Gregory Orfalea: California Poets Part 7, Two Poems

Gregory Orfalea

July 1st, 2024

California Poets: Part VII

Gregory Orfalea

Two Poems

AT TARZANA PARK WITH LUKE, AGE 3

There is a good wind up

Over the long grass of the outfield

And the hardpan of three infields

Soon to crack.  Dear youngest,

I was a boy here, sort of a boy,

A thirteen boy, which is the beginning

Of a wind called girl,

The beginning of hair on the chin

And the voice of a frog

And a look always to outfield.

Who are these other parents?

Who are these Mexican nannies?

They seem to belong here more than I

Who has come from the other side

Of the continent to surprise

The survivors of this family.

They smile, as parents do

In a sandbox, or lady from Michoacan.

One couple is from Georgia and probably

Longs for Georgia as I long for here.

But I am here with you,

My son, who have not been here

Before.  And that seems to be

The way of the world:  go away

If you are to multiply.  You can

Go home to the eight-foot baskets

Without nets or nets rusting.

You can go home—to the wide,

Empty outfield.  But setting home

Is the daughter or son.

I return your popsicle, Luke,

From the ice cream man in teal van

Named Lutfi who played “Lullabye

And Goodnight” through the aging streets

Of the Valley and whose scarred eye

Shines from a home he will not see again.

You give it back: “I took it already,

Dad.”  The past.  The first past

Tense from your lips!

Grains of sand funnel through your hand.

SAGE

Smell of sage, my youth—

Where have you gone all these years

In the sodden East?

Interview

September 25th, 2024

California Poets Interview Series:

Gregory Orfalea, Poet, Novelist, Editor

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: You’ve dedicated a substantial amount of your career towards writing well-researched non-fiction. I’d like to start with your book on the 551st battalion and its engagement at the Battle of the Bulge. You have a very personal connection to the event as your father was actually a part of the unit. Was this history often discussed in your family prior to the writing of the book and to what extent did its research and composition change the way you understood those events?

GO: I learned a lot about my father’s brave, edgy personality by studying the fate of the 551st, which was thrown into the meat grinder at the Bulge, pretty much destroyed and taken apart without honors, its records apparently burned in the field or purged.  It was the source of great satisfaction that the book helped secure a 50-year-late Presidential Unit Citation for the few survivors of the 551st at the Pentagon in 2000.  Historically, the book gave, I think, credible evidence that Bastogne was not the central crucible of the Bulge.  General Patton’s tanks melodramatically relieved elements of the encircled 101st Airborne there.  But Bastogne on the southern tier was a sideshow.  The Germans did not want Luxembourg!  They were headed northwest to Antwerp to cut off the main Allied supply port.  My father’s unit, the 551st, were trucked to the northern shoulder of the Bulge, right where the worst and most important strategic action was.  They were, in fact, the spearhead of the whole Bulge counteroffensive.  They should not have been forgotten.  It was my great privilege to remember them.  And him.

DG: Though you’ve lived in other places, your roots remain deeply tied to Los Angeles. Some years ago you wrote a series of essays about the city that were published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and these were subsequently collected in 2009, becoming Angeleno Days. The essays deal with the joys and difficulties of living in this metropolis, along with your return, the need to reconcile the LA of your childhood with the one you’d come back to. More importantly, the pieces also touch upon your experiences as an Arab-American and the more-than 400,000 fellow citizens that call the city of Angels home. It’s been thirteen years since the publication of that book. What continues to make this landscape special and how have Arab-Americans contributed to its development and improvement?

GO: Angeleno Days appears to be one of my more popular books, to my surprise, as essays don’t normally sell.  It went into several printings.  Hearing nothing but abuse from Washingtonians about L.A. over the years, I wanted to help right that ship.  About Arab Americans, see below.  (I do think the largest population of such people in the United States now in my hometown is uniquely poised alongside Jewish Americans—as we were growing up in Tarzana—to interact politically more equitably and fruitfully in Los Angeles than New York.)

DG: What’s your favorite place in Los Angeles?

GO: Topanga Cove, where I swim from the lifeguard station to the rock jetty.  That is, after some hours writing at TLC (The Living Café) on Topanga Canyon Boulevard just down from the pig-in-the-sky, then a late lunch at my favorite fishery in Los Angeles—the Reel Inn, across from the Cove.

DG: Let’s focus on the achievements of Arab-Americans in general. In 2005, you wrote The Arab Americans: A History, a comprehensive study of these diverse communities across the US. The book did much to dispel myths and misconceptions, but these remain. What do you feel are the most misunderstood aspects of this linguistic community—this marker of identity that stretches from Mauritania in Western Africa, to Egypt, up to Syria, and back down to Oman?

GO: The great Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani said once about the Arabic-speaking peoples, “You are taken for a species of wolf.”  I am afraid concerning Netanyahu and his ilk, that is the case, certainly in Gaza.  What happened on Oct. 7, 2023, to 1,200 innocent Israelis was, of course, wrong and indefensible.  But what followed with the deaths of 41,000 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians, and many children and women, was horrific, and the attacks on hospitals, shelters, universities almost beyond belief.  Both sides are guilty of war crimes.  I wrote the history of my community in the United States with the assumption that filling a gap in the record of this poorly understood ethnicity would help.  It did for a while.  Then it didn’t.  About ethnic identity—and identity politics and sociology in general—I am going through a deep reevaluation.  What is important about us is what unites us as Americans—not to mention as human beings.  We grieve; we hunger; we hope; we despair.  We try to love and come up short.  We love and lose and with more compassion love again.  We exhort and praise and even at times rebuke our God or look for him everywhere.  The ethnic stripe pales beside the importance of our humanity and when we lead with an ethnicity or gender we risk leaving behind the wonder and complexity of our up-and-down soul.

DG: Let’s talk about your teaching career. You’ve taught at several universities and directed the writing program at the Claremont Colleges. What do you love most about teaching and how has it influenced the work you do?

GO: Teaching allowed me the pleasures of being a father again (we raised three sons) with not quite the responsibilities!  There’s no magic formula for writing, only hard work, though it is not broom pushing.  Or shouldn’t be.  The demands are not from the body, but the soul.

DG: I’d like to return to California and talk about a book you spent more than twelve years writing, Journey to the Sun: Junipero Serra’s Dream and the Founding of California. Serra was certainly an important figure in the founding of California though he remains a controversial one. Vandalization of statues in Carmel, for example, demonstrate these divisions. You stated that Serra’s sainthood is deserved. Why is this ultimately the case and are there things, in your view, for which he cannot get a pass?

GO: When I began the 12 years of work on the Serra biography, I saw him in the politically correct light, tainted as a colonizer.  But in the final analysis (though the book does not take a stand), it seemed to me he was a saint who suffered much for the Indians of California and Mexico, defending them as a good civil rights lawyer would in many cases.  Often, he was at odds with the Spanish military, to the point of dragging himself over 1,000 miles back to Mexico City to get the Commandante fired for not cashiering molesting soldiers.  Consider this:  when Serra and Portola came across “good, sweet water” out of San Diego, and Portola wanted to water the horses, bathe in the pond, and let his soldiers drink from it, Serra forbid it because, as he saw it, this was the Indians’ drinking water and it should not be disturbed.  Does that sound like someone guilty of genocide?  Would someone without great compassion for the indigenous have demanded the release of Kumeyaay leaders who took three Spanish lives rebelling in San Diego?  And later welcomed the murderers as leaders for the missions?  I called it the Gospel of Love and that is exactly what it was.  There are very few American historic figures as badly misrepresented as Padre Junipero Serra.  Serra was not perfect.  Though he did not force the indigenous into the missions as is often erroneously claimed, he used the whip and sometimes the stocks as corporal punishments for rape and theft which, by the way, were meted out to Spanish soldiers, too.  This was wrong and I say so plainly.  In my opinion the goodness of Serra, his great love and sacrifice for the American Indian, outdistanced that flaw.  A paperback version of Journey to the Sun is coming out on Georgetown University Press. It contains in a new last chapter about the sainthood controversy and the ensuing wild iconoclasm.  If a leader needs perfection to be enstatued, there will be no statues in the land.  There was even an attempt after the murder of George Floyd to destroy the statue of Abraham Lincoln behind the U.S. Capitol, dedicated in the 19th century by none other than the great civil rights leader Frederick Douglass!  This is the sort of absurdity—and anti-historicity—with which we live today.

DG: In 2004, you edited Up All Night: Practical Wisdom from Mothers and Fathers, an anthology of works related to parenting. As a parent yourself, what were things you learned from working on the book and what are things you wish more parents knew?

GO: I came away from Up All Night with greater respect than ever for the essential courage of parents.  So many of their testimonies just blew me away, especially the first, “Soon, Very Soon” from a father of a child with severe autism.  I think what JD Vance should have said instead of castigating single women in the most insensitive, unfair way is that we are becoming an increasingly self-absorbed society, what with selfies (the term itself reflects that absorption), the abyss of social media (so anti-social), and near-deification of self-actualization and self-expression.  Parenthood is difficult; it pulls you out of yourself in sometimes jarring ways.  But the pleasures are akin to the pleasures inherent in touching Original Love. I mean the Creator.

DG: Let’s return to the Arab-American experience. In 2001, you edited A Century of Arab-American Poetry. Though Khalil Gibran remains hugely popular in the states, his marvelous work is only the surface of this great poetic tradition. Who are some of the poets you love the most and whose work should people be reading?

GO: Joseph Awad, a truly great lyric and meditative poet, was in a sense unveiled in Grape Leaves.  He had 10 children.  Does this link to my previous answer?  But to be frank I don’t read much contemporary poetry.  I got tired of its vapidity and self-importance and cryptic dullness.  The po-biz ruined poetry.  Forced people to be different to the point of obscurity, or, the opposite—attitudinal and tonal uniformity. 

DG: Are there Arabic words or phrases that you feel are impossible to translate into English?

GO: Khaaye.  Impossible to translate.  Means something like ultimate relief or peace.

DG: Let’s turn to poetry. Apart from The Capital of Solitude—a full collection of roughly 103 pages—which you released in 1988, you’ve published very little verse, even though that was precisely the genre of the first title you put out. Can you talk about the development of the book and how your compositional approach differs when you write poetry? And is there perhaps another collection in the works?

GO: I do not quite know how to explain that after the publication of The Capital of Solitude, my poetry went, in a sense, underground.  It didn’t have to.  From it, “Arab and Jew in Alaska” was the first poem by an Arab American to appear in the Norton Introduction to Poetry.  Perhaps I was simply ducking the din of hundreds of poets at conventions seeking not illumination, but jobs (for a while, I was one).  Too, the family gun tragedy stopped up a lot.  After all these years, my second collection is now done, California Rain.  It begins with a long poem that appeared in Poet Lore, “What Kind of Day Was It?” about the shootings.  It ends with another long poem about a lemon grove along the sea on which I have meditated since the trees were saplings, “The Old Grove.”  It deals with the death of 23 people in the Santa Barbara mudslide of 2018 following the great Thomas fire.

DG: In 2013, as part of the University of Iowa International Writers Program and the US State Department, you visited Armenia and Turkey. What were your impressions of the countries, which writers did you meet, and what were some of the projects accomplished?

GO: The trip to Turkey and Armenia was a tremendous gift.  I was privileged to be alongside great writers doing unusual things.  In Istanbul, Peter Balakian conducted a public reading, something quite rare in Turkey for an Armenian writer, of the history of the genocide.  Gish Jen read a beautiful passage of a husband and wife awakening in bed with all their fears to confront the day.  We were given a tour with a Turkish dissident of old buildings in Istanbul with Armenian markings not quite obliterated.  Armenia itself is a poor, small, utterly charming country.  We read to large crowds there everywhere we went.  I felt a special attachment.  We are told that the name “Orfalea” may originate in the eastern Turkish town of Urfa, from which the Armenians of our family may have fled to Homs in northern Syria after rumbles in the 19th century of what was to come.

Discovering there are hardly any Armenians left in Urfa, but that it is the site today of half a million Syrian refugees from a civil war who went the opposite way of my original family—south to north—I began a novel.  Wonder and Shame is about a disillusioned American who goes to the land of his ancestors, rescues a deaf-mute seamstress in Damascus he had loved as a youth, and escapes with her to Urfa.  There he fashions a baseball team of Syrian orphans.  After nine years’ work, it is done; I think it is the best thing I’ve managed to do, with all proper hubris.

DG: What are you reading or working on at the moment?

GO: Working on a memoir-travel book, Senior Rider, about the drive across America I took in summer 2023 with old friends.  We took the northern route, the so-called Trump Belt, through West Virginia, southern Ohio, Indiana, rural Wisconsin to fish with my old writer friend John Hildebrand, through Sinclair Lewis’ hometown of Sauk Center, Minnesota, then North Dakota, Montana, Utah.  Deathly sick in Vegas.  Limped into California through the Mojave Desert, thence home to Santa Barbara with my middle son Andy.  Writing it flat out, as if I’d leave this world tomorrow.

Author Bio:

Gregory Orfalea is the author of ten books, the latest of which is Journey to the Sun: Junipero Serra's Dream and the Founding of California (Scribner). His first collection of poems, The Capital of Solitude, won the Ithaca House First Book Prize. His second, California Rain, which emerged decades later, contains the two poems published in California Poets: Part VII. Eight years in the making, his novel about Syrian refugees will be published by Luminor Books in 2026, under the title Wonders and Shame. He has taught literature, writing, and Middle Eastern American Literature at, among others, Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, the Claremont Colleges, and Westmont College. His wife and he live in Santa Barbara; they have three sons and a granddaughter named Maya.