Voices of New Mexico

Contributors

Foreword

Voices in New Mexico have been talking, whispering, shouting, crying, and storytelling for millennia. This anthology, Voices of New Mexico, collects essays, poems, short stories and histories of New Mexico on the eve of our 100th year of statehood in 2012. These are not the usual suspects from Anaya to Zollinger, they are other voices from Andersen to Wolfert. Enchanting authors.

I know many of these writers, some of whose books I have sold over the past twenty years as a bookseller, some I have only met, and some I do not know except through their writings. But these are voices that you should know more about.

These writers tell stories about listening to ghosts, hearing spirits, apprehending the sound of the Llano, and the whispers of flora and fauna of our state. They are proud of the history and people of our state. This book begins with a poem and ends with a poem, both citing the amazing colors of the land and sky—and strong feelings of place. In between these poems we can listen to many tales.

Elizabeth Fackler’s story of Billy the Kid and Lincoln Town says that the town evokes what Joseph Campbell called the rapture of being alive…. We who crave the rapture of life can share it vicariously by walking the streets of Lincoln and listening for ghosts. Connie Gotsch, the voice of public radio in the Four Corners region, recounts a visit to the Palace of Governors in Santa Fe (closed for repairs) that drew her back to New Mexico to live. Something called to her and she has added her voice to her adopted state with programs about the music and arts found here. Her delightful article traces her path through both mediums and their impact on her, and through her work their impact on us.

Snow, snowmen, tumbleweed snowmen? Melody Groves writes of the different climates of the southern part of the state and the north. Different landscapes, different terrain, different weather and how it shapes our thinking.

From the discovery of the Clovis Point to the space age of Dr. Randy Lovelace and the current Spaceport, New Mexico, we humans respond to our environment. Spirits walk the land here whether through witches who can be thwarted by certain plants, carried by winds on the Llano or heard murmuring during the day or night on an archeological dig. David Kyea regales with a story of spirits of a different kind—chokecherry wine.

This book is a very satisfying read. It adds voices to the dialogue of what it means to live in New Mexico enchanted. The authors certainly are.

Ruth E. Francis

New Mexico Book Coop – Founding Member

February 2011

Voices of New Mexico

The New Mexico Book Co-op was formed in 2002 with a few brave souls who were determined to have New Mexico books in bookstores. The trend was showing its’ ugly head to not have New Mexico books in independent and chain bookstores. We were proud of New Mexico books.

Since that beginning we have had stores for Christmas, distribute a newsletter, formed book shows, hosted workshops on book production and marketing, distributed catalogues, host a website—nmbookcoop.com, and promote the New Mexico Book Awards. The New Mexico Book Awards began five years ago and not only recognizes the best from New Mexico authors, publishers, and about New Mexico but those people that have done monumental things to promote New Mexico books and authors in the Friends of New Mexico Books and Friends of New Mexico Authors Awards. Our sister in promotion, Reading New Mexico, is the only online review site dedicated to New Mexico books.

We are serious about promoting New Mexico books and authors. Voices of New Mexico is the New Mexico Book Co-op’s first book. Voices recognizes the different viewpoints New Mexico authors and artists have. Voices is being released in time for New Mexico’s Centennial in 2012.

Voices of New Mexico has essays about living in New Mexico, being a New Mexican, and New Mexico’s colorful history. Voices of New Mexico also has some beautiful examples of art from some of New Mexico’s best artists. There are certainly many more authors and artists in New Mexico but this is a start and we hope you like it.

We want to point out the energy of Ruth E. Francis for helping to put this book together. We want to thank Paul Rhetts for putting all the pieces together to make a book. We also thank the over 1000 members of the New Mexico Book Co-op for joining together.

We are well aware that in this day and age of hand-held book readers that many have said that the book is dead. Yes, the industry is changing but we still think that people like the feel of a book and to have a book in your own library. We also think that public libraries are important for everyone to share the joy in reading a book. We are also aware that children and adults do not read like they used to read. This is our small attempt to add to the great literary legacy of New Mexico—enjoy it. Happy 100th Birthday New Mexico!!!

Barbe Awalt

Co-Founder, New Mexico Book Co-op

An Introduction

by Demetria Martinez

My writing arises out of a sense of belonging: Our family has been here for centuries, and our indigenous forebears have been here, according to their origin stories, since the beginning of time. Also, it seems that half the people I run into are somehow related to me. My writing also arises out of a sense of belonging to a larger region: I am a citizen of the border region and as a Nuevo Mexicana/Chicana am committed to help healing what Gloria Anzaldua referred to as an open wound—this 2,000 mile border with Mexico that has torn us apart from our neighbors, rather than bringing us closer. What a wonderful challenge for a writer, especially for Nuevo Mexicanos!

Why I Look

by Anastasia Andersen

Every day this habit of turning

left, right, over my shoulder

to the mountains.

Every morning I turn east,

every evening east again,

until the mountains turn

the inside color of watermelon flesh.

It’s in the name, Sandia

although I still don’t know where

watermelons grow.

I don’t understand the air

and it’s easy to forget

water. Everything is hard

and sharp. Cactus, of course

and something called a century plant,

like knives I’m told.

The Five Sisters that are dead

volcanoes. The horned lizards

and white bones there.

And the sun, always that—

in clear points

sharpening the edges of leaves

exposing the eye to a knife.

At the end of the day, it cuts

into the mountains until

all the pink flesh is revealed—

the only softness I’ve seen.

Tightrope Across the Abyss

by Shanti E. Bannwart

Bettina lives on top of the Mesa in a hand-built adobe house with turquoise colored trim and window frames. The High Desert is her backyard. There are wild lupines and sturdy New Mexican sunflowers. Fiery red Indian paintbrush blossoms hide between cacti with thorns that hook fiercely into your flesh. Magpies screech in the scrubby pine trees and deer come close to the house to drink from the water in an old bathtub, left there to catch some of the rare rain showers. When the moon grows close to full, coyotes yipe and laugh into the night, telling each other jokes from hill to hill and across the flat mesa, their eerie laughter galloping down into the canyon were a small brook provides water for bull frogs, lizard and hare. In winter a cedar fire brings the iron stove to glow and the smoke rolls across the roof, spreading sweet and deliriously spicy fragrances. The wind pushes tumbleweeds across brown grass and gathers them in thick clusters along chain link fences. New Mexico is part of the Southwest of the U.S., about at the meridian of Morocco. It is dry and hot in summer, but we are blessed with four seasons, and snow falls in winter, because we live at about 7000 feet elevation.

Bettina is my neighbor, and neighborhood at the outskirts of Santa Fe means distances of several miles between us. Bettina Göring has a slim face, blond hair, lively eyes and a quick smile that lingers, comes and goes like shadows of the fast moving clouds across this serene landscape. Her front teeth are just uneven enough to indicate that she might not have American roots. She has not. Like I, she too, was born in Germany. Her grandfather’s brother was Hermann Göring. In case you are young enough not to recognize this name: Hermann Göring was the perfectly blond and Arian profiled German officer, the right-hand of Adolf Hitler and Marshal of the Empire, the leader of the SS, founder of the feared GESTAPO and commander of the Luftwaffe. Herman Göring concocted and condoned the concept of the concentrations camps, where in perfectly engineered gas-chambers and extermination ovens more than six million, mostly Jewish, human beings were destroyed.

I live at the foot of the Mesa where Bettina has settled. New Mexico is about as far away as one can flee to separate from one’s German roots and culture, but not far enough, I found out, to avoid meeting a compatriot who is the grand-nice of Herman Göring. For years I didn’t know about her ancestral bondage and burden. We rarely met and simply said Hello! when we encountered each other along the dirt road. I didn’t know that she was a Göring, even when her husband Adi functioned as electrician and connected my 380 foot deep well pump with the meter. Water is precious here in the High Desert and there are houses on top of the Mesa which lack a well. A Mesa is a flat table of land that is shaped and marked by canyons, valleys and deep fissures. Our Rowe Mesa spreads for hundreds of miles and can be identified from a spaceship.

I learn about Bettina’s ancestry when a friend mentions during dinner, Do you know that Bettina created a documentary about her pilgrimage to a Jewish artist in Australia who is a concentration camp survivor? Bettina’s last name is Göring, she is the grand-niece of Hitler’s right hand and officially designated successor.

This friend informs me where I would be able to buy the movie, and so I do. It stands waiting for months between books on my shelf, before I gather the courage to view it. I am German, too, and was born at the onset of WW II, my soul and identity is scarred by this history. I still feel unable to talk about the Holocaust without sobbing, more than sixty years after the events. I am perpetrator by lineage and cultural inheritance.

When I finally gather my courage and view the documentary, it moves me deeply. The images sink into layers of the past were they merge with memories of my own German history. I feel less alone and branded when I discover that Bettina, too, suffers the phenomenon of grief and guilt by association with her German origin.

One day, when driving to Santa Fe along the dirt road that leads out of the canyon, I slow down at the cattle guard. Another car comes my way and stops. Our windows are aligned, and when I open mine, Bettina is looking at me. With one glance, and for the first time, we recognize each other as sisters of fate.

Shanti, she says, I heard that you bought my video.

Bettina, I respond, I want to meet and talk with you.

Again, I postpone, for months, connecting with her. I am afraid, shy, terrified, like one would be before open-heart surgery. I fear to be found out, to be discovered with a black sore inside that has been there for most of my life and would remain until the end. I dread the anguish that radiates from that spot and cannot be soothed. Weeks later, Bettina invites me to a public viewing of the movie in the small and intimate Jean Cocteau theater in Santa Fe. A painful discussion follows the performance.

And this is the story which the documentary portrays: Made aware by a friend, Bettina discovers the art of the Australian painter Ruth Rich, who creates pictures of concentration camps and their victims, dark, brooding, heart-wrenching art. Her images burrow into the subconscious rivers of horror that flows underneath the physical reality of those camps. Ruth is a renowned artist and has shown her work in two major exhibitions in Australia. Bettina Göring studies the artwork on Ruth’s website and begins an email correspondence with the artist. This emerging relationship encourages Bettina to attempt healing of her own ancestral wounding, of her guilt and shame, by meeting face to face with this survivor, whoís loved-ones were gassed during the Nazi regime.

Oh my god, Bettina sighs and distorts her face, it’s going to be work.

The camera follows her on this journey to Australia and documents with touching simplicity a thoroughly womanly approach to atonement: being there, eye-to-eye with the Enemy. The fright before meeting the guest shows in Ruth Rich’s face as she stands at the Sidney airport, waiting to encounter Bettina.

I am totally overwhelmed, she says with tears, squeezing the wilting sunflowers in her hands.

The two women get together as strangers, drink tea, circle and test each other as they begin to talk. It is hot in Australia. They sweat and get tired, anxious and nervous as well as intimate in their revelations. The physicality of such encounters is stunning, perplexing and heart-wrenching. They search inside themselves for the courage to be torn open and made vulnerable to their deepest pain. They struggle to come to terms with a horrific historical event by scaling it down to the personal encounter.

They demonstrate politics of the heart and soul as a female approach to making peace through personal action and down-to-earth, awkward meetings and exposure.

Are you willing to be uncomfortable with me? asks Ruth.

To have courage and make myself vulnerable, I need physical contact, says Bettina. They stretch their hands towards each other and hold on as if shipwrecked.

We need to step into the water together, says Ruth.

Making peace is hard work, like giving birth. It is painful, humbling and sometimes petty. These two women walk along a fine edge, daring to stumble and fall. We watch how a uniquely feminine space for healing is being created. A big universal story is encapsulated in this small encounter. Horror is transformed into forgiveness through the physical closeness of two deeply wounded human beings. The surface of this meeting seems gentle and sometimes tentative and polite, but underneath flows a bloody river. This is Herculean work, enacted humbly in a small house in Bangalow, Australia.

A lot of Jewish survivors would not agree with me, meeting a Nazi descendent, mentions Ruth, as if she is surprised by her own generosity.

I understand, says Bettina, I feel total outrage about our inheritance. At thirty I got sterilized, I didn’t want to give birth to more monsters; I cut my bloodline. A radical decision. My brother did the same, independently. I had three mental break-downs and could not sleep for weeks.

After many days of confrontation and healing, Bettina Göring and Ruth Rich desire to perform a final ritual that will bring closure to their journey. They apply to celebrate a peace ceremony in the Jewish Museum in Sidney. Their request is declined.

But the World Peace Organization steps into the breach, staging a peace rite with candles, tears, embraces. During this celebration of forgiveness, the two women stand in for millions.

This was my life work, to get this over with, sighs Bettina, exhausted.

We have become friends, says Ruth.

This encounter portrays a glorious and practical example for the path towards reconciliation and change. It is not the way that official politics is practiced, but it seems more effective and engaging. Intimately videotaped by Cynthia Connop, the documentary Bloodlines is slowly finding its path around the world, being shown and discussed at the Boston Jewish Film Festival and at the Jewish Film Festivals in Israel, in October 2008, when Bettina is invited to travel to Jerusalem and attend the presentation.

A two-page reportage appears in the HAARETZ-Israel News with the title: Goering’s Grandniece Seeks Closure in Israel. The report triggers more than forty responses from readers. Here are some excerpts:

It seems like far too much guilt over what her father’s uncle did. She had nothing to do with it.

I hope she can now continue her life in peace, she has wrestled with her demons enough.

This woman has been hounded beyond sanity. Does she really think her own seed is evil? What a bizarre, Medieval notion. What a grotesque story. What a grotesque world.

This is definitely unmerited guilt. It is unfortunate that she should feel any responsibility whatsoever.

Hermann Goering was a Nazi and committed crimes that are simply unforgivable but it is a problem for him only, not for his family. Nobody can be kept guilty for crimes committed by parents or relatives.

Certainly no sane person would argue she bears the sins of her ancestry—it is a shame that she has felt such guilt over something she has little to do with.

Any Jew who cannot feel empathy for this woman does not understand the essence of being Jewish.

Bettina...you are not responsible for what others did before you were even born...I hope your visit to Israel brings you the closure you seek....

* * *

Weeks later, Bettina visits my home and we have tea.

I need to learn forgiving my own people, she says. I have a lot of compassion for the Germans and their history. My father adored his uncle, Herman Göring, and I feel shame, that I liked him when I was a child.

Your honesty helps me to come out of the closet, I admit, Now I can talk more freely about my past. I am softening around it, as if ice is melting inside me.

I have not yet forgiven my people, it’s a burden I carry. I hope that it might become a fertilizer for my own growth. But now, after reading the responses to Bettina’s appearance in Israel, I feel relieved, free, joyous. Yes, maybe, we both can let go and shake the old shadows off. Maybe we are not responsible, not guilty and tainted by our ancestry.

Bettina, I say, your journey into reconciliation broke a spell.

Your courage to face the victim and accuser took the dark rocks out of the river of my conscience and allows the water to flow. The reactions of the Jewish people to your video reveal that the children of the Holocaust victims encourage movement towards a new story.

Get rid of your guilt, they say, you are insane to believe it’s your burden what your fathers did.

How long have we lived with the belief that being German carries a stigma.

God, I sigh, I feel as if somebody slapped me in the face and yelled Wake Up!.

Maybe it is time for us, the next generation after the Nazis, to kick the demons out and invest our energy, compassion and love into our own, present lives and the country, where we live now.

We hug and a rusty lock in my chest cracks open.

* * *

As I write this, I sit in the small library room of the Anasazi Hotel in Santa Fe. A fire crackles in the chimney. On the mantel stands a carved wooden angel wielding a sword in one hand and the scale of justice in the other. The beautiful face is fierce and serene. She looks as if she knows how to use this sword and will not hesitate to apply force for a worthy cause. Does she discern, because she is an angel, when drawing blood is justified?

I come here from time to time, reading, writing and musing and enjoying the art of the three cultures that live peacefully together in New Mexico. In this room, the Hispanic influence is represented by the carved angel in its simple beauty, the Native American by the exquisite ceramic pots and baskets displayed on the shelves, and the Anglo is present in the blond-haired lady in front of this room who handles requests for trips, and tickets, and rental cars, with help of her laptop. Friendly tourism seems to benefit all three cultures. It took some hundreds of years to find this arrangement between races with such contrary philosophies. I