Better than Leno: a good night's read is a pilgrimage around the world

I'm lucky. Nobody occupies the other half of my bed. Only books have earned that honor. A good night's read is a pilgrimage around the world that God created and proclaimed good. A good book can serve to remind us that God's project is not yet done, that we must find creative ways to respond in a world scarred by injustice.

Here's a sampling of my current reading.

In America's Child: A Woman's Journey through the Radical Sixties, Susan Sherman recalls the time she faced, with other peaceful demonstrators, riot police with clubs clenched in their hands. It's 1960 in front of the San Francisco courthouse where hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee are to take place. Hearings continued even after Sen. Joseph McCarthy had been discredited.

Like so many activists then, Ms. Sherman acquired an FBI record while she engaged in the most American of activities: dissent. She takes us on an exciting journey.

She revisits the bohemian poetry scene in New York's Lower East Side when many poets realized they needed to move beyond the merely personal and write about the great political issues of the day. There are trips to Cuba and Nicaragua, and endless demonstrations against the Vietnam War. There is the 5th St. Women's Building Action, where women took over an empty building with the dream of starting a women's shelter, food coop, clothing and book exchange and more.

A big dream? Yes. That's what makes this book so important. It's an invitation to dream big at a time when we are in a quagmire of a war--and, at home, still short of realizing full rights for minorities, gays and women. America's Child invites us not only to react but to reflect, as so many writers and artists did in the pages of IKON, a major magazine that Ms. Sherman co-founded. I find myself asking, what venues must we create today for sharing and nurturing our visions?

On to Vietnam. I wonder if we would have nearly destroyed that country had we a clue about its peoples' art and poetry. The Defiant Muse: Vietnamese Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present helps fill the gap. Published by Feminist Press, the book is an extraordinary bilingual collection edited by Nguyen Thi Minh Ha, Nguyen Thi Thanh Birth and Lady Borton.

Two thousand years of foreign invasions produced a literature of lamentation and resistance. Interestingly, the first heroes in the country's recorded history are women; one of these, Trung Trac, began the practice of combining military and literary arts. In 40 A.D., she stood in front of her officers, unsheathed her sword and recited her "Oath at Hat River," a quatrain in six-eight meter. "First pledge: Wash away the enemy;/Second pledge/Rebuild the Hung Family's Karma ..." Poetry became a way of communicating commands, advice and courage during War.

The American war in Vietnam produced its own poetry as well. Journalist and poet Xuan Quynh (1942-88) captures village life in Vinh Linh, a site of constant U.S. bombing. Villagers responded by digging tunnels in which many children were born.

The poet wrote: "What do you have for a childhood/That you still smile in the bomb shelter?/There is the morning wind which follows you/There is the full moon which follows you ... The enemy's bomb smoke, the evening star."

Being monolingual is a curable disease. If you want some good medicine, read How I Learned English: 55 Accomplished Latinos Recall Lessons in Language and Life (National Geographic Books). This book describes the practical, political and spiritual "passage to another way of seeing the world and speaking it into existence," as PBS commentator Ray Suarez writes in the foreword.

Writer Ruben Martinez, born in this country to a Mexican-American father and Salvadoran mother, recalls his kindergarten days. By now he has pretty much mastered English, which he will "use as a weapon" should other kids, weaned on English, equate Mexican with "wetback" or "beaner."

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"I am holding on to language for dear life," he recalls, "instinctually believing that it can work some magic against ... the color of my skin."

Later in life, his wife was expecting twins, and they wondered about their linguistic futures. Knowing that at that stage in the pregnancy, his girls have their sense of hearing hilly developed, Mr. Martinez gets them started. "I read them Pablo Neruda. And I read them Walt Whitman."

[Demetria Martinez is author of Confessions of a Berlitz Tape Chicana.]

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