December 26, 2019 Best of 2019 One Word: Salty By Myriam Gurba We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! One kid raises their hand. They ask, “Miss Gurba, why’d you become a high school teacher?” This is a classic time-killing move. My tone turns serious. I respond, “It was an accident.” Hearing a public school employee be so blunt widens kids’ eyes. They’ve baited me into a tacit game of truth or dare and I’ve knowingly broken the rules. I’m pretty sure they expect me to belt out the opening lyrics of “Greatest Love of All.” They want a saint. What garbage. Catholics raised me, but I’m not a martyr. Still, even teenagers know you’re not supposed to admit that you stumbled into their classroom, but who cares? I did and I stayed and I continue to stumble in every morning. Something my students ask me less often is whether or not I like teaching. Something they ask me even less often than that is what I like about my profession. Read more >>
June 26, 2019 One Word One Word: Striking By Myriam Gurba While aiming a lens at my face, the photographer whispered, “You’re striking.” This quality lives far from pretty. Daisies are pretty. Adolescent hamsters are pretty. William Wordsworth wrote pretty poetry. It wasn’t striking. Striking poetry ambushes us. The sensory details are chosen to paralyze, discomfit, or inflict pain. When such poetry bears lilies, they fester. When such poetry harbors horses, they crush toes. When such poetry casts a fishhook, its metal sinks into an open eye. Striking phenomena resemble beautiful ones in their force and strength. “Beauty quickens,” said critic Elaine Scarry. “It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid.” When I was a ten-year-old tomboy, I asked my father, “Why does evil exist?” After looking up from his watch, he replied, “Myriam, imagine how boring life would be if evil didn’t exist.” It makes life more vivid. At the time, my father’s authority on the matter went unquestioned. In hindsight, his answer strikes me as slapdash, dangerous, and wrong. When I was older, I lived with a man who, though he was evil, was as boring as he was dangerous. Here is an inventory of his pastimes: plucking bass guitar while buzzed, extolling the greatness of soccer player Lionel Messi, and misogyny. He turned me into a human soccer ball, and yet I couldn’t recognize what was happening. The radical feminist Andrea Dworkin experienced this same perceptual inability, explaining that the horror of what is happening to a battered woman exists, “quite literally, beyond her imagination.” My mind could not name what he did to me. Misogyny struck me dumb. Read More
March 19, 2019 One Word One Word: Avuncular By Myriam Gurba In our column One Word, writers expound on their favorite words. Man with beer, artist unknown, c. 1920 My uncle Henry has killed a lot of people. In spite of his dark past, and because of it, he’s my favorite American uncle. Since I cherish bilingually, in English and in Spanish, I cherish my uncles and my tíos separately. The border separates us, cleaving family from familia. My favorite tío was Alvaro. Unlike Henry, he wasn’t a genius. He never killed anybody, though he was known to get rough with English. His favorite T-shirt was a little too tight and its stenciled letters declared LIFE’S A BEACH! To visit Alvaro, I travel thousands of miles, to a cemetery in Guadalajara. To see Henry, I need only walk a mile from my apartment to a skilled nursing facility beside a hipster barbershop and an Irish pub. Henry no longer speaks about the people he killed as an artillery officer, but decades ago, he often rambled about them to my father, his little brother. He shared specifics. He described GIs slicing free enemy ears, threading them together, crafting leis of shriveled lobes. He told about exploded water buffalo dripping from trees, pink rain. He talked about calling in an air strike and obliterating everyone and everything in a village, all life wiped out except for a single baby. When Henry returned to California from Vietnam, the baby followed him. He continued to hear it crying. He looked for that baby everywhere, including underneath his mother’s house. He couldn’t find it. Read More
January 2, 2019 One Word One Word: Salty By Myriam Gurba In our new column One Word, writers expound on their favorite words. One kid raises their hand. They ask, “Miss Gurba, why’d you become a high school teacher?” This is a classic time-killing move. My tone turns serious. I respond, “It was an accident.” Hearing a public school employee be so blunt widens kids’ eyes. They’ve baited me into a tacit game of truth or dare and I’ve knowingly broken the rules. I’m pretty sure they expect me to belt out the opening lyrics of “Greatest Love of All.” They want a saint. What garbage. Catholics raised me, but I’m not a martyr. Still, even teenagers know you’re not supposed to admit that you stumbled into their classroom, but who cares? I did and I stayed and I continue to stumble in every morning. Something my students ask me less often is whether or not I like teaching. Something they ask me even less often than that is what I like about my profession. Read More
November 6, 2017 Stolen The Mexican American Bandit By Myriam Gurba Good artists imitate; great artists steal. In our new series, Stolen, writers share stories of theft. Still from the animated short Zimbo by the Guadalajaran directors Rita Basulto and Juan José Medina. My ex-wife stared as she watched my maternal grandmother slide a chicken into her purse. When she noticed she was being watched, my grandmother locked eyes with my ex-wife. In her thick Guadalajara accent, my grandmother bellowed, “For the dogs.” Her dogs were waiting outside of the buffet, in her truck. It was Mother’s Day and they were her most beloved. On our way home, my ex-wife asked, “Have you seen your grandmother steal meat before?” I looked at her with a deadpan expression meant to approximate the one my grandmother had given her. “She’s Mexican,” I answered. My grandmother’s habit of filling her purse with meat reinforces an American stereotype: that Mexicans are thieves. Consider the now-retired chip mascot Frito Bandito. And Speedy Gonzales, the cheese snatcher. But Mexicans invert this trope. “You live in California,” my paternal grandfather would remind me when we’d visit Mexico at Christmas. “You live there because of a robbery! The United States stole that land! Americans are thieves.” My grandfather’s indictment was supposed to make me, a gringa, ashamed. Instead, it made me secretly relish America. My family lived on stolen land and stolen fruit always tastes better. Its ill-gotten nature emboldens its umami, glazes it with immoral MSG. When I went on my first stealing spree, I became a Mexican bandit, and a practitioner of Manifest Destiny. Read More