Q&A about his book of poems: Red Leather Gloves
S.e.e.: Why did you write this book and what are the boxing poems really about?
I wrote this book as a purging of sorts. I was an amateur boxer in Houston when I was a teenager in the 1980s and the experience had an indelible impact on me later in life. I come from a boxing family, so the boys are expected to be fighters, and I was one even before I began boxing for Championship Boxing of Galena Park. Boxing refined my street fighting sensibility into something that was both constructive and very destructive. First, I learned the discipline and value of sacrifice that I did not have before. This has enabled me to survive very difficult situations in life, and also to thrive in various pursuits.
But I also learned how to inflict severe damage with my fists in very calculated, scientific ways. Worse still is that the training—rounds and rounds of sparring with bigger fighters and even professionals—made the skills into rote. And the beatings made me angry and taught me a twisted model of manhood that segued with the general socialization of working class Chicano youth in my barrio.
As I grew older, however, the experience started to resonate as a trauma and haunted my everyday encounters. I kept getting into fights even into my 30s! The book came about as I started meditating on some of the lessons of Chicana feminism, which has explicated piece meal the causes and effects of male privilege and masculinist performances of power.
As I pursued my BA and later my MA and PhD, I really did want to be on the right side of our struggle to retain our humanity and our liberation as a people and a species, and this necessarily involved confronting how I had been taught to be the bad guy, as it were. The poems, then, really are about boxing as a science of violence, and a social science of masculinity; yet the overall book also is a chronicle of the socialization of a young boy into a terrible model of manhood all the while he refuses to completely surrender his capacity to care, his empathy, and his enduring belief in humanity.
S.e.e.: So is the book is autobiographical?
Yes, Red Leather Gloves is highly autobiographical. It oftentimes is a mistake to invest too much autobiographical resonance in a poet’s work, but in this case, it is true. This is a slice of my life. In fact, there is a narrative quality to these free verse poems, and the entire collection is arranged more or less chronologically and thematically. It begins with the initiations, and progresses through the training and fighting towards the middle-aged man trying to make sense of it all.
That is, it begins with the 15-year-old “Kid from Magnolia,” and ends with the 40-year-old professor who is trying to make peace with the violence inflicted upon him by refusing to continue participating in male privilege, or at least trying to arrest it and keep learning how to love.
S.e.e.: What is Chicano about this book?
Well, there are many things that are uniquely Chicano, but it is important to note that Chicana and Chicano mean so many different things for many different Raza. For me, the book is based in the racially charged context of south Texas, particularly Houston, Texas, and more precisely, my barrio Magnolia. We are the smallest barrio in Houston, and are geographically contained by a bayou, the ship channel, and rail yards, so we are quite isolated and insular. That is to say that the book takes place in the segregated bigoted context of Texas, which is compounded by barrio rivalries that are frequently violent and sometimes lethal. This barrio warfare played out in the ring in tournaments in Houston.
The poems also explore various types of bigotries through the use of various vernacular idioms, including Caló and various types of code switching and bilingualisms. The cultural references also are grounded in the poetic persona, who sees, experiences, and understands everything in terms of race and Raza culture. There aren’t too many poets nowadays who write about fideo and manteca, and in these poems, these food items and other cultural references gain a unique resonance. For instance, I note how my training required that I eschew Mexican food such a rice, beans, fideo, and tortillas de harina, which back in the day were made by hand with lots of lard, or manteca. All these foods included starches, carbohydrates, and fat that put on weight. They were thus verboten as my coaches were determined to keep me as thin and light as possible to keep me in the lightest weight classes, which maximized my natural strength as I fought fighters who usually did not have much muscle mass (I fought at 106 lbs., 112 lbs., and 128 lbs.).
S.e.e.: What makes this book different from other boxing books?
This book differs from almost all books on boxing because I am not celebrating boxing, nor am I providing a romanticized nostalgic view of it. Boxing involves the refinement of violence through scientific methods designed to destroy another human body and, to be honest, the entire human being. To do this effectively, you need to get your natural empathy weaned out of you, and you need to either already have a killer instinct, or develop it, and none of this is good.
I remember coming home every night from training with my head pounding as if it were going to explode. I was emaciated, always hungry but afraid to eat too much for fear of moving up to a more dangerous weight class, and I was angry, really angry for all the beatings. My coaches were bigots; the tournaments were chaotic free for alls with fights breaking out in the bleechers and coaches betting on their own fighters, and even coaches got into fights with each other at times, once with a knife!
Worse, boys get broken, literally broken in ways that likely followed them throughout their lives in the way that my guilt at breaking boys has followed me, though I imagine it was worse for them. I was undefeated with 14 fights, two knockouts, but in truth, to be undefeated, I needed to get beaten to the point of defeat repeatedly so I could fight my way out, and the cost was my humanity.
You do not get this reality in other boxing books because most of them are written by people who were never fighters or by fighters writing a self-promotion memoir that, usually, is ghost written. One notable exception is Anissa Zamarron’s Boxing Shadows, which explores the underside of boxing in an honest painful expose of abuse that is not only rare in the genre of boxing literature, but completely non-existent, especially by male fighters. I seek to offer a similar exposé.
My poems expose all of the hidden horrors of boxing while at the same time trying to offer some insights into the why and the how of it all, that is, the metaphysical dimensions, pursuant to meditations on where we need to go from here. Most books on boxing feature the fight game as a metaphor for resilience or political struggle, or they romanticize the pageantry and athleticism, some explore the homoerotic dimensions through erotica, and all of this is part of boxing.
But the realities behind this—the boxer shitting his pants in the ring after a gut punch, the panic some fighters experience, the brutal taunts, the utter viciousness that emerges from the fight or flight instinct—is the real story of boxing. It is primal, and ugly, and involves the unleashing of our animal nature. I wanted to expose this because it is directly linked to the larger interpersonal and geopolitical forms of violence that define human society at present.
S.e.e.: As a final question, how do you make sense of the contradictory nature of this book, which uses art to talk about violence?
This is one of the enduring paradoxes in all of human culture: the depiction of violence through art. But it also makes lots of sense. Culture is our way of making sense of the world, and art is perfectly suited to deal with complexities, contradictions, and ambiguities. These poems about violence seek to present aesthetically elaborated works of art that enable the reader to experience the range of emotions that a fighter experiences as they are faced with an opponent who is trying to destroy every aspect of their being while a crowd of bystanders goads them on.
Art is the only way I found to convey the terror and explore the scientific athleticism, while simultaneously illuminating the tragedy and ethics of it all. In the end, Red Leather Glovesgives us a range of different types of violence, which ultimately enable the reader to gain a more complex understanding of the micro and macro dimensions of how it all works, and why it works the way it does: to teach us how to dominate or be dominated. The multiple strands all come together in the last poem, “Ode to Ali,” which pays homage to a fighter pacifist without effacing the trauma and tragedy of it all.
In the end, like Ali, I do have hope for humanity, but I also believe that we need to know how far we can descend, and how far we have descended, before we can achieve a real and lasting utopia. This is what Red Leather Gloves is all about.
B.V. Olguín is featured in this interview which follows up three extracts that ran here last week from his poetry book, Red Leather Gloves, published by Hansen Publishing Group and available at Amazon, http://ow.ly/ygd7O.