The Gulf of California By Anita Endrezze (Yaqui) There are two memories of tides: one for the deep blackness that split away from the mother sea and one for sea that found itself in the daybreaks of rivers. Yet it was all one sea tracked by comets and the Elegant Tern, seals in speckled pod-shaped skins, and whales, opening their small eyes when the hands of people drew fish out of the salt. Geologists tell us that the sea split millions of years ago before the Yoemem, Yoremem, Kunkaak, O-Otam curled their tongues around the names of themselves and raised the conch shell to their lips, so that the sound of nature became human, too: kalifornia vaawe Then the sea was measured and divided into leagues. The Spanish ships called it dangerous because the sea tore in two ways, tide and rivers, so they contained it in maps written on dead animal skins with ink made from dried octopus blood Mar de la Kalifornia Golfo de California Then it was named the Vermilion Sea when the red-shelled crabs clicked in the waters. It was the Sea of Cortés because it’s the right of the Conqueror to claim the world in his name. It’s his right to name hunger after himself and to take away rivers and children and to give back the bare bones of life in the Queen’s name. What can you say about men who name the mountains “mother” madre when the worst curse they can shout defiles their mother in the act of creation? Now we call the Gulf of California polluted with the pesticides of fields and the wastes of factories. And the voices of the fin-backed whale, sardines, sea-kelp, anemone, and turtle are quieter, so that we have less memory of the way it was and less hope for the way it will be. In the winter I eat strawberries from Mexico and oranges, sectioned and split apart on my north continental plate. I don’t know much about my relatives picking the fields near Bacum, Torim. I don’t know much about the spiny sea urchin, except that it knows more than I about the sea, the sea that names itself unnameable movable horizon.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 21:48:57 +0000
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