On my mother’s side of the family, I am five generations removed from any immigration experience. On my father’s side, it’s six. Family ancestry wasn’t a significant topic of conversation on either side, except for an aunt (mother’s sister) and a cousin (father’s niece) who traced family genealogy. What this suggests to me is that families on both sides were shaped more by the land they came to rather than the land they left.
But the past is never really the past. I may not know how Great-Great-Grandmother Wetzel’s Teutonic obsession with cleanliness was passed down through the generations, but when my oldest son bathed his hands in teething biscuit, it was close to a catastrophe in my mind. (The phobia stopped there; he still doesn’t care about messy hands.)
Victoria Maria Castells is a second-generation American; her parents came from Cuba. They, and she, still feel strongly shaped by “the island.” Cuba evokes strong passions, and it’s difficult to find anyone without an opinion. Those passions and feelings often flow freely, and that’s perhaps why she named her new poetry collection The Rivers Are Inside Our Homes. Geography may change, but homeland remains a strong influence.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
Some Tuesday Readings
What Was the Fact? – Jon Askonas at The New Atlantis.
The great libraries of Rome – Fabio Fernandes at Aeon.
A Sonnet on the Transfiguration – Malcolm Guite.
A Ruin – poem by Philip James Bailey at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).
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