banana [ ]
If you’ve never admired the beauty of a flowering banana blossom, you’ll appreciate the following depiction from “Banana [ ]: A History of the Americas,” the centerpiece poem of Paul Hlava Ceballos’s first full-length collection:
Banana290 Leaves Around the Bud Unfold
and Banana Blossoms are Revealed291
Oval Shaped, Dark PurpleBud, Banana Blossom or
Banana Heart292 Dug in the Rich Earth
a Banana Head Dropped in the Earth293in Hopes That Banana Breeders
Will294 Live
For Ever and Ever
What makes this strangely formal, oddly passive language noteworthy is the fact that Ceballos has lifted these passages—and hundreds more, as the footnotes attest—from an astounding archive of sources that range from scientific treatises and encyclopedia entries, to interviews with labor organizers, declassified CIA documents, and accounts of brutal corporate exploits in Latin America by companies like United Fruit, Chiquita, and Del Monte. Handpicked and arranged into stanzas, the staggering accumulation of quoted material proves somehow both discombobulating and grounding, as Ceballos mixes and matches sources across time and space to establish the banana as an enduring and divisive emblem. Earlier in the same poem, Ceballos strips down each quote such that “banana” hangs like a linguistic counterweight, dead letters lingering at the end of each lyric:
to banana134
be banana135
a banana136
domesticated banana137
object banana138
overripe banana139
as banana140
an banana141
empire banana142
Elsewhere in this collection, Ceballos employs a variety of forms, such as the Ecuadorian Decima, “an oral form from the Esmeraldas province, developed from a parallel Spanish form by Afro-Ecuadorian poets," as well as sonnets written from the points of view of the last rulers of the Incan empire, including Atahualpa, the doomed final king:
When I was killed, I faced my birth.
Dark queen, scarlet blush and gem-sweat,
cradles in arms a newborn king-
dom, which quakes and crumbles in half.
Ceballos’s balance of archival footage with imagined voices of the past brings into sharp focus questions of empire, inheritance, and legacy in ways that resonate beyond national and cultural borders.
