“La Comida y La Conciencia”: Foods in the Counter-Poetics of Lorna Dee Cervantes

Abstract

In “Shooting the Wren,” from the volume, The Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (1991), Chicana poet/philosopher Lorna Dee Cervantes depicts a dissonant colonial history leading to a personal identity historicized through the native food production of “acorns” (68). The poem is neither a narrative nor a dialogue, but a sentient treatise; it is built up on opaque, minimalist objects placed within a somber ambience of layered temporal frames that extend back in time to foreground a powerful reassertion of the self as a reclamation of something from beyond that has become familiar through ingestion of “China/ Berry, Manzanita, wild board imported from Europe” and “acorns” (68). In reclaiming her personal identity, Cervantes also declaims her poetic identity, one that is coterminous with a reversal of chronological time and that resounds as an assertion of consciousness. Her ancestors’ action of “kneading in a steady procession” highlights the poem’s self-consciousness as it both dramatizes and mimics the making of acorn mush; thus, the preparation of food is central to and advances the making of the poem. Intoning the manual exertions of ancestors who produced food while simultaneously affirming the production of identity as a “fusion of difference,” the poet concocts a multifold and reverberating poetic consciousness from the fruitful ingredients of history.