Meet Fresno’s new poet laureate, Salinas-born Gen X Chicana, Aideed Medina. A powerful woman who exudes resilience and hope, Medina intimately understands hardship and conveys this through her poetry. She understands pain and trauma, sprinkled with hope, and her deep connection resonates with her readers. There is a special spirituality in her poems.
The following excerpt is from a special poem she wrote for Fresno and presented at her appointment to the two-year term as poet laureate in April, titled “Yokuts Land, of Fresno, I sing”:
We are unfinished but not invisible,
the underdog with the champion’s stride,
a city in the heart of farmland, at the skirts of wilderness,
framed by valley oaks…
I am a poet of the underpass,
the alleyway,
the riverway, and the 99.
Yokuts land, of Fresno, I sing…
Fresno’s people are my people,
their worries are my worries,
their joys are my
celebrations.
Yokuts land, of Fresno, I sing…
We are a city of neighbors who care,
advocate, build, work for, and with
each other. Our business is
humanity…
In our dreams lives
the labor of the city
that is
Fresno.
Aideed is a beautiful name with Arabic and African roots that suggests “help” or “support” and which Medina herself identifies as “holy tears” as she connects with the humanity and environment around her.
“I’m kind of necia (stubborn), you know, I live in my own world inside my head and so it’s sometimes hard for me to understand when people don’t see the big picture or how we are all connected as humans,” she says. “I feel very connected to not only people but to the world at large.”
And this connection is deeper than meets the eye.
“I rarely use metaphor, like when people read in my poems that I’m talking to trees or whatever, I’m not being ‘poetic,’ I’m literally out there talking to trees sometimes,” she confesses with a laugh. “There are trees that I have a special connection with—I think that all things in the universe can communicate with you in some way if you listen.”
“I feel a connection, for sure,” she continues, “and I do feel that how you treat the people and place that you are in, your energy can be sensed—it’s an echoing of vibration that will respond in kind, you know.”
Medina is attuned to the vibration of life and has been writing about it ever since she can remember.
“I learned English in a period of a month when I was five years old,” the native Spanish speaker shares. “It was my Rosetta stone moment, and I’ll never forget it.
“My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Brown, was singing, ‘Popcorn popping on the apricot tree…’—and I suddenly understood what she was saying. Everything clicked. It was magical. All the world made sense, like I could read everything on the board.
“I could understand what she was talking about. I knew that a cat was a gato, I knew that a ball was a pelota—suddenly I could read in English and all the world made sense.”
The moment this Pandora’s box of literacy opened up for Medina, everything changed.
“I wrote and wrote and wrote and I started falling in love with how the letter ‘a’ felt, and the letters ‘b’ and ‘o,’ and I just started writing and writing and the next thing you know, I was writing little songs like ‘Cat in the Hat.’ I was only five,” Medina acknowledges.
“But [then] I started writing stories and all kinds of crazy stuff and my teachers were like, ‘What the hell?’ Suddenly, I went from ESL to the next moment having a special teacher come in and give me higher, advanced lessons than my classmates.”
“I would put on plays during recess with my friends,” Medina fondly remembers. “‘Okay, and you drive the ambulance and then you’re going to fall to the ground and then we’re going to come and get in there like this…’ is how it would go.
“Like, I would make all these crazy things up and I would write songs and I would write, write and write in my little journal—just a happy little kindergartener and first grader living in my special imagination.”
But then came Mrs. Ashton, Medina’s second-grade teacher.
Mrs. Ashton had heard about little precocious Medina and her writing prowess. One day, during recess, she found one of Medina’s little “booklets”—stapled sheets of paper put together as a makeshift journal, chock-full with stories, plays and poems.
When the class returned from recess, they saw on the board a list of misspelled words and grammatical errors taken from Medina’s booklet. Mrs. Ashton proceeded to instruct the class to make fun of Medina’s mistakes ad nauseum until everyone in the class was distraught and crying—which brought a cold, devious smile to Mrs. Ashton’s unforgettable face.
“You’re nothing special—you’re just a dirty little wet Mexican girl.”
Caustic words that Medina has never forgotten.
*****
I. smiley G. Calderon is a Southern California Gen X Chicano now living in the Central Valley. He believes in building community through education. He also loves world peace and tacos. Smiley is advertising director for the Community Alliance newspaper. Contact him at smileycalderon@gmail.com.
[insert Aideed.jpg]Aideed Medina, Fresno’s new poet laureate. Photo by Peter Maiden
