ardía con una cruda belleza, se había construido un gran cerco que trataba de dividir el norte del sur. Me había topado con una tierra fronteriza en donde la gente perecía de calor durante el día, y de una fría hostilidad por la noche”.

  Estaba aprendiendo a llamar a este paisaje espinoso mi nuevo hogar, pagando el precio de la edad adulta en las formas comunes de amor y pérdida, pobreza y trabajos mal pagados. Pero conocí a algunas personas que no eran comunes. Habían organizado un ferrocarril subterráneo, proporcionando santuario a c
ientos de refugiados latinoamericanos que huían de la muerte en sus países de origen, pero que tenían bloqueada la entrada a los Estados Unidos. Comprendían que, aquello que es legal y lo que es moralmente correcto, a veces están en conflicto. No solo lo sabían, sino que lo llevaban a la práctica, arriesgando su propia seguridad, porque no era posible vivir con la opción inmoral de permitir la muerte de inocentes. Descubrí que estaba de acuerdo, y de pronto me encontré compartiendo mi casa con refugiados, escuchando las historias del terror del que habían huido. Me sorprendió saber que los regímenes brutales de sus países, como El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, contaban con el apoyo y las armas de mi gobierno. Nuestros impuestos habían contribuido a entrenar y financiar a los ejércitos que acribillaban, torturaban, violaban y asesinaban a sus ciudadanos. Y nuestros impuestos pagaban a las patrullas fronterizas que detenían a estas familias cansadas de la guerra, devolviéndolas a destinos que podrían ser peores que la muerte.

  Yo no estaba preparada para comprender el alcance de las crueldades que una nación puede concebir para imponerse sobre otra. Pero esto cambió cuando vi cosas que no podía dejar de ver; oí relatos angustiados, inquietantes, distantes, de lo que estas mujeres, hombres y niños habían soportado. Uní los pedazos, comprendiendo mi propia compleja posición ante la brutalidad que estaba obligando a sudamericanos, centroamericanos y mexicanos a emprender este camino, a refugiarse en mi casa por un tiempo, y luego seguir adelante sigilosamente. Había usado la palabra “americano” toda mi vida sin pensar en estos otros americanos. El mito nacional con el que había vivido era una hipocresía. Ahora la hoja de dos filos me había herido en lo profundo, cortando capas de complacencia, empezando a dar forma a la ciudadana y artista en la que quería convertirme. Aprendí que cada historia tiene más de una cara, y que la verdadera esencia del problema podría ser la que aún no has escuchado. Vi cómo las verdades justas y cómodas que se sitúan en un lugar pueden estar completamente equivocadas en otro. Aprendí español. Aprendí a quedarme quieta y escuchar.