Ofelia Zepeda: An Introduction

"The Moment Just Seemed to Last for a Long Time"

by Jeanne Armstrong and Louise Lockard

Poets, novelists, and artists have visited our class in the Spring of 1992. We have listened to them and questioned them about Native American poetics and we have listened to them and questioned them about their communities and how they speak from that community.

Ofelia Zepeda--poet, educator and linguist--has also been our teacher in the seminar on poetics and politics. With us, she has heard each author, discussed their poems, shared her perspective on their work, and helped us to gain our own perspectives. When we read the transcript of her discussion of poetics, we remember her voice in the other discussions, a voice which endures and grows stronger with time.

On the O'odham Reservation, at the University of Arizona and in bordertowns, Ofelia Zepeda has worked to create a community of O'odham people who read and write in their own language for pure enjoyment. She says, "Whether the expression is in a short letter or just writing down personal thoughts, it is thrilling to know that there is someone else out there who can read what we have put down on paper and share the experience with us."

Ofelia Zepeda's parents were born in Mexico. In the 1920s when the INS began to enforce border crossings, they emigrated to what was called in O'odham, "the cotton place," the area near Casa Grande, Arizona. Her first language was O'odham. Since she lived off the reservation, Ofelia was enrolled in the O'odham tribe as NR, non-resident. She attended public schools where she learned to read and write in English. In the summer, she travelled by truck with her brothers and sisters to an unmarked border crossing where children and supplies were transferred to another truck on the Mexican side of the border which would take her to her O'odham relatives in Mexico and to the summer ceremonies near the sea. From her relatives on both sides of the border, Ofelia learned the stories of her people in spoken O'odham as she worked in the fields and participated in the ceremonies.

The first time Ofelia Zepeda saw a book written in O'odham was in a bookstore in Tucson where she had enrolled as a student at the University of Arizona. Unable to read the language that she could speak fluently, she decided to become literate in O'odham. Relatives near Ajo told her about a retired missionary at the University of Arizona, Dan Matsen, who became her first teacher. Her text was the Wycliffe bible, which had been translated into O'odham by Protestant missionaries. Later she studied with linguist Ken Hale, an expert who was visiting from M.I.T. and who has written of the "severe and relatively constant linguistic oppression which has been directed against indigenous peoples."

Interviewed in the Tucson Weekly, Ofelia says, "We had to create our own literature in order to promote literacy. Some of my writing I used to just transcribe from interviews with people or O'odham songs, just write them down so you could read them as poetry." In 1980, she attended the Native American Language Institute in Albuquerque during which students were asked to write poetry in their native languages. They worked late into the night sharing their writing and revising it. The book of poetry entitled Mat Hekid o Ju: When It Rains, edited by Ofelia, is a collection of the Papago and Pima poetry written at this institute.

The authors of Mat Hekid o Ju gave a reading in the Tribal Council chambers at Sells, the first reading of written O'odham. Ofelia describes the audience as O'odham people who knew the poets and who shared their experiences and their language. She says that when Mrs. Ramon read a poem about her mother who had died, "There was this silence in the room...the moment just seemed to last for a long time and it kept happening over and over again." After this event, people would come up to her at the store or in her car and talk to her about the poems.

One woman stopped her at the grocery store and wanted to discuss a word in one of the poems. Later--Ofelia says it was nearly a year after the reading--the woman came to Ofelia's house with the book and they discussed the word in O'odham and in English and thought about what the poet was trying to say. Through such discussions, Ofelia Zepeda has succeeded in creating a community of readers and writers of O'odham.

A Sunday afternoon radio program with announcements in O'odham about chicken scratch dances as well as personal news contributes to maintaining this community. Ofelia's success has taken her from her own beginnings as a speaker of O'odham in the U.S. and in Mexico to work with missionaries and linguists at the University of Arizona and finally back into her own community to meet with other speakers and readers of O'odham.

The work of Ofelia Zepeda in linguistics, education and poetry is filled with this sense of the possibility of her own language. She has worked for ten years on the transcript of the O'odham emergence story, a version that was recorded before she was born and is curated at the Arizona State Museum. She says she is trying to write the story in a way that interweaves the anecdotes of the old medicine man who told it with the text itself. Ofelia anticipates that it will take her a long time to get it right.

Her work as a linguist has enabled Ofelia Zepeda to become involved in studying dialects on the O'odham reservation. She has also done an oral history project on the Sand Papago. In this project, she recorded considerable information on the use of desert plants for food and medicine as well noting distinctive features of the Sand Papago dialect.

In explaining how she creates her bilingual poems, Ofelia emphasized that her technique is to write in O'odham first and then create an English version if possible. "I like to think that I can create something in O'odham first that's only in O'odham, which is fine, is a perfectly valid piece of work...the words that I use or play with or whatever are in O'odham only and English never never comes in and that's the hard part because it has to be a very, it's a very, conscious exercise".

While she acknowledges that it is a valid strategy to simply make an English translation, this is not how Ofelia creates her poetry. If she writes an equivalent English piece, she preserves the basic concept but does not attempt to translate the O'odham poem line for line or word for word. When Ofelia reads to a non-O'odham speaking audience, she will still read some poems in O'odham so that the audience knows how the language sounds and can appreciate its rhythm.

During her class visit, Ofelia read the coyote poem and described its genesis. Her discussion of this particular poem is a good example of her creative process and the linguistic complexity of her poetry. She explained that the O'odham part of the poem is taken from a song text in the Southwest Folklore Center collections. It was a coyote curing song recorded by a medicine man.

Using this song as her inspiration, Ofelia elaborated on various cultural dimensions of the coyote as trickster and healer in the poem. She explained that while the story of the coyote family moving is humorous, it is also complimentary to the coyote because the premise of curing songs is to gain the animal's help by giving it a compliment. Mixing English and O'odham, the poem also combines a traditional curing song with allusions to aspects of modern life such as "Merle Haggard and Hank Williams tapes in the Basha's grocery bag."

Sharon Suzuki asked Ofelia about the sense of natural motion in her poems--clouds, tumbleweed and of course coyotes running. Ofelia's response was a beautiful description of the desert's energy and how the O'odham have accomodated themselves to this energy. "You can show where something slows down or something stops or almost comes to a stop and then there's a transition again and it either starts moving again or else it becomes quite violent. . .I like that kind of energy going on and I think out here in the desert it's very very noticeable. . .especially in the summertime when things can just be really quiet and then all of a sudden you have a huge thunderstorm."

Ofelia then described how people's motion responds to the desert's energy in that when it's very hot, people stop or slow down until it cools off again. Thus desert people have even learned to harmonize their metabolism with the desert's metabolism. Listening to Ofelia talk about the various emergence spots she has seen or heard of gives us an appreciation for the intimate connection of the O'odham with their desert environment.

Remembering that her father would say "As soon as the wind stops, it's gonna rain," Ofelia explained that as a child she thought that it always rained when he said those words. This is a recognition of her respect for the power of words, an important aspect of O'odham culture. "The community. . .as a whole is quite conscious of what they're doing with words and they know it has a certain power--the one that is most obvious is when you cure, when you can call the rain and things like that...but there are other things for everyday people, you know, when you use language--and they do tell you, you know--you have to be careful."

The coyote song can heal and so can Mrs. Ramon's poem. By sharing emotional memories of her mother who had passed away, Mrs. Ramon moved the local audience to silence. "People talk about speakers who think language, or speaking in general, is good, sort of like healthy for you, or whatever, so if you practice it right it's sort of good for the whole."

Perhaps it is this respect for the power of words that makes traditional O'odham songs and Ofelia's poems speak in such "powerfully compact phrases" about the desert environment (Tucson Weekly). Certainly this respect explains a quality of Ofelia's speech that has always impressed me. She seems to weigh her words very deliberately and carefully. Now I understand the reason for her cautious manner of speaking.

Like that untranslatable O'odham word that might simply mean a "ringing noise" to one unfamiliar with the cultural context but which connotes an enduring resonance, words must be used carefully because they can resound indefinitely. "It was just a simple verb that tried to capture that description of the songs going on for a long time, or forever, from the beginning of time."