Our intersecting crises—COVID-19, the struggle for racial justice sparked by the murder of George Floyd, mass unemployment, and, most important, the crisis of political imagination that enables all of this—remind me of a lesson I share in my book Unforgetting: that US literary culture is divided by a big barricade. On one side are writers like the late Leonard Nathan, the prolific poet and UC Berkeley professor who taught us to respect and analyze the integrity of the poem as an autonomous form free of worldly influences. As a working-class Salvadoran kid from San Francisco’s Mission District, I was at first besotted with the ascot-wearing formalist poet’s booming voice and emphasis on structure and rhetoric.
Then he deployed his booming voice against me, scoffing at the poet I chose for my final paper in his class: Roque Dalton, the guerrillero who would become the greatest poet of my parents’ native El Salvador. He termed Dalton—a revolutionary poet loved by Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortázar, and other Latin American greats—a “pamphleteer.”
Despite Nathan’s warnings, a poetic image from my childhood visits to pre-revolutionary El Salvador powered me forward: my cousin Adilio nervously pulling out a plastic bag containing Dalton’s poetry and some political pamphlets from a hole he’d dug in the ground beneath an almond tree. Adilio’s nervousness and determination were in part due to the fact that his mom had planted the tree next to the brick wall their house shared with a neighbor, a treasury policeman who was also a member of the escuadrones de la muerte.
Ever since Adilio showed me those poems, I’ve stood on the other side of the barricade, with poets and writers like the late June Jordan, who was Nathan’s colleague. Jordan taught me to respond to this dearth of the imagination by destroying the illusory distinction between the poetic and the political, between literature and a life of passionate engagement with the crises of our times—a life like those of the writers I love.
The Fire Next Time—James Baldwin (1963)
There’s much to love and emulate in this book, but what’s most important, given our current condition, is Baldwin’s emphasis on what we need so urgently yet lack so seriously: a connection between word and deed, between the spirit and the letter of action—in his case, the action of congregating with others in shared belief: “I have never seen anything...
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contributor
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Roberto Lovato is an educator, journalist, and writer based at the Writers Grotto, in San Francisco. Lovato is the author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas (HarperCollins) and a cofounder of #DignidadLiteraria, the movement advocating for equity and literary justice for the more than sixty million Latinx persons in the US. A recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center, Lovato has reported on war, violence, and terrorism in Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, France, and the United States. Until 2015, Lovato was a fellow at UC Berkeley’s Latinx Research Center, and he recently finished a teaching stint at UCLA. His essays and reports from across the United States and around the world have appeared in Guernica, The Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Der Spiegel, La Opinión, and other publications.
