from Defacing The Monument
36.
At the Arizona Sonora Border Projects for Inclusion work center in Nogales, Sonora, in July 2017, I stand with a group of students and watch a man fit a Honduran immigrant boy with a prosthetic calf and foot. The boy lost the lower part of his leg falling off The Beast, the network of Mexican freight trains that run from the Guatemalan to the US border. No hero’s journey. No ritual. To cross: “to traverse” or “to oppose or stand in the way of something.”
I have no idea, and I do not rush to imagine, how any of it could feel. Which is not a turning away, which is the opposite of turning away: to stand in my own relational presence before what might be known or not known to me, to tremble in the tangle of compassion, complicity, opacity, and relation. The work center provides wheelchairs and prosthetics designed for Mexico and Central America, employs men and women with disabilities, and receives money from the US Northern Command among other donors.
The boy smiles as a man wraps the plaster around the stump of his leg.
I bring the boy onto the page in solidarity with ARSOBO’s work. And yet, as I retrace the boy’s smile with my words, I want to scratch out the feel-good story of perseverance that might make bearable our complicity as US citizens in his injury, the kind of story that might be heard listening to the so-called liberal radio (as we drive home from our jobs in the military-prison-industrial-educational-kleptocracy we mistake for a nation), the kind of story that makes us feel just good enough to do nothing to alter our government’s policies and our participation in the economics that create the conditions which invited the boy to heave his body up onto the train.
The screech of train brakes sounds like a scream, a scream like the sound of tons of steel and petroleum, commerce and indifference, grinding to a halt.
Economies will not be separated by a wall. Our appetites and negligence fuel a system as entangled as the orange trumpet vines growing up our desert fences.
I think again of the human cage through which the deported migrant walks making part of a public art installation, the poem at the port of entry that reads: “The border is what joins us, / Not what separates us.”
I want poems to tell the story of the border without the comfort of resolution. I do not want to make disaster pornography but to make our responsibility in the atrocity of the border feel unbearable.
What are the aesthetics of no intelligibility, no relief?
“(I) worry about healing,” writes poet Jenif(f)er Tamayo in her chapbook to kill the future in the present, which reverberates with her and her mother’s own immigration detention. “every day i worry about the grounds that healing solidifies,” she continues “who will be the last to heal? who will be forgotten in this healing process? i am not sure how healing is anything but a greater commitment to this very world before us. i want to resist the imperative to heal…” [i]
Perhaps the poem or the documentary can be a place to model not healing but discomfort with the wreckage of late capitalism and late empire, to model James Agee’s tremble before the weight of white supremacy, creating conditions for identification as well as difference and disambiguation, where contact and similitude are negotiated because it is only from the recognition of specific conditions that we can understand, work toward, or reject a reality, that we might rebuild this world.
Sometimes it helps to sit inside a building and imagine what it would be like to wreckingball its walls, in order to make sense of one’s orientation.
As Tamayo writes: “in other words, i don’t want to live forever/ i want new ways of living/ like, no, to this fucking air.”
37.
Venn diagrams make the world look orderly, when we might need to learn
to find our ever-shifting place in the tremble of our tangles.
38.
We stand at the front of the chapel, next to the small altar. Our guide at the Juan Bosco Migrant Shelter in Nogales, Sonora thought we (two men and three women from a university an hour to the north) were going to ask questions of the migrants seated in rows of folding chairs before us. But we stand before them silent. A door in the room’s back wall remains open to the sidewalk; a fan vacillates near the altar. After a few awkward seconds, we ask the men and the women if they want to share anything with us. Most have either been deported or arrested on their journey, will be allowed to stay in the shelter until they can find work or another place to go. In the front row, two young girls flip through a blank notebook passing it back and forth between them.
And the men and women begin to call out from their folding chairs.
“The US officials take our documents and don’t give them back,” a woman says.
“They stick their hands in our mouth,” she continues.
“They treat us like criminals,” a man says.
And the men and women say “inhuman.” They say “respect.”
“Think of all the money they spend to pursue and prosecute us,” one man says, “when all we want to do is work.”
No one needs to prod them into speaking. They testify as we stand next to the altar, nodding and translating, holding our notebooks without remembering to write anything down.
And when they stop speaking, we thank them.
Before we leave, one of us pulls a pen out from her bag and hands it to the little girls, holding their own blank notebook in the first row of chapel.
But the story can’t end here.
The pen is not a metaphor for giving voice. The pen is not a metaphor for giving tools. A tool is the flag hung over the water barrel or the coordinates of the barrel written into the code and transmitted to the migrant’s phone or the poem that helps the migrant locate the north star.
Let us think, instead, about the blank notebook passed back and forth as promise, as the space to hear the vibrations of the relational web, to witness the wingflash, to resist the impulse to commodify a history of survival, to remember our place in relation and our potential to recognize
what haunts, what calls, what pecks at our awareness, what sings out or screams through the text of our present.
Let us think about the gift of the pen as a pledge to mark our silence before the stories that are not ours.
The pen is less important than what happens when we walk out of that room with the memory of those children.
To leave the page blank. To lay down. To see in the charged colors. To look directly into the camera. To be connected by more than flows of currencies. To turn our eyes towards the tangle: the webs of capitalism, antiblackness, white supremacy, narrative webs that constitute the veil of military-prison-industrial-educational-kleptocracy we mistake for our democracy, the veil of silence and myth of voice, the commodity of story. To learn to recognize webs of need and responsibility, veil of the individual, the veil of racism, sexism, imperialism denying our humanity, our web of connections and differences, veils of deception and greed. To find the documents excluded from the archive, the stories in our cards and from our ancestors (what gets passed down or forgotten in the project of healing, who stares out the window and drinks themselves to rag), to remember that our stories do not take up equal space in the “marketplace” or the myth of the nation, that everyone has the right to their opacities, the beautiful eclipses
that both farmer and astrologer read.
Poems, documentaries, performances, (Soma)tics, rituals and divinatory readings can be a map or a code of coordinates. They might shine like guide-stars. And while they might not lead anyone to water, they might help them understand where they are and how they might change what surrounds them.
Our poems, documentaries, performances, (Soma)tics, rituals and divinatory readings might make a space like an empty notebook passed between sisters or friends
upon which they might leave their marks across a page or leave nothing but the space for someone else to write their story
a blank page, where anything is possible.
The bullet holes on the water station sign and the legal threats hurled at the “Desert Survival Series”[i] remind us when our poems counter state sanctioned violence they will be challenged, not made part of the installation at the point of entry.
We must not make suffering of others a commodity.
We must not seek the approval of the state or its co-conspirators.
We do not need more poems at the port of entry any more than we need the concertina wire that now sparkles like tinsel through Nogales.
We need people to bring the wall down.
* * * * *
[i] “The Desert Survival Series,” created by the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, constitutes a long poem in 24 sections that provides lyric survival tools to assist migrants crossing the desert. The poem formed part of the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a cell phone app created as “a last mile safety device designed to aid the disoriented of any nationality in a desert environment.”
Photographs by Sophia Terazawa
These excerpts from Susan Briante’s Defacing the Monument appear with the permission of Noemi Press and the author.
Defacing the Monument, published on August 1, 2020, 161 pages, $21.00 paperback. To acquire from Noemi Press, click here.