All Yearning for the Same Thing

Scene: Is it Ortiz Cofer, or Cofer?

Cofer: I find that if I’m in an anthology with Latinos, it’s Ortiz Cofer. If it’s an anthology with Anglos, it’s Cofer. So it depends. There’s no hyphen.

Scene: In the Masterpieces of Latino Literature, you’re listed right after Pablo Neruda. Alphabetical good fortune, or are the poetry gods making a statement?

Cofer: I think it’s just my good fortune to be placed in such good company. Occasionally I’ll get an anthology where I’m next to Edgar Allan Poe. And, you know, as long as I don’t have to go out drinking with him, it’s fine.

Scene: One of my favorite of your early poems is “Latin Women Pray.” Do you have it near you? Could I get you to read it?

Cofer: Um, I have it in a book here, if you could just wait a second. I’m not a great organizer, so my books are not in alphabetical order. Yes, it appears in a book of essays called A Woman in Front of the Sun. Let’s see if I can find it.

Scene: It’s on page 116.

Cofer: Oh, thank you. You want me to read it?

Scene: Yes.

Cofer: Over the phone?

Scene: Yes.Cofer: Okay.Latin women prayIn incense sweet churchesThey pray in SpanishTo an Anglo GodWith a Jewish heritage.And this Great White FatherImperturbableIn his marble pedestalLooks down uponHis brown daughtersVotive candles shining like lustIn his all seeing eyesUnmovedBy their persistent prayers.Yet year after yearBefore his image they kneelMargarita, Josefina, Maria, and IsabelAll fervently hopingThat if not omnipotentAt least he be bilingual.

Scene: The themes in that poem run throughout your work.

Scene: In your essay “Advanced Biology,” you use the phrase, “the art of cultural compromise.” What’s the difference between assimilation, say, and adaptation?

Cofer: I think with assimilation, you’re basically sublimating your true self, saying, “I have to become the other in order to survive.” In what I call cultural adaptation, or compromise, you admit that you are displaced, whether by choice or circumstance, and then you adapt. It’s absurd to fight it. You don’t have to give up who you are. The way I see it, you’re richer than others.

Scene: In your first book, Terms of Survival, there’s a poem called “Costumbre.” Do you remember it?

Cofer: Oh, jeez.

Scene: I’m not trying to put you on the spot. I promise not to ask you to read it.

Cofer: No, no, you’re just reminding me how long ago it was.

Scene: It’s such a perfect little poem.

Cofer: Gosh, the obsessions are still there. I’m working on a new book now, and the poems I’m writing are bilingual in a much more challenging way—challenging to the reader—than they were when I was writing Terms of Survival. Even in this book, I was saying, “I learned your language, now here’s my language.” So, in this “Costumbre,” yep, I’ve got in front of me now, the prostitutes are playing dominos with the men, and the wives are walking by, looking away. You know, it’s kind of my little feminist statement. It’s like, “Be a good girl, but you’re not gonna get to play.” And so I still write about the outsider woman, about the woman who places herself outside the expectations of her society, whether by becoming an artist or simply not following the rules.

Scene: You’ve written about the myth of the Latina woman, that’s she’s considered a whore or a maid or criminal. As a writer, do you see yourself as on a mission to dispel these stereotypes?

Cofer: No, I never saw myself as having a mission. I saw myself as having an intense, personal need to express myself in language. And that’s hard to explain. Mother Teresa had a mission, and activists have a mission, where they say “this needs to be changed” and “I have to change that.” I don’t get up in the morning thinking that. Not because I don’t want to change the world, but because if an idea has been buzzing around like a bee in a jar in my head, I have to understand why it came to me. I always quote Virginia Woolf, who said what that is is a “moment of being.” If you have something that you carry with you, and you’re a writer, you will eventually write about it. It has been identified by your imagination and your memory as something you can explore, and perhaps even make universal. Like recently we went to New Orleans, and saw the devastation. It was not my mission to write about it, but I could not stop thinking about the images. I felt compelled to write about it. And if a poem gets published, and it means something to people, then it will have become art, and not just my own needs being met. I am political in that I’m a thinking person and a caring person, but my art has to carry the politics in the same way that a painter’s work has to be embedded in the canvas. The things that drive us are love and grief, you know, the great emotions.