by Joanna Acevedo
May 2, 2022
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A Light At The End Of The Tunnel: Gloria Gervitz’s Migrations
POETRY REVIEW
Image by DEZALB on Pixabay
Migrations: Poem, 1976-2020 by Gloria Gervitz (translated by Mark Schafer); NYRB Poets; 304 pages; $20
Forty-four years in its process, Migrations is at once poetry, myth, and epic. The lifework of Mexican poet Gloria Gervitz, who is of Ukrainian Jewish heritage, Migrations asks questions, makes allusions, and calls out into the void. Erotic, spiritual, and conversational all at once, Gervitz manages to seek out the core of what are our most essential quanadaries. Moving from free verse to even more abstract forms, this translation from the original Spanish creates an extraordinary new world from the simplest of expressions.
Migrations is a single poem, spanning several hundred pages, which Gervitz has been working on since 1979, in various forms. At times, Gervitz’s work, translated by Mark Schafer, is so abstract as to almost be intangible, at other times, it is shockingly clear. Gervitz is clearly grappling with themes of life, death, memory, and reality throughout the work, as well as the deep strain of what it means to be a woman. She states early in the text, “which portion of reality is the most fragile/mine/or the one in which others see me?” These questions of reality will come up again and again within the poem. On the very next page, the speaker states, “break memory/break me,” perhaps asking the reader or her intended audience to break through the barriers of memory and go to the next, new realm. The concept of breaking through memories or the past is often present in these pages. Memory is transient, ephemeral, and Gervitz uses her poem as a way to break down the boundaries of memory as well as the boundaries of reality, and the boundaries of herself.
She addresses various audiences within the piece, sometimes saying “mother,” while at other times it seems to be a lover. At one point, she says, “you were always the most beautiful/no one else mattered/oh maleficent one," possibly speaking to a lover or sibling, but later in the section, the speaker says, “take pity on me/you who have given me comfort/help me forget you…could it be that you’re my echo?” This doubling implication of the echo is found elsewhere in the poem, and often refers to pairs or multiple women. Groups of women throughout history, and in particular Jewish history, are important themes. Gervitz is acting as a mouthpiece for all of history in this part of the text. It’s hard to forget her as the speaker because her language is so powerful and sensuous. Although the poem has the scope of history behind it, it is difficult to remove the poet's voice from the context that it exists in and think about the message as a whole. Gervitz is myth-making; she is creating a new order for women throughout history. She is rebuilding the world in her own image, on her own terms, in her own language.
Moving from the mythic to the inherently physical, the erotic nature of this poem cannot be denied; sex is a continuous theme throughout, as is self-pleasure. The speaker takes pride in her ability to please herself, and themes of womanhood and self-sufficiency are important and vital to this narrative. Self-pleasure is seen as a beautiful and erotic act, and the speaker takes no shame in it. This is in conjunction with the poem being seen as a sort of landscape of history, a tribute to the spirit of women throughout the last two thousand years. Through sexual power, women can achieve empowerment in a way that is unique to their sex, and Gervitz is celebrating that in her text.
Although the content is very focused at times, the scattered, unevenly distributed nature of the lines that make up most of this poem give it an airiness, a lightness, that makes room for the heaviness of some of these lines. Gervitz asks hard questions which are impossible to answer, such as,“What do the dead remember?” “Outside the rain falls silent/(bless me mother)” directly follows this line, adding beauty and a chilling quality to the preceding entry. By spreading the poem across the pages in this revolutionary way, Gervitz is innovating and creating a form which creates space and room for her difficult language.
In other places, she writes list poems, powerful driving forces which go on for pages, listing various items from around her environment, things she is thinking, and her various observations about the world. They range from the mundane: “the cries of children playing marbles/the cries of children playing soccer/the hard-core gamblers playing with their lives” to the more serious: “remember no pain no gain/remember life is just a game/remember if not now when/remember we’re all on borrowed time/step right up gentlemen step right up/because we’re all going to die.” These list poems are gorgeous in their own right; they are beautiful columns of language, incredible observations on the natural and unnatural worlds, but they hold a center of darkness in them, a dark eroticism, that permeates the entire poem. Death is everywhere, along with memory. Darkness lurks beneath the surface.
Intentionality is another theme that comes up again and again. “Oh what things we do to each other/without knowing what we’re doing,” Gervitz states late in the piece. Life is just a game, and we play, she jokes earlier. Although darkness is a prevalent theme, the word “whiteness” also appears many times. Presuming that for every moment that is dark, there is an equivalent moment of light shining through. Balance is especially important to the poet, and the reader gets the sense that there is some internal counter, some checks and balances keeping everything intact. At the end, however, the final note is one of hope. The final lines, which are forty-four years in the making, are: “And I/who one day/will die/am here/in this moment/that is every moment/I am alive.” This final moment of life, at the end of a poem which reckons so much with life, death, memory, and darkness, lets us believe that perhaps there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And yes, Gervitz is the one to lead us out.
©2022 West Trade Review
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Joanna Acevedo (she/they) is the Pushcart nominated author of the poetry collection The Pathophysiology of Longing (Black Centipede Press, 2020) and the short story collection Unsaid Things (Flexible Press, 2021). Her work has been seen across the web and in print, including in Hobart Pulp, Digging Press, and the Write Launch. She reads poetry for Frontier Poetry, is a Guest Editor at the Masters Review, is Associate Poetry Editor at West Trade Review, and received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2021. She is supported by Creatives Rebuild New York: Guaranteed Income For Artists.
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