The Only Thing That Matters

Epilogue: Border Questions/Border Encounters: Fanny Howe

65 Epilogue Border Questions/Border Encounters: Fanny Howe It’s been nearly twenty years since I wrote these poems, and more than that since I met Fanny Howe, whose haunting , innovative writings were the central inspiration for this collection. What was happening back then—and how did this work come into being? In February 1991, I was twenty-four years old, a lapsed Catholic, and pregnant with my first child. I was enrolled in Fanny’s graduate poetry seminar—a night class in a windowless basement room at San Diego State University. It was the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, the onset of the New World Order, and the brink of the first Gulf War. George Bush (the First) was deploying troops and ramping up the ultimatums while Saddam Hussein was promising the “mother of all battles.” I was caught up in the escalating madness, not just as an activist but because my lover Zahi was from there—from Palestine. 66 While the two of us were embroiled in the turmoil of love and conflict, Zahi’s family in the Holy Land was wondering if they should succumb to the hysteria and don gas masks to prepare for Saddam’s SCUD missiles allegedly loaded with chemical weapons—WMDs that never arrived. At the time, annihilation seemed close, and I was throwing up all day long. “We’re having a war and a baby,” Zahi used to say— among many other thunderous pronouncements that filled the atmosphere of our rented bungalow. Even the landscape was bipolar. The arid geography of the San Diego–Tijuana border region was saturated with evidence of humanity’s most loveless impulses: mile after mile of military bases and car lots, freeways and strip malls. Poor immigrant men were pulled from buses for the crime of having dark skin. Yet beneath this appalling behavior and clutter, the natural world was somehow subversive. The beauty of the place was willfully defiant. Hidden canyons sprouted with colorful flowers, cacti, and other succulents; an evocative, scented fog permeated the Pacific air. It was at this fragile, fertile moment that I met Fanny— a small, greying woman who wore simple, almost monastic clothes and avoided all forms of feminine adornment. Despite her natural modesty and reticence, Fanny was one of the few people in those days who were genuinely interested in my pregnancy. “It’s a miracle!” she used to 67 say. Her sprightly blue eyes would become even more animated . “A baby—growing inside of you!” She seemed a little awed—as if my body were the site of the most unusual paranormal event, or as if I were the Blessed Virgin herself. This was before I knew anything about Fanny’s background , before I knew that she had three grown children of her own from an interracial marriage—a tempestuous love story that had ended in divorce. This was before I knew that she was an incredibly prolific author, the daughter of an illustrious, old Boston family of scholars, writers , and artists. It was before I knew she had rejected her secular, atheist upbringing and converted to Catholicism in the early eighties. In short, I knew nothing about my poetry professor except the hints and whispers I managed to glean inside of that gloomy classroom. One Saturday in January—either right before or right after the United States began its aerial bombardment of Iraq—Zahi and I were at an antiwar protest at Balboa Park and we spotted Fanny in the crowd. We spent the rest of the afternoon marching together, talking politics, and sharing our outrage at the spectacle of bloodlust that had overtaken San Diego. This quick political alliance eventually developed into a long-term friendship and mentorship that has lasted until today. Soon after that encounter, I began reading Fanny’s books, starting with The Deep North—a poetic novel about a privileged but alienated white activist named 68 Gemma who tries to “pass” as black in Boston in the late sixties. On the surface the novel explored America’s dysfunctional obsessions with race, sexuality, and class, but at a deeper level it was about the demolition of the certitude of a fixed identity that comes with exiting the world of white privilege. I related intensely to this subject matter. In the end, the protagonist Gemma suffers a nervous breakdown, loses all of her friends, and disappears...