Amazon Island: Revisiting Female Intimacy in Luz María Umpierre-Herrera’s The Margarita Poems

My Amazon order of Luz María Umpierre-Herrera’s The Margarita Poems arrived promptly and in excellent condition as promised. Yet this turned out to be unlike any purchase I had made before. To my pleasant surprise, the book included the following handwritten dedication by Umpierre-Herrera:

To Mary Crow In sisterhood and revolution Luzma.

There was also a handwritten note that accompanied my purchase. The note read:

“Hello–

You may notice that the inscription is to Mary Crow. Mary teaches creative writing at Colorado State University, here in Fort Collins. She is Colorado’s Poet Laureate, and a lovely person.

Enjoy!

Carole

Thank you, again, for your order.”

What at first glance appeared to me as a peculiarly cordial act on the part of Carole the sender assumed greater significance as I began to read through the poetry collection. Carole’s intent to introduce and bring to my attention poet Mary Crow as the addressee of Umpierre-Herrera’s inscription resonated with the collection’s project of fostering connections with other women “In sisterhood and revolution.” Carole’s note to me as well as Umpierre-Herrera’s dedication to Mary Crow comparably reflected The Margarita Poems’ own emphasis on affecting female intimacy.

The poems in this collection overall connect female minority subjects in a common struggle, while allowing for a female communal celebration of difference. They raise awareness of injustices toward women and multifariously express resistance to externally imposed and fixed categories of identity and belonging in the world for women. One poem, for instance, titled “Only the Hand That Stirs Knows What’s in the Pot,” voices a migrant woman’s resistance to complete assimilation in the second home; the poem protests that she is not an assimilatory subject who will be wiped out of her own distinct, individual, and cultural subjectivity. On a different note, “No Hatchet Job” resists the public scrutiny, the forced rehabilitation, and even the glorification of the frenzied female poet, favoring instead the right to choose self-definition. The poems, however, do more than simply offer a plethora of feminist proclamations. That is, Umpierre-Herrera’s call for the right to self-definition is not just untouched, unrevised, classic feminist rhetoric. It covers universal ground and also incorporates a local agenda. It raises awareness of the struggles of marginalized women worldwide while also focusing on the injustices stemming from the colonization of Puerto Rico. Moreover, the poems seek to break free from all national boundaries and do so by opting to conflate the Puerto Rican political struggle with all women’s rights to choose how to define and live their lives. Forging female connections becomes key for revolution.

While Umpierre-Herrera’s earlier work shows a feminist and emancipatory sensibility similar to that in The Margarita Poems, what is most notable about this collection is that Umpierre-Herrera explicitly introduces it as a lesbian text.¹ The poems’ queerness provides a powerful perspective through which to challenge both colonization and heteronormativity. From the onset of the collection, queer female intimacy becomes a recuperative force to combat both oppressive structures. The opening poem, for instance, presents the painstaking yet successful crossing of the “mad river in Ohio” to reach the female lover. The crossing of the river in the poem comes to symbolize the female speaker’s hardship endured from the oppressions of colonization and heteronormativity: it represents, for example, the oppressive influence of “Hopkinses”; that is, the male-centered English literary canon. Yet the lovers nonetheless resist the oppressive forces and are united in the end in an orgasmic celebration of lesbian love and female sexuality. Furthermore, the speaker of the final poem in the collection overtly parallels lesbian love with love for a free Amazon island, resolving to save her lover/island from the colonial and patriarchal chains weighing her down in the ocean. The poem empowers the female subject by disturbing the discourse of colonization and heteronormativity through queer female intimacy and queer resistance.

The expression of female eroticism in Luz María Umpierre-Herrera’s The [End Page...