After Sweet Green Corn Ripens

I never knew that her given name was Maxine. Or that, as a girl, she dreamed of becoming a Rockette, and thus spent many evenings with her cousin Judith practicing those high kicks.

The very last time I saw Maggie, she was smooth-skinned, cheeky pink, and saucy. She wore a small brown pill cap on her head, which I thought looked smart and stylishly understated. Her explanation for it: “I’m having a bad-hair year.”

I laughed. “Well, gorgeous, you sure know how to make that work for you!” I’d been having challenges along such lines myself, wearing decorative scarves to hide a thinning area just past my hairline. Her ornamentation reasons, of course, were entirely different than mine: she had been through several months of the “bone-crusher,” aka the “soul-destroyer,” her personal nicknames for chemotherapy.

What a far cry from when we first met -- in the late 1980s, at a downtown San Diego protest against the Reagan administration’s policy in Central America. I was there in creative-intellectual-rebel mode, on the verge of entering graduate school, espousing a hip cause popular with many of my twenty-something peers. She, on the other hand, had actually been to Central America, living there for many moons, witnessing suffering, reading widely among the works of the post-war Latin American poets, and writing gritty and gripping poetry in empathetic response to the political and social injustice she found.  

So her objection in the poem “In The Distinguished Liberal,” (written for the poet Claribel Alegria) came from a wholeheartedly different level of experience than that of most who had gathered at that well-intentioned downtown demonstration. The title was simultaneously the first line of the poem, highlighting an irony that I probably did not fully appreciate all those years ago:

In The Distinguished Liberal

Newspaper

I read of the Salvadoran poet,

now living in Nicaragua,

who came here to speak

of her country – Neruda’s

delicate waist of America –

of the rich volcanic earth

of corona de cristo that blooms blood red

of executions in the dark …

The distinguished liberal

newspaper headlined its story

“Salvadoran Misery.” Of course

severed heads are a misery.

Mutilated Indians are a misery.

Military escalations promoted

as humanitarian aid are a misery.

Yet she speaks of revolution

in San Salvadoran factories

in liberation churches

in pueblo-owned milpas after

sweet green corn ripens.

To her mind, it was the “distinguished liberals” who seemed disheartened and overly focused on bad news, unable to hear the yearning and the hope in these grassroots revolutions. It was also the “distinguished liberals” in academia who were often writing beautiful award-winning lyrical poetry, paying lip-service to justice-making and solidarity with the oppressed, yet remaining at an easy distance from it all -- comfortable, complacent, tenure-tracked, safe.

Maggie’s track was never tenured. Early on, some critics claimed her work needed more lyricism and form, that it flirted too much with bitterness and despair (and admittedly, I had moments when I agreed...), that it was overly political and time-specific in content. Of course, would be her retort. That was, in good part, the point. Mutilated Indians lacked a certain lyricism. Prisoners of South Africa’s apartheid system danced with despair. Life in the world’s war zones was invariably fraught with politics and the specifics of time and place. When it came to poetry, perhaps, she tended to agreed with Che Guevara. As her poem “Death of Che,” attests, Che once said: “I can’t sleep/on a mattress while my soldiers /are shivering up there.”/ And he divided the men into two groups: / those who can sleep / on a mattress / while others suffer / and those who won’t.”

That line describes much of Maggie’s poetry. It doesn’t sleep on a mattress while prisoners are being tortured. It cries, rages, unveils, and refuses to cover its eyes.

I step out of my car

emptied of singing

to work, to work

Emptied by news of war

the hungry, radiation...

-- from "World of Dust," in Seventh Circle by Maggie Jaffe

Yet Maggie herself was no mattress-rejecting ascetic. A luxurious bed was one of her most treasured indulgences during the final months of her life -- along with cigarettes (she had quit a few times in her life, once for nearly fifteen years) and red meat (after losing too much weight after surgery and chemo, she enthusiastically renounced vegetarianism). She loved tasty food, good drink, exotic clothes, hefty books (her favorite: Moby Dick), opera, jazz, dangly earrings, thought-provoking films, liberation theologians, and left-wing activists. She had poetess-diva tendencies. Her cats – there were always one or two in her abode-- were registered and pedigreed. Despite many rough patches, she dug in to life with great verve and relish.

Maggie & I dug this flick.

Maggie welcomed guests into her home with an effervescent hospitality. Once upon a time, she and her husband, also a professor, threw lavish end-of-semester parties for their students and friends, replete with wines, tamales, chocolates, Dadaism, and intoxicated sociocultural gabfests. I was a graduate teaching associate then, and I enjoyed most of those gatherings. But, introvert that I am, I loved more my solo visits with Maggie. An afternoon or evening with Maggie was always a step into a delicious, zestful Sabbath. Sometimes we’d go out for dinner and a movie – but more often she’d invite me over to her place and we’d stay in, noshing on Vietnamese take-out or some fabulous homemade delicacy, and watch rented films in her sumptuous bedroom-theater. This way we could get mildly, or perhaps deeply, buzzed without worrying about driving. Belly-full, wine glasses on night stand, and ashtray-ready, we’d prop thick pillows against the headboard of the king-sized bed. The windows to the room had these luxurious burgundy velvet drapes – which she would draw to block out any outside distractions. With the TV volume suitably adjusted and video forwarded to the film’s beginning, she would dim the overhead room light to some deep shade of sangria, and we’d be ready to surrender ourselves to Kubrick or Almodovar or Lee or Wenders. We watched a variety of movies, from the obscure and ponderous to the popular and current: El Norte, The Fringe Dwellers, A Dry White Season, Hiroshima Mon Amour, The Mission.  Sometimes we would “preview” films – that is, check out a flick we were considering showing in a class, and pedagogically chew the fat. I recall one evening when her husband, on his way out the door to teach a night class, crankily sneered at us as we started to preview the movie version of Hair. “You’ve got to be kidding me -- Hair? Isn’t that just West Side Story on acid?” That sealed my decision to show the rambunctious hippie musical during the final week of one of my English 100 classes, although for the life of me I cannot recall how I managed to connect that movie with written composition. Maggie’s preference that semester was George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which she saw as a smart and gritty critique of cold war politics and domestic racism.  

Liberate the lobsters!

Expropriate the best sellers!

Shoot the New Yorker in the kneecaps!

Interrogate the whole damn magazine rack!

--from "At the Writers' Colony" in Continuous Performance by Maggie Jaffe

Maggie loved exploring and teaching about portrayals of the oppressed in popular culture – particularly the working poor, prisoners, death row inmates, the “disappeared” in Central and South America, Native Americans, and the African diaspora. As an uprooted intellectual Woodstock-nation bard and secular Jew with a heart wide open to the cries of the downtrodden, Maggie staunchly refused to separate her hunger and thirst for justice from her writing and teaching.

From Continuous Performance, Poems by Maggie Jaffe

Because of Maggie, I came across ideas and histories and cultural moments that I might not have encountered otherwise. We went to hear ex-CIA agent Philip Agee when he gave a lecture at San Diego State, where we heard the horror stories about agents testing torture techniques on homeless people and crop-dusting viruses over American cities to see how well such biological invasions might disable a population. We went to the protests against CIA recruitment on campus, trying not to laugh as we chanted “The CIA is – you know – the US version of the Ges-ta-po!” When some local neo-Nazis littered the campus with hate literature, Maggie invited the president of the local John Brown Anti Ku Klux Klan organization to speak in her classes. She gave me one of the dozens of T-shirts she’d bought as a kind of payment for his lecture – across the front was an image of a thick-booted skinhead – crossed out with an X – and large bright letters proclaiming “No Nazis! No KKK! No Fascist USA!” I could not bring myself to wear this attention-attracting shirt in public, but she loved sporting it with her Indian earrings and beatnik beret.

Maggie lent me scads of books from her personal library: Black Elk Speaks, Soledad Brother, Rules for Radicals. One year for my birthday, she gave me a volume of artwork by the black collage artist Romare Bearden, a thoughtful and lovely gift. The first page of the book features a quote of Bearden’s: “The true artist feels there is only one art—and that it belongs to all mankind.” Bearden’s work – full of the specifics of biography, history, struggle, cultural ritual, and place – expressed a moral position that contrasted with the cynical detachment and disconnectedness reflected in the prevailing art of his day. Bearden rejected “art for art’s sake,” filling his collages with vivid images and tense energies that reflected the turbulence he experienced in the inner cities. As Mary Campbell noted in her accompanying essay, “In the urban scenes, on the city streets, there is a violence that is destructive, yet there is also a redemption and a transforming vision that allows hope.” Bearden bore witness through his art, and when Maggie gifted me with a collection of his work, I sensed her encouragement for me to join her in creating “art for bearing witness’ sake” – to find a way to do the same with my prose.

A birthday gift from Maggie

Maggie generally scoffed at institutional religion (as did I back in those days), but she had a secret appreciation for the yearnings and values that had given birth to it. Once, she sheepishly admitted to me that she had taken to lighting candles for her father on the anniversaries of his death. She also confessed that she had “a thing” for Jesuits (Perhaps we had just watched the movie The Mission). Together Maggie and I saw the movie Romero, about the El Salvadoran archbishop assassinated in church because of his love and support of the poor in his country. I’m pretty sure it was through Maggie that I first heard about the liberation theologians Gustavo Gutierrez and Ernesto Cardenal and the Jesuit antiwar activist Daniel Berrigan.

Perhaps that is why she was the first of my academic friends that I “came out” to about my perplexing return to the Catholic church in the year 2000.  By then, I had long since left academia and had moved away from the heart of the city where Maggie continued to teach and write. I had married; she had divorced. Our work lives had become busier and more stressful, and we both regretted that our visits had become fewer and farther between. She took my re-embracing of my baptismal roots as a fine reason to invite me over for dinner and a bottle of red wine.

“You know, you are partly to blame for my stumbling back to church,” I told Maggie, accusingly. “You and your Ernesto Cardenal. You and your Dead Man Walking and your Romero.”  

            “Well, my personal theory is that with a name like Mary you’re pretty much doomed to such a fate. You are what you are.” She took a sip of wine.

            “You are what you are?” I laughed and shook my head. “Holy Moses, Magalita! That’s right out of the Hebrew scriptures: ‘I am that I am’.”

            “Well see, then, there ya go. Neither of us can keep away from this religious crap. I yam what I yam too, apparently. Like Popeye the Sailor Man.”

            Serendipitously, Bob Marley’s Exodus album was on while we were eating. At the same instant, we both realized that the song “Jammin” was playing:

            we’re jamming –

            to think that jammin was a thing of the past

            we’re jammin

            and I hope this jam is gonna last

“Oh my God” – we raised our glasses for a toast, for this synchronicity was, well, truly jammin – and together, with Bob, we sang it: “We’re YAMMIN!”

Summer faculty. Maggie is fourth from the left; I'm on the right.

           

A decade later, things really were jamming for Maggie. She had won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that enabled her to take a sabbatical and finish her sixth book: Flic(k)s, a poetic exploration of “cinema and life’s cinematic movements.” She was in a relationship with a kind man who treated her like a queen. College lecturing continued to be hard (and underpaid and underappreciated) work, but more often than not, she was enjoying it.

Then the crushing fatigue descended, along with a spate of urinary tract infections and various bugs that she initially chalked up to a weak immune system. “I tell those fuckers (her snarky-yet-affectionate nickname for ‘students’) to stay home when they’re sick but somebody always shows up to cough in my face. I don’t get it!”

            “It’s obviously a conspiracy,” I joked. “If they can get you sick, they figure they can weasel out of a quiz or get you to drop a paper.”

            “Well, I do think that they have figured out that I give better grades when I’m high on Sudafed.”

            But the Sudafed and homeopathics and healthy eating did not stop what was ailing her. It turned out to be bladder cancer, advanced to such an extent that Maggie’s entire bladder, along with her reproductive organs, had to be removed.

            Maggie hoped initially that the surgeon would successfully scoop out all of the cancer. When post-surgical chemotherapy was suggested, she resisted it at first – dreading everything she’d heard about its side effects. Eventually she was persuaded to give it a go. It was, in a word, ruthless—and having to navigate the challenges of a urostomy and urine drainage bag compounded the long slog of exhaustion, nausea, and brain fog. Fairly soon after she finished her chemo sessions, however, she experienced an encouraging return of strength. For a few months, her scans showed no return of cancer. Plans were made for a second surgery – this time to construct a new bladder from a section of her intestine.  She moved into a new, easier-to-manage apartment – a small place with a pool – and was looking forward to swimming again. We made tentative plans to share decadent “comfort meals” of rare steak, macaroni and cheese, and canned chocolate frosting. “And you know what?” she said to me one day on the phone. “This crap is getting me a whole two semesters off! In this world, the trick to getting a long paid sabbatical is: get seriously ill. Don’t that fuck all?”

Her vim and spunk had returned. I hoped this jam was gonna last.

One incision was as far as the surgical bladder-building team got with Maggie. They immediately stitched her back up, aborting the reconstruction after finding cancer inside her abdomen. The oncologist determined that it was inoperable and untreatable.

            It was one of cancer treatment’s horrible back-stabs—those false-negative scans, and the sensations of well-being and vigor that had invited hope and future plans. Maggie knew that there could be no guarantees in her situation, but she had been feeling healthy and had prepared well for another several months of post-surgical recuperation in her new abode, replete with her favorite legal pain-killers, tons of movies, and the possibility of being able to swim in a pool again by summer. Instead, she would have to procure new homes for her cats and experience the anticipatory grief of her family and loved ones.

            At first she still wanted to do the decadent-eating thing, so we kept making plans to eat at DZ Akins (an outrageously yummy Jewish diner in La Mesa) and return to her place with the worst possible take-home dessert for us to savor as we watched schlocky movies together. But our plans were consistently interrupted: she had to contact lawyers; she needed to meet with a doctor about an experimental therapy; a painful tiredness would overcome her and make visiting impossible.

            One night she called me up to apologize for having to cancel our plans yet again.

            “No need to apologize, Maggie. We’ll do it some other time. Whatever works for you. It’s okay.” I hated that she seemed to be feeling guilty about not being up for a visit.

             “I can’t believe how bad this sucks.” Maggie’s voice was a tense whisper. “Goddamned fucking cancer! I have so much to do, still. I hate it all. I hate everything.”

            As I mouthed some words attempting to express love and acknowledge the unimaginable suckiness of dealing with cancer, Maggie began to cry. Then to moan. Then to sob. And then to gulp for air between sobs. All I could do was listen and remain on the line, feeling absolutely, utterly helpless. The phone grew hot in my hand; the sky above glittered horribly; the workdesk in front of me exuded an awful woodenness. And for some reason, I could not cry at that particular moment. The energy in Maggie’s sobbing demanded all of the emotive space – and all thirty-five miles of air —between us. There was nothing to say or do. I listened as she sobbed, and I breathed in the thick darkness, wordlessly praying. My crying would come later.

            This was not despair Maggie was experiencing – I think it was more like a mournful anger. Despair usually lacks the energy that sobbing requires. It dawned on me later (slow, I am) that whatever usually brings contentment or happy anticipation – such as tasty food or a visit from a friend – might evoke an angry or embittered grief in someone who is expecting to die soon. It’s the encounter with a naked existential unfairness – i.e. the people and activities and life I love are being ripped away from me; it hurts too much to enjoy them now – that enrages.

Maggie and I never got together for that decadent meal. There were only two more times we connected – both times by phone. One time it was to talk about hospice. She had heard rumors that a residential hospice (rather than a hospital) might be a good way to go: “they give you good drugs there, I hear.” I shared with her my only experience with hospice, which had occurred two years previously when another friend, Kathy D., was dying of cancer. I had been deeply moved by the thoroughness and tenderness of the in-home hospice nurse’s care during Kathy’s last days. I told Maggie I had heard wonderful things about San Diego Hospice, which (at the time) offered a beautiful space for people to die. She said she would check it out as her situation progressed.

            In the fall of 2010, Maggie and I had our final conversation.

            I was thousands of miles away, visiting my hometown, Kansas City. I had taken some time to myself in the afternoon to walk around the lake at Loose Park. Maggie called me, still hoping that we could get together soon. She sounded serene – even jovial – and told me that she managed to get herself in a trial with an experimental anti-cancer drug. She was looking forward to trying some other alternative therapies, because “what the fuck? Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Might be my final adventure.”

She also wanted to talk with me about “spiritual things.”  “Seriously, Mary, I’m wondering about what life really means, if there is a great beyond, and shit like that! Can you believe it?”

            “So then,” I shot back. “You must have made it into the psilocybin trial? Or the ecstasy one?”

            We both laughed hard. “I promise to save a little for you if I get some of the good shit,” she said.

            “Cool! So can we plan on shrooms and Fantasia for our next get-together?”

            “Marking my calendar, girlfriend.”

            All joking aside, Maggie really did want to talk about spiritual things, and we continued to talk for nearly an hour. I had recently taken a course in spiritual direction, and she was hoping I had some juicy cosmic wisdom to proffer. In all honesty, I felt I had had little to share in that moment that would not sound like some half-baked, paltry platitude. Furthermore, I am not much good at conversing via cell phone – communicating without eyes, gestures, facial expressions, and touch feels stilted and partial. And of course, a good friend’s impending death is intimidating as hell. However, when Maggie asked for suggestions on “something spiritual” to read, a name did spring to mind.

            “Check out the works of Rabbi Rami Shapiro,” I said. “I’ve seen him speak at a few interfaith conferences. He writes a column for Spirituality and Health magazine. He’s funny, wise, and deep. He has a more nondualist approach to religion and spirituality, and thinks of 'God' not as a Supreme Being, but Being itself. He translates YHVH as ‘the One Who Is’ rather than ‘Lord.’ I think you’d like him.”

            I had a paragraph from Shapiro’s The Hebrew Prophets scribbled in my journal and I shared it with her: “When the prophet speaks to you in the voice of God, you are hearing the deepest truths of your own being echoed in their words. It is as if your greater self, the self aware of itself as one with God, were addressing your smaller self, the ego that, while also a manifestation of God, insists that it is other than God. It is the ego that sees the world as an arena of competing beings vying for the biggest piece of a fixed pie. It is the ego that shifts from self to selfishness, and engages in unjust, cruel, and exploitative behavior. It is the ego that needs to hear the prophetic challenge; it is the ego that needs to turn. And when it does, it turns toward its greater self and reconnects with God and engages creation justly, lovingly, and humbly...”

            “Hunh.” She paused to write his name down. “He sounds like he might be a mensch. Thanks for the suggestion.”

            I want to take a moment to behold a couple of lovely ironies:

Through my years of exposure to Maggie’s cultural and political tastes, I discovered elements and strains of Catholicism that I had not encountered previously in church or in Catholic school. And there, in our final conversation, I had offered Maggie a nugget from within her own inherited, albeit largely rejected, Jewish tradition. Our mutual loathing of institutional religion had been so strong when we first met, yet as our lives ripened, we each handed over – almost accidentally -- something tasty and nourishing, like sweet green corn, from the others’ rejected tradition.

            The other irony is Maggie asking me about “things of the spirit,” when the truth was that she had, in her own fashion, already lived the spirit through her writing and teaching and politics. Her work was inspired by and dedicated to all the beaten-down of this world – and like an incorrigible Hebrew prophet, her poetry and her life proclaimed : “Spare me the sound of your hymns, and let the music of your lutes fall silent; I am not listening. Rather let justice well up like water, let righteousness flow like a mighty stream.” (Amos 5:24).

My attempts to contact Maggie over the next three months were unsuccessful. I left her messages by phone, note, and e-mail but never heard back from her. One day, her answering machine was too full to receive any more messages. She had mentioned to me earlier that she might simply “let people go” at a certain point, and limit her contacts to a small circle of loved ones. Perhaps that is what she chose to do. Or—perhaps she intended to get in touch with people at some point, but was interrupted by death, the ultimate diva. She died at the San Diego Hospice on March 5, 2011, at age 62.

            Several people among Maggie’s larger circle of family and friends spoke at the memorial service. Maggie’s sister recalled a favorite question they half-jokingly asked of each other over the years: Oy, what happened to us? Where are all the Talmudic scholars in our family? I shared humorous memories about the bad luck we both had with dentistry and our mutual idolatry of heavy, dangly earrings in the early 1990s – Maggie underwent surgery after ripping an ear lobe. Another friend and colleague mentioned that Maggie had actually felt rather well during her last two days – even “rallying” at one point to write a few lines and spontaneously hold a rambunctious poetry workshop for the hospice staff.

            I love knowing that little detail about her final days. It still hurts that she is gone – and I am sad that I will not hear that particular Noo-Yawk accent again, the timbre of her voice with its unique mixture of sarcasm and concern and chutzpah --  but I love knowing that she found her own way to stay in the flow as she was dying. That in her own fashion, she donned that mantle of Talmudic scholar – or, perhaps more accurately-- of chachamah (wise woman) -- teaching and subverting and loving well in her full, wild ripeness.

Maggie Jaffe's NEA Author Page.