Books
Bloody Aztecs
by Tessa Laird
If I hadn’t already read City Terrace Field Manual, a book of poetry by Sesshu Foster, I might not have bought Atomik Aztex. I love Aztecs, but I’ve a horror of 80s niteclub lingo that peppers words with kool-looking x’s and z’s. But Foster’s gritty poetry was the only accurate representation of the Los Angeles I experienced while living there – bitter and beautiful verse that reflected the underbelly of urban Hispanic sprawl, rather than Hollywood’s glamorous playground. An Anglo-Japanese hybrid, Foster has nevertheless totally immersed himself in Chicano experience, and the dust jacket for Atomik Aztex boasts rave reviews from iconic Latino figures such as Ruben Martinez and Guillermo Gomez-Pena.
The story is a “what if” scenario – what if the Aztecs had not politely rolled over to the vastly outnumbered Spanish invaders? What if they had extended their warlike ways beyond the borders of Mexico, and even across Europe? Except it’s not that simple – there are, in fact, multiple realities occurring simultaneously (aided, of course, by the cyclic Aztec concept of time). So, while in one world Zenzontli is Keeper of the House of Darkness, a cocky official of the Aztek Socialist Imperium, in another world Zenzontli is a disgruntled freezing worker at the Farmer John meat factory in LA. From the start the comparisons are obvious, the meat factory is the sacrificial altar of the contemporary capitalist world; the animals provide the blood and offal while the humans provide the sweat and slave labour.
Perhaps a Chicano writer wouldn’t have created such an unsentimental portrayal of the Aztex, who are bloodthirsty, cocksure and cruel. But they are still far kooler than the “Europians”, and as Foster makes clear in one of his galloping monologues, the difference between our pathetic reality and their magnificent alternative is a matter of aesthetics. “The Europians figured they’d wipe us out, Plan A, enslave our peoples down at the corner liquor store, crush all resistance thru germ warfare and lawyers, lie, cheat, kidnap, ransom, burn our sacred libraries, loot our kapital, install Christian theokratik dictatorships … in no way does that fit our aesthetic conception of how the universe is supposed to run. It’s just plain ugly. To think that they want to foist that vision of Reality on the rest of us. That’s the insult. Barbarick, cheap aesthetik based on flimsy Mechanistik notions of the omniverse as a Swiss watch set to ticking by some sort of Trinity.”
And that’s just the second page – as one of the Zenzontlis asks, “Who says James Joyce has a lock on interior monologue?” Divisions between the two worlds become blurrier as our dual protagonists’ verbal bouts of Montezuma’s revenge merge into a rio grande of apocalyptic lyricism. Foster’s work has the lilting drive of picante poetry that begs to be read aloud, even shouted, though he warns in the preface, “Persons attempting to find a plot in this book should read Huck Finn.” Foster slips, not only between the Aztek Socialist Imperium and East LA today, but in and out of WW2 in both realities. Throughout this calendric confusion, the only unifying element seems to be blood, lots and lots of it, but most of all, bloody good writing.
ATOMIK AZTEX, by Sesshu Foster (City Lights, $29.95).
