Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Birth of a Column" In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 221-223). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press. Summer 1976
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
We’re going to have a double editorial page,” said Our Editor, “and we need a column. Who can write one?”
"Oh, I can,” I said airily.
Omigawd.
The beginning is the hardest, as Marx told us; it actually follows from the conclusion. So perhaps if I start from the end, I’ll wind up at the beginning. I trust this is all perfectly clear.
So—the end. Well, like, the end was that I wrote a poem. Yes, that’s exactly what I said—a poem. The editor doesn’t know it yet, but I am already anticipating his respectful and self-restrained reflex when he discovers the awful truth.
“You wrote what?! We already have a poem, a real one, by a real, recognized poet, and you were supposed to do a column! Something political, about the historic significance and meaty theoretical juices and aura of excitement and high purpose of the FSP Conference! Why didn’t you?”
Because it’s too hard, that’s why. God, she knows I tried. I sat at the picnic table in the back yard, pen in hand and typewriter adjacent, and thought and thought and thought. How to telescope into 500 words (500? It takes me 1,000 to order something from the Sears catalog!) an experience that was the absolute pinnacle, the political arch of triumph of my entire life?
The more I mused over the beautiful Tenth Anniversary Conference and the often not-so-beautiful 10 incredible years of infighting and outfighting, joy and fury, and sheer highpowered momentum of feminist rebellion and class struggle— the more I remembered, the more verbose I became in my mind. And I decided (cop-out?) that this was the stuff that books are made on, not columns.
The sun was hot, colorful flowers and shrubs were vividly etched against the white houses around me, planes were droning overhead. Analysis blended into reverie. I basked in the sunshine, staring straight ahead. And then something happened, something spontaneous and impulsive.
This poem happened.
CENTRO DE LA RAZA
silhouetted in the vista from my patio
third-dimensional against a grey-blue sky streaked with silver
almost obscured by the soaring trees, the luxuriant branchesin three gradations of green
the building roots there, high wide solid firm—entrenched
half-encased in shadow, mysterious, commanding
a palace? a resort perhaps, a very important government
edifice, a hospital?
white walls red roof stark chimneys and windows, windows
windows
like a Mediterranean chateau clinging to the misty hillside
the haze envelops it in twilight,
unutterable romance
jesus christ, clara, are you kidding? that dump?
sigh, i know what it really looks like, up front and inside. . .
an old dilapidated ex-schoolhouse
but i view it from a distance
and as everybody knows that lends charm
and distortion too
still it has a living history, born of pain and defiance
and the sheer imagination to DEMAND it
chicanas and chicanos won it, spoils of war,
wrenched from the scared aghast gringo city council
the huge structure is a triumph, a beacon, a souvenir of
struggle
a harbinger of things to come
today el centro—tomorrow el Municipal Building
why not?
there are many planes of reality
i look at it and what i see
is good and true and beautiful, like the man said
el centro de la raza
throbbing with the radiance of the revolution
And that’s the way it was, Comrade Editor, one soft summer afternoon in the life of a willing, if neophyte, columnist. Together, we have no place to go but up.