Other Fugitives &
Other Strangers
by Rigoberto González

Other Fugitives & Other Strangers Poems by Rigoberto González
Tupelo Press
Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa Rigoberto González
University of Wisconsin
Review by Ricardo L. Ortiz

The roughly simultaneous publication of gay Chicano poet Rigoberto González's latest collection of poems (Other Fugitives & Other Strangers) and his first prose memoir (Butterfly Boy) offers readers a unique opportunity not only to familiarize themselves, if they haven't already, with the work of an extraordinarily fine young talent, but also to explore the complex, fascinating interaction that one conventional literary genre can conduct with another, and in ways that disturb, expand and enrich the potential of literary expression.

Conventional literary thinking might privilege the verse collection as the more" artful," and perhaps value the memoir primarily for its ability to provide an autobiographical context for the enigmatic, provocative lyrics. Granted, Butterfly Boy does dedicate itself in part to a fairly clear accounting of the poet's life, from his birth in California's Central Valley to migrant farmworker Mexican parents, to the family's struggles to survive economically and otherwise in both Mexico and the US, to his adolescence in the Southern California desert badlands (an adolescence during which he struggled with poverty, his mother's death, his father's abandonment, his sexuality and his weight), finally to his arrival, thanks to his discovery of literary fiction as a means of escaping imaginatively from the hard facts of his family's life; at the university life that would allow him finally to claim his own adult independence.

That rough narrative outline does little justice, however, to the stylistic marvel that is Butterfly Boy, and it does nothing to describe the intimate, profound relationship that the poet/memoirist fashions between the two volumes. Perhaps the most interesting point of contact between the two books emerges from the way that together they deviate from the conventional functions of of their chosen genres. While the lyrics that make up Other Fugitives clearly operate in a confessional mode, they're often alternately as withholding as they are forthcoming about the emotional, psychological or spiritual details informing their respective performances. This opacity mostly heightens the artistry of the poems, and it allows the poet to strike a delicate balance between the most irreducibly idiosyncratic of his experiences and their more generalizable meaning to a reader. See, for example, the simultaneous embrace and refusal of the intimate, confessional mode in these lines from the title poem, meditating upon the psychodynamics of a trick:

      The stranger's hands. . .
      are only human hands with fingertips
      unsentimental with discoveries, without nostalgia
      for what they leave behind.

While it may make conventional sense that such an anonymous encounter would be free of sentiment, anyone who's undergone such encounter with any regularity can vouch for the fact that it is often that very anonymity that can allow for the indulgence of exactly such sentiment, and can even inspire an odd kind of nostalgia.

And for a writer like González, one who is acutely aware of the emotional and psychological correspondences among his often painful, but as-often compelling familial, erotic and aesthetic lives, it is precisely this resistance to easy sentiment. to an easy nostalgic capitulation to loss, that drives him to work, and to write. This is particularly clear in his treatments of his mother's death when he was twelve, his father's general emotional unavailability, and the physical and psychological abusiveness of a male Iover whose emotional hold on him is a central theme of both volumes. Hear, for example, in the following lines from "Papi Love," the poet's inventive handling off the inevitable punning of the familiar queer latino endearment for lover:

      If Papi stops loving me, I'll look for a man who acts like a man . . .
      . . . I need that god, that judge that
      father who hugs me like the son he never wanted to give up . . .

More than once in this volume, González invokes literary fathers (there are epigraphs from Cavafy, Francisco Alarcón, and Thomas James), but the forebear most resonant is much of his verse is a mother, one Sylvia "Dying is an Art" Plath, and if the gesture in "Papi Love" to her Daddy" isn't clear enough, one can look generally to González's handling of restrained free-verse forms (especially the frequent use of unrhyming three-line triptych stanzas) and specifically to such observations as this one, culled from "Breaking Down Picasso's Minotaur":

      Exhausted beast.
      It will hold its pose until its hide
      Decays right off the paper.

      Death takes no canvas to its
      Art.

González also makes scattered references to literary writers who inspired him during his formative years in high school in Thermal, CA, years spent in what he calls the "honorsland" of college-prep and advanced-placement classes where his was very often the only brown face. As with Plath in the poems, however, González's literary patrimony in Butterfly Boy remains mostly implied; but it is, in addition, decidedly male, and while it is not exclusively Chicano, or gay, he's able to draw on a rather rich lineage. The mémoir compares quite favorably with a stellar list of predecessors that have explored the difficult process of coming of age male and imperfectly masculine in Mexican America; these include José Antonio Villarreal's Pocho, Richard Rodríguez's Hunger of Memory, and Arturo Islas's Rain God and Migrant Souls.

González's memoir shares with these other books the particular capacity of a well-observed narrative exploration to produce disarming, and even disarmingly lyrical, insights. Butterfly Boy stands apart from these progenitors, however, in its insistence (one it shares in spirit with the poems) on not surrendering to predictable forms of sentiment, or nostalgia. In the context of his family's history of compelled migrancy, González has occasion to observe the following near the end of the volume: "There are people, I imagine, who are born and die in the same town, maybe in the same house, or bed. Creatures without migration: have they not lived because they have not moved?"

In a world in which, increasingly, one must work, and work hard, to imagine not migrating (from bed to bed, house to house, country to country), perspectives like González's emerge as not only undeniably valuable, but indispensable.