Not One Place

Poets Laureate on Place: A Prose Series

It is profound, what poet-teachers are always inviting writers to do: bring in the concrete. I cannot escape its impact when I name, now, my relationship to the place I live.
 

I am a Californian, but my Iranian family raised me with a sense of being Iranian in stark contrast to my classmates, friends, and the Southern California suburb where we lived. Since the late 1980s, I’ve lived in Santa Cruz County, after moving here to go to college. My history here includes a sense of not being reflected in local representation, and not knowing whether others cared about that. It includes my own sense—plumbed and depicted in my first book of poetry, Sister Tongue زبان خواهر—that as a young, growing adult I didn’t know where I should be—that is, where to really imagine myself, in order to be.

Santa Cruz is not one place. What it is now is different from what it used to be, and who I am in it is different as well. I never used to ask, never thought to ask, Is there space for my Iranianness here? I didn’t know then how I could dig for myself an emotional subterranean tunnel between Santa Cruz and Iran.

But what hasn’t changed is my feeling of dumb luck to live in a place of unrivaled natural treasures: oak woodlands and chaparral, coast redwood forests, sandy beaches, rocky coastline, sloughs, wetlands, fertile soil in which to grow food. The Pacific coastline and Monterey Bay. The Pacific Flyway, an important migratory route for birds. So many birds.

Something I learned from studying natural history in my 40s: When I’m in a place, sometimes I ask, who belongs here? What spiders live here? What mushrooms? Am I someone who belongs here? How much room is there for me in this place, but also how much room for anyone? What does this place want from the multitudes?

This ocean which I think of as one ocean along which all of California’s coast resides is my ocean. I have the right to the cupsful of seawater I’ve held in both palms since as far back as I can remember. Dear Pacific. I don’t notice my silences as I sit and stare into the here-and-gone of waves breaking apart. My pieces—the parts of me who hear different tongues, the selves which often feel at odds—are mended. Not whole, but pulled closer. Calling to each other through that tunnel. I find language to name wishes—to want to be seen and known, to want connection to others. The surf laps the colonies of hermit crabs scattered through the sand. Lap me, I want to say out loud, but don’t. Still, it’s a gift to find those syllables inside.

When I move about, when I watch things hop across a patch of dirt, when I feel myself noticed but not named alien or a threat, I assume my rights to just be here.

During my first ten years of childhood, marked by sorrow and deep loneliness, I lived in a tract-laden town. I thought suburbia was homogenous and strangling. Now I live in a neighborhood which I guess is suburban, though that label sounds wrong to me. Some seasons I’ve walked around early in the mornings, listening for birds. But when you’re trying to notice birds, anywhere, you usually end up noticing a lot more. It feels like I’m sharing a circulatory system with my neighbors. When I move about, when I watch things hop across a patch of dirt, when I feel myself noticed but not named alien or a threat, I assume my rights to just be here. I take up my space without questioning how.

My poetry work with teenagers has changed my internal experience of my county. As an Academy of American Poetry Laureate Fellow, I’ve launched a series of pop-up teen poetry workshops (led by me and other local poets), during which teens are invited to explore poetry and place. Some of these teens remember or experienced very recent fires and floods in different parts of Santa Cruz County. Some don’t. Among other prompts, I almost always invite these writers to remember a space in their community which makes them feel safe. I talk with teens who “thought they were doing the exercise wrong” when their favorite taqueria came to mind. I talk with teens who tell me about getting to the nearby beach with their friends and calming down together, others who saw their or their friends’ homes destroyed and wrote about enduring fear, about loved places destroyed. I’ve read snapshots of parks, dunes, living rooms, forests, porches, and meadows—each a tether to coordinates which you might or might not find on a map, now in my daily consciousness. It is profound, what poet-teachers are always inviting writers to do: bring in the concrete. I cannot escape its impact when I name, now, my relationship to the place I live.

I am addicted to this curiosity, this question: What do you imagine when you pause to conjure a place here in Santa Cruz County which provides you solace? Is this place real? Under these questions is another question I keep returning to: Can our diverse county meet the needs of its diversity?

My role as poet laureate has tightened my bond to and increased my identity with our county. Every day, the gift of this bond is filtered through my horror and grief about the way millions of Palestinians—in Gaza and in the global diaspora—are unable to presume a future in the place where they feel this same bond and identity. The opportunity to live out those feelings in or on the ground which they identify with is being stolen from them. I don’t have to fight for my enormous feelings. This fact, in this place, in this world, compels the work I do here.

Farnaz Fatemi is an Iranian American writer and editor in Santa Cruz, California. She is Santa Cruz County’s Poet Laureate and a founding member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which presents a weekly radio show and podcast in Santa Cruz County and hosts readings and events. Her debut book of poetry, Sister Tongue زبان خواهر, won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, selected by Tracy K. Smith, and received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. Farnaz is an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and a California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow. She formerly taught writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her poems and lyric essays appear or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, No Tokens Journal, Poets.org, Tab Journal, Nowruz Journal, Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere. More at www.farnazfatemi.com.

Header photo by haveseen, courtesy Shutterstock.