Memory Tricks: Re-Calling and Testimony in the Poetry of Alicia Gaspar de Alba1

In Alicia Gaspar de Alba's second collection of poetry, Gardenias for El Gran Gurú and Other Poems, the act of remembering is central. The function of memory — at once elegiac and regenerative — is explored in the work of Gaspar de Alba, principally in her recent poetry but also involving important intertextualities with earlier pieces, such as the poem "Domingo Means Scrubbing" and the story "Malinche's Rights." The notion of "re-calling," deployed bisemically, refers to the act of remembering in the conventional sense and also, more importantly perhaps, connotes a more active sense of re-naming, re-assembling the past, both personal and collective. Motifs of death, loss, absence, pain, ritual, and lesbian eroticism (which recur with regularity in Gaspar de Alba's oeuvre) are traceable in a number of emblematic texts. In this most recent work, it is the inscription of the father's death that allows the poet's voice to come into being, to testify, to write and re-member his dangerous presence, and to embrace what his passing means to her: "When my father dies / the stories I waited for will blossom."