Native in a Strange Land: Trials and Tremors.

Wanda Coleman. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow P, 1996. 292 pp. $27.50 cloth/$15.00 paper.

Reviewed by

Sandra K. Stanley

California State University, Northridge

For Raymond Chandler, Angeles is a labyrinth of mean streets, for Joan Didion a mirage of tarnished dreams, but for Wanda Coleman Los Angeles is an "S & M trip": To love this "city with no center, no heart, no soul ... is to be a constant trick, a constant victim of the dry screw. Is to never be quite satisfied on deep levels. Is to always be hungry." In Native in a Strange Land: Trials and Tremors, Coleman composes a series of hungry, restless, often angry, sometimes jubilant essays that she describes as love songs for Los Angeles, a "lover with deaf ears."

Although best known as a poet and fiction writer of raw, politically and sexually charged works (e.g., Mad Dog Black Lady and African Sleeping Sickness), Coleman is also a freelance journalist. Familiar with the everyday grind of earning an often subsistence living, Coleman has long faced the challenge of trying to convert her writing into food and rent money. At times this mother of three "lucked into reviews and interviews"; at other times she received assignments; and at other times she wrote essays before finding an interested publisher. Coleman herself concedes that this "hand-to-mouth writing" has taken a "substantive booty" on her essay collection - both in terms of thematic coherence and consistent voice. Undeterred, however, Coleman has made the very fragmentation of both her erratic life and chaotic urban environment the subject matter of her book. Although her collection, like Los Angeles, has "no center," she has attempted to give it a piece of her heart and soul. In Native in a Strange Land, Coleman acts as a tour guide through the "emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through the scattered fragments of [her] living memory."

Often that topography is encased in physical and psychic gridlock: memories of the Watts riot of 1965, the L.A. riots of 1992, the Northridge earthquake of 1994. Like Coleman's other writings - over three decades of published poetry and prose - these essays highlight the "trials and tremors" of people in crisis, people simply struggling to survive. The painful themes of sexism, racism, dehumanization, and marginalization pervade her work. A reader is less likely to find Coleman's Los Angeles populated with the "up and coming" of Beverly Hills than with the "down and out" of skid row, for Coleman is most interested in the lives of the disenfranchised and the dispossessed. Her heroes often find themselves scavenging on the margins of society: Transients like the ever-present panhandlers - some wily, some industrious, some pathetically desperate - discover ways to battle daily indignities with laughter and small acts of kindness; friends like Nan, "holed up in high-rise hell" and fighting poverty and diabetes, beat back the lure of suicide by simply sharing a conversation with a friend; and strangers like an unknown woman, falling to her death from the Barham overpass, realize they are unable to beat off the lure of suicide "in a metropolis gone mad, where the only politics is survival and success is measured in multiples of zeroes."

Admittedly, some of Coleman's essays - like "Astrology to Go" and "Of Fatness and Fitness" - seem obligatory, giving a gratuitous nod to L.A.'s reputation as a place obsessed with fads and body images. But other essays, like her eulogy to Susannah Foster and her "Letter to Jamal," relate Coleman's struggle in her own cultural war against poverty, racism, and hopelessness. In "Letter to Jamal," Coleman responds to a "severe case of double vision," of deja vu: the 1965 Watts and 1992 South Central rebellions. Coleman's social history cites a litany of those who have not kept the Faith - "the tricksters, shysters and pseudointellectuals, of all colors and creed." She does not try to hide her anger, and she concedes that some might judge her tone as rancorous, as tinged with the cliches of "victimization." Nevertheless, she also asserts, "I do have a good fix on the mistakes of the past. I will do my part to keep reminding those who have forgotten the lessons of that past. I will teach those who want to learn."

Although Coleman, disabused of any illusions, realizes that she is not a stranger in paradise, but a native in a strange land, she is committed to staying with her S & M metropolis. She is a survivor, abused, but not beaten, bloody, but unbowed. Finally, she toasts her erstwhile lover, this "orange town": "So I'll hang tough and love you. / With no regrets."