07 February 2009
Simple Memories as Poetry
By Ofelia Zepeda
Ofelia Zepeda is a poet and educator born into the Tohono O’odham Indian nation of the American Southwest. She has long championed American Indian languages and wrote A Papago Grammar, which is used by students. In addition to her writings on languages, she is the author of three books of poetry, including Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert and the bilingual Earth Movements/Jewed I-Hoi. She was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1999 for her work. Zepeda teaches at the American Indian Studies Programs at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and is codirector of the American Indian Language Development Institute, which she cofounded.
The question is a basic one: What or who influences my writing? The answer, though, is not easy to arrive at in my case. In the poem, “The Place Where Clouds Are Formed,” the lines “with the back of his gloved hand he wipes the window, / ‘is it coming yet?’” recalls an image and a voice I remember so clearly, as if it happened recently, yet it is a long-ago memory from my childhood. Many of my poems stem from simple memories. Memories caught in time, memories of certain phrases, acts, and movements. These memories surprise me when they come to the surface. It is interesting to me that when I started writing poetry as an adult I easily pulled on bits and pieces of remembered things from my childhood. In my first collection of poetry, Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert, I include an introductory essay that reflects on this phenomenon and my desire to give credit to those things that helped to shape my memories. They are not mine alone but consist of a menagerie of people in my life, in particular, my family. Oftentimes they are a collective memory, but I was the only one who chose to move them into poetry.
I can recount the sounds and shapes that act as the mnemonics for many of the things that help me remember. I attribute much credit to my language: The Tohono O’odham language, spoken in southern Arizona and northern Sonora Mexico, is still an oral language; reading and writing of this language is not a commonplace occurrence. The orality of my language forces me to practice remembering things. As this language moves into the 21st century, it becomes even more imperative that the act of remembering continues, whether it is remembering the sacred rituals and songs of the O’odham or the everyday occurrences and sounds of a people in a special place. All of these remembered things are part of the overall orality of a language, and all contribute on many levels to the creative process, as in my situation. Today I take care in trying to be observant of the simple movements around me. I pay attention to everyday sounds, notice the daily movement of people. I make special notes in my memory of some of these things, never knowing when an event, a word will surface and guide me in creating a poem.
