Connect with us

Where You Live When You Lose Your Homeland

From different centuries, the poems of Bertolt Brecht and Angel Dominguez convey the lonely yearning of Los Angeles exiles.

 

Illustration by Tevy Khou

In “Poets on the Beat,” a collaboration between Capital & Main and the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, distinguished California poets provide new perspectives on such topics as climate change, inequality, the immigrant experience and police violence.

Los Angeles has long been a city of exiles, both those displaced from elsewhere and natives made to feel they do not belong. That experience is articulated in the poetry of Bertolt Brecht and Angel Dominguez, as now more people than ever move to countries other than the ones where they were born. Separated by generations and origins, both of these poets wrote of Los Angeles in poems that illuminate the housing crises common to cities in our time.

 

Fleeing the Nazis during World War II, Brecht took refuge for six years in Santa Monica, California. He rented a house at 1063 26th Street, which he described in his diary as “one of the oldest … about 30 years old, California clapboard, whitewashed, with an upper floor with 4 bedrooms. i have a long workroom (almost 7 meters), which we immediately whitewashed and equipped with 4 tables. there are old trees in the garden (a pepper-tree and a fig-tree). rent is $60 per month.”

 

In 2011, Brecht’s $60-a-month house was designated a historical landmark and sold for $1.2 million. In 2020, it sold again for $4.6 million. The new owner said, “I felt a creative spirit the first time I walked in this house.”

 

Brecht, like other famous European refugees, found that continental success did not translate to Hollywood success. He managed to sell only one screenplay during his years on the West Coast, for a Fritz Lang feature called Hangmen Also Die! Someone else snagged screenwriter credit, but the movie provided Brecht funding so he could write his plays and poetry. Brecht was chastened by the commercial indifference to his talents, and designated as an “enemy alien,” he was barred from leaving his house after 8 p.m. He never warmed to Los Angeles, writing mordant poems about the city’s inequality in the 1940s:

Thinking about Hell …

 

Thinking about Hell, my brother Shelley, so I hear

Supposed it to be a city much like London. I

Who live not in London but in Los Angeles

Thinking about Hell, suppose it must be

Even more like Los Angeles.

                                                      In Hell too

I do not doubt there are such luxuriant gardens

With flowers, as big as trees, that admittedly perish at once

Unless watered with very expensive water. And fruit markets

With heaps of fruit that, it must be said

Have neither smell nor taste. And the endless columns of cars

Lighter than their own shadows, swifter than

Foolish thoughts, gleaming vehicles in which

Rosy people coming from nowhere are going nowhere

And houses, built for the happy and therefore empty

Even when lived in.

 

Not all the houses even in Hell are ugly.

But the fear of being flung out on the street

Consumes the dwellers in villas no less than

The dwellers in the shanties.

Brecht writes about the way that a city of “gleaming vehicles” has been unwelcoming to immigrants and the poor. Hollywood-born Dominguez, whose family is part of the Mexican diaspora, dwells on similar themes as Brecht when writing about Los Angeles. While both poets concern themselves with inequality, Dominguez also explores a more permanent sense of loss created by colonialism. As a “double exile,” Dominguez feels the loss of an ancestral home in the Yucatán and then the loss of a childhood home in the San Fernando Valley after the house is razed to make way for apartments.

 

Both Brecht and Dominguez anchor their interrogations of dislocation in the figures of houses and a discussion of housing. Their poems, each in their own way, explore a certain gentrification and dislocation of the spirit. Brecht writes of “houses, built for the happy” that stand empty “even when lived in.” Grieving about the replacement of the family home in the San Fernando Valley with pricey apartments, Dominguez writes, “I build a house in the dead-end housing complex of my heart … I build a roof above a dream I’ve yet to have.” Housing in these poems is used as a synecdoche, which represents wider economic and historical forces arrayed against people made refugees on various levels, alienated not only from a cultural homeland but also from the sense of their own happiness and priced out of even the feeling of “home.”

Dominguez’s 2021 book, RoseSunWater, laments the loss of a house at 14711 Saticoy Street in Van Nuys, California, once home to three generations of the Dominguez family. The home has since been destroyed and replaced by what the poet describes as “expensive, ugly apartments.” Built in 1906, this family homestead once belonged to Dominguez’s grandmother, who planted fruit trees from seeds: twin aguacates from the Yucatán that have taken “two decades to become myth.” The family also grew pitaya, chaya, lemon and mango trees, an orchard that represented the striving of Dominguez’s Yucatec family. In the knowledge that the “house is going to be destroyed before this book is ever finished,” Dominguez returns to the Yucatán to write about what might be saved from a history fraught with colonialism and exile.

 

According to Realtor.com, the former Dominguez family home is now a nine-unit apartment building. Completed in 2020, the building is not subject to rent control and contains “a great unit mix of eight (8) three-bedroom/two-bathroom units and one (1) four-bedroom/three-bathroom home,” according to the listing, which goes on to say, “These units are spacious and bright with wide open floorplans, private balconies, and plenty of windows letting in natural light. All units are brand new with high-end fixtures and finishes.” The listing describes the property as “very low maintenance with tenants paying for all of the utilities.” In 2021, the property was purchased for $4.4 million dollars.

 

In the double exile from the Yucatán and from their childhood home, Dominguez holds on to a connection to their heritage by attempting to complete their grandmother’s unfinished poem, which is reproduced at the beginning of the book. (Dominguez uses “they” and “their” pronouns.”)

 

The language of real estate bleeds into Dominguez’s poetry:

I build a house in the dead-end housing complex of my heart.

The rent is cheap enough to live and every tenant is on a second

chance account of some kind, my heart included.

 

I keep trying to build the square footage into my organs. I

keep trying to form a floor plan out of memory, every time I

touched my hands to those walls; feet to the floors. I am trying

to remember a feeling beyond the ruin to come. There will be no

pyramid. There will be no archive. Our home will become the

shape of an overpriced future I can’t afford. I hope every tenant’s

aguacates rot before they can use them.

 

I build a roof above a dream I’ve yet to have. The empty chairs

manifest spirits and ancestors and we’re all moving out of here 

before it’s too late.

“How do I (re)build the house in my heart?” Dominguez asks in the middle of the book. In the end, the book becomes a way toward repair. “The orchard stays with me wherever I go,” they write. Refugees, immigrants and the poor are familiar with loss and do not accept it as much as survive it. Dominguez finds solace in sacred Mayan traditions, represented by cenotes. Cenotes are large pools of groundwater flowing in the Yucatán that are believed to be sacred portals to the Mayan underworld. For Dominguez, they are portals to the heritage denied to their family and to Indigenous people in general. In “If Not a Future Then What? A Present?,” the lemons and oranges of Saticoy Street scatter to form “two new tints of sunlight” and the house “evaporates into a rain that does not end.”

A Cenote opens up to eat the house. To keep it safe.

            The house is with the ancestors now.

 

The inhabitants scatter across the city void and beyond. The

pitaya becomes several palms around the city. The roses

explode out across the landscape blossoming in the rain before

evaporating along with the water. The aguacates lend themselves

to immigrant households to keep their families fed. The

lemons scatter along with the oranges to form two new tints of

sunlight that always look like Mama’s and Xix’s oranges.

The colors of the house become other times of day lilting

memories from the soul of those who know how precious this

dream can be. … The house itself evaporates into a

rain that does not end by which I mean all our dreams become

clouds to nourish the future. To nourish our ancestors and those

who are gone, but still roaming with(in) us.

Dominguez moved from L.A. and lives in Northern California. Brecht left the U.S. in 1947, one day after being interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Brecht admitted to the committee that he had participated in various political meetings, but he denied membership in the Communist Party. He was also accused of producing “a number of very revolutionary poems, plays, and other writings.” Brecht’s exile in Santa Monica had been a productive time, even if he did not experience commercial success. He wrote five plays, a screenplay and many poems. This one is a favorite of mine, alluding as it does to my own family’s history of incarceration in concentration camps for Japanese Americans.

The fisherman’s tool

 

In my room, on the whitewashed wall

Hangs a short bamboo cane, wound with string

With an iron hook, fashioned

To gather fishing nets out of the water. The cane

Was acquired at a junk shop downtown. My son

Gave me it for my birthday. It is worn.

In the saltwater the rust of the hook has penetrated the hemp binding.

These traces of use and of work

Confer on the cane great dignity. I

Like to think, this fishing tool

Was left me by the Japanese fishermen

Driven out from the West Coast and into camps

As suspect foreigners, and then installed in my place

To remind me of certain

Unsolved, but not insoluble

Questions of humanity.

Copyright 2023 Capital & Main.

 

“Thinking about Hell” and “The fisherman’s tool” were reprinted from The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht by Bertolt Brecht. Translated by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine. Translation copyright © 2019, 2015 by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine. Underlying copyright © Bertolt-Brecht-Erben/Suhrkamp Verlag. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company Inc. All rights reserved.


Excerpts from RoseSunWater (the Operating System, 2021) by Angel Dominguez are used by permission of the author.