We all carry them - stories. And our stories, like memories, have a way of attaching themselves to the unexpected - a song, a smell, an activity, or a poem - taking us back on unplanned visits, to places long ago filed away.
And so it was for me one Saturday afternoon when I happened to hear this poem on West Coast Live, and was instantly pulled back to my mother's kitchen, where her recipes were as much about food as they were about life; where the telling of her stories was always easier when her hands were busy cutting, stirring, or blending. How much of my own story was shaped while she handed me the secrets to her cooking.
In this poem, Mt. Shasta poet and teacher, Maria Elena Fernandez, paints a picture of her family's history - rich, vivid and condensed as only a poem can do - told by her mother to put the poet at ease with the often daunting task of making tamales.
Maria Elena will be reading her poem and talking about the richness in telling and gathering our stories at the storytelling booth at our third annual A Taste of Tamales by the Bay on Sunday, April 26, 2009 at Fort Mason. Come by and share a memory, food tradition, recipe, and the story it tells.
!Buen Provecho!
Making Tamales
She tells me stories to put my hands at ease,
how in 1910 Abuelita Inez y sus hermanas
hid beneath the floorboards of their home
for a month, listening to soldiers drink
above their heads, waiting until estos hombres
had drunk themselves into sleep
before they came out to eat...
Mama's graceful fingers wrap husks
around the bundles of meat and cornmeal
in smooth rhythm unbroken by the addition
of more meat or ground red chile
to the pot of mole between us.
Y como Tia Lupe tried seven times
to bring her family to Los Angeles,
and seven times was caught by her pinche borracho husband.
Pero su hija, Susana, living in San Jose,
recently became a citizen...
Our fingers work and weave fragments of lives
into the meal for El Año Nuevo.
They will resurrect in ribbons of steam from heaped plates of
arróz, frijoles, y huevos con chorizo--Tia Lupe,
Abuelita Inez, y los otros, with us again.
I am up to my elbows in masa, hands sticky with mole,
stained red beneath the nails.
We laugh at my clumsy bravado, those sagging creations
propped up against hers in the tall aluminum steamer,
and closing the lid, Mama says,
"No te preocupes porque the heat will make them firm."
Maria Elena Fernandez
2008
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