ADAMANTIA, AN INTERMITTENT SEARCH FOR WORDS
Inmaculada Lara-Bonilla
What follows is the adaptation of a text read at the 2013 Imagining America national conference, a gathering of scholars, artist, and designers from all corners of the United States under the title “A Call to Action: Reflection, Inspiration, and Change." The conference was an idyllic celebration of democracy, of reaching, of creativity, and of impassioned activism. My presentation was developed in the frame of a flexible conference format, deviating both from the positivist research paper using verifiable data to demonstrate a hypothesis, and the presentation carefully showcasing the achievements of a socially engaged project. My piece was, in face, a small collection of self-referential micro-stories that were assembled as a brief narrative collage. I shared my thoughts and stories very much in the oral tradition: by telling them around a cable (a " roundtable"), without visual aids, PowerPoint, poster boards, or any other three-dimensional objects other than my voice.
The roundtable I had convened, '' Writing and the City," was about our relationship to writing, reaching, and urban environments, three interconnected passions that were crossing paths for me again in an interesting manner. I was writing and planning the roundtable within the first month after having joined Hostos Community College, CUNY. It was a moment of transition and transformation: transition from one institution to another, from one city to another, from several communities to several others. It was a time for change in ways that I could not anticipate, lee alone understand. I only knew that it was a time of intense chinking and planning, of inspired action, and renewal. Just what conference promised co address. Clarifying my relationship to the threesome "writing-education-cities" at this particular crux was nor easy trying made me realize char his one was one more moment in a series of attempts, that there had been many other times when I had wanted to say, d raw, or dance how these three passions fed each other, how I found them intertwined, over and over, in the most surprising and delightful compositions.
Below is my brief collage, made up of some of these threads, braided together with the driving desire of a search I have come to call Adamantia. Adamantia makes me think of the roots of my interest in language and reaching as they connect co experience and to the preservation of legacy, but also as they connect to creativity, fiction, and the future of dreams. Adamantia reminds me of the beauty and imagination that often trans form moments of reaching and of writing into feasts.
ADAMANTIA
Adamantia is a region. It is an archipelago, to be precise. It is the archipielago and the map. A moving map, it is also the conversation with the map. Adamantia is a delicious search for stories. Adamantia is the interrupted, believing, and adamant search for words.
MONICA
Madrid. Six years old. While walking to school with my gloomy neighbor, I come up with the perfect-I chink- idea to cheer her up and I make a joyous but serious proposition: "When we grow up a little, we should move together to an apartment filled with the little colored sheets of paper we get from the priming shop." A skeptical silence follows. "We’ll stack them up all the way to the ceiling and invite our friends over," I elaborate.
My child's tongue cannot articulate in any other way what I imagine could happen in the colorful place where we can write together, or draw, or dance and laugh as we wish. Monica glances over her shoulder and keeps walking by my side as the light turns.
THE WAR ANDTHE TRAIN
As children, my brother and I would repeatedly ask our grandfather to cell us the story of the train. We called it indistinctly the "story of the train" or "the story of the.: war," convinced that the war was primarily a story, and that the story of the train and the story of the war were one and the same, our only real war story.
The codified tale went like this: During the Civil War, my grandfather and his friend were taken prisoners and huddled on into a train with dozens of others. On its way co Seville, the train made a stop in the woodsy mountains. The two friends asked the sergeant overlooking their car if they could step off briefly to relieve themselves. They jumped off and hid immediately. While the train, full of soldiers and prisoners, scarred again, they too ran and ran and kept running without a stop or a look back for hours. They saw a house and a woman by its door. She invited them to come in and fed them and the friends stayed with their female savior and her husband for a few days. Then. they hid and walked for weeks. They hid and walked more than two hundred kilometers co return home, a trek that took several months. Nobody in their families knew where they were. Peasants would lodge them over night, clothe them in peasant cloches for protection, and feed them along the way.
Grandpa never said whether he was being transported to a death squad or to a different front. We sensed the murkiness in his silence and never asked. We would simply request, over and over, the story of the train. It was better than a movie and perhaps this time we would learn something new.
Lacer, as a teen, I wanted to know more about the war and muster the courage to gently prod my grand mot hers regularly. We spoke about their youth and adulthood before and during the war years. I listened, asked questions, wrote stories, and recorded their voices. Today, I ask my students to provoke similar conversations with their elders. I fear that the stories can be lost at the airports, in the streets and stairs, under the rails of the subway lines.
DETROIT
As an undergraduate student, I am invited to visit the United States and I see my first North American city. To me, Detroit, Michigan, looks like a bombed-out, besieged conglomerate of highways under a curfew. All I can think about is that this is the closest I have ever been to a war. Bur I also feel this is very different from my grandpa rems' war, chat the sight is asking me to understand something about the unending rawness of U.S. urban struggle, ocher missing pieces of history, thing char I had nor learned or imagined from across the ocean.
During the same months, I discover the discipline of "creative writing," which is taught and practiced at my new college. I stare writing furiously under the influence of central Michigan 's frozen air. I daydream of never stopping the practice, of sharing it, and of someday passing on the joy of this discovery through teaching.
WOMEN WRITING MEMOIR
After several years and several other cities, I encounter another post-industrial American landscape with its own share of economic and social depression. It is Syracuse, New York. From the college on top of the hill, the community centers, and the deserted winter streets, I design a graduate course to ''engage” myself and my self-segregated students with the city that we live in, bur are far from. I want us to listen, to learn, and co record, ins pi re, and understand stories by women who had migrated from Latin America, the inverted mirror. I invite women living in the West Side of city (the area that most Latinos/as share) to write and publish their memories of travel, of changing places, and of anything else they like. The women I approach willingly and enthusiastically share their writing with us and, lacer, with an entire academic community. We publish a small book with their texts, and they perform at a public reading in Spanish, their native language, on the main campus. Everything is a success, bur I am not satisfied. I wonder what should come next.
CASITAS
In hindsight, I don't think I ever abandoned that idea chat Monica didn't like or understand as a child (would she now?). I continue fantasizing about a place full of colored sheets all the way to the ceiling, a home of a different learning experience and a different language. A place inhabited by art, writing, and community. A place for dialogue and dancing, a place for reading and story-telling. I begin envisioning La Casita Cultural Center, a new public space for Latino/a and Latin American art and culture for the college and the community alike. After two years of hard work, the center opens and run s with success. Looks like a success, sounds like a success, but, again, I it takes me some rime co find the words chat speak about it and about what may be missing.
POEM
In 2011, I publish a poem that talks about the city- Syracuse-about writing, and about teaching. It's called "T rails/ Senderos." Down its lines march the trains, the stories of people chat I know and char I don't know, the women who migrate, my own migrations and love for words and for teaching , the mystery of the cities, and the strange language that may speak to the connection of it all: "The imagined voice/ Echoes among the trees,/ While the grunting train lulls/ Something beyond and over the rooftops" (Lara-Bonilla 2011).
RECLAIMING IDENTITY
Reclaiming Identity is the rid e of a book I read while writing research in Latina women's auto biography. Three years later, chose two words haunt me. I send emails, write justifications, use what seems like every word and every silence I have to explain that, although I could be, I will not be who I don't think I am; to clarify, to reclaim char I am a seeker of knowledge, the sort of inspirer-writer-curator-re searcher-in-the-world-educator for dreaming. I look for the language to say this in the city, in the classroom, in the conference room, at the library, on the page.
FICTIONS
A student who I have known for over ten years, and in two different cities, has developed a substance addiction. He seeks my help and support. He is enrolled in my creative writing class and has moments of brilliance, increasing absences, and sometimes thoughtful, sometimes meandering writing. I can only explain my personal theory of fiction, which is somewhat of theory of dreaming, of writing, of living, of seeing, and of composing the future. It is a way of imagining, a strange oncology. I cry to explain how I believe char our wishes may be fictions, your fictions guiding scars, and how your guiding stars may protect you and make your fictions and dreams come true, the matter of real life.
NEW YORK CITY
Manhattan is a mecca where millions are said to pursue their dreams, their fictions. However, I find in the South Bronx the door that unlocks the complex past and present of the local city. The building where I reach is filled with colorful pieces of arc all almost the way up to the ceiling. Since the first time I walk into it, they speak of an endless opportunity to create, learn, and inspire. It houses a creative and intellectual community committed to teaching and to the city. If only Monica could see... But this city's story is yet to be told, the fiction to be released.
REFERENCE
Lara -Bonilla, Inmaculada. "Trails"/ "Senderos." Stone Canoe 5 ( 2011): 246-7.