On July 17, 2020, there were violent clashes in Grant Park in Chicago between the police and a large group of protesters whose target was a statue of Christopher Columbus at the south end of the park. The violence committed by the police on the protesters seemed to convey two conflicting worldviews about the significance of the monument. To the police, Columbus seemed less of an historical figure than the material apparition of civic order, the holy ghost of (private) property that bears up the power of the state and whose publicness must be protected, paradoxically, at the expense of the will of the people for whom monuments are presumably erected. To the protesters, the statue of Columbus represented the unholy commemoration of 500 years of colonial violence and subjugation and the cruel erasure of the indigenous peoples who would be enslaved and nearly wiped out by regimes of remorseless expansion. The clash in Grant Park was one of many that occurred across the nation catalyzed by the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers on May 25, 2020, and the Black Lives Matter protests that resulted afterward enflamed the civic consciousness of a nation held in slumber by quarantine life and a still raging pandemic. In St. Paul, in Richmond, in Boston, statues of Columbus were being toppled over or beheaded in acts of symbolic violence against the actual violence of the state. As the paragon of settler colonialism and a metonymic cipher for white supremacy and imperialist violence, Columbus’s statuesque frigidity loomed large and perversely ensconced within the skin of a leviathanic state.
In Edgar Garcia’s debut book of poems, Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence, 2019), Garcia offers a radical proposal to a détournement of the colonial curse of Columbus’ legacy: rather than toppling or beheading Columbus’s metonymic power (and thus legitimizing and perpetuating the violence of the state as a zero-sum game ad infinitum), why not absorb its mythos, decolonize its inherited language, and, like a shaman, put on its skin? Why not invade its dreamlife, eat of its organs, and metabolize its wish-imagery? Indeed, Columbus wears no skin of his own but emerges adorned in the multiple masks and stolen costumes that typify the rabid colonist in search of imaginary cannibals. Within the psychogeography of Garcia’s densely populated book, Columbus is legion, and a stranger to himself. Like Odysseus, he is no one; like Polyphemus, he is blinded by desire, seeking to eat of language-afflicted organisms:
To go among the islands to say
marvelous things about them to find
mastic and aloe and roots to bind
from which the Indians make bread
To see fresh water we went everywhere
after a thing called desire
Less of an historical figure than the catalyst for diaristic perambulations through the circumference of Garcia’s oneiric gaze, Columbus appears as a hydra-headed specter who, in an inversion of Virgil’s guidance of Dante through hell’s corridors, leads the poet-diarist across a landscape of dream-images that drift up from a shared mind. In its phantasmagoric logic and immersive effects, Skins of Columbus reminds me a little of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell: a spiritual catabasis into the depths of a body made multiple by the transcendent signage of personal mnemonic. Slippages between self and other, between Garcia’s journaling and Columbus’ log entries, between lyric form and prose excursus, dreamlife and waking life, assemble a collage of textures that never synthesize but remain dynamically apart, uprooted and floating, vitally fragmented. The metaphysical differentiation between subjecthood and objecthood is disturbed by a compassionate identification toward a decentered otherness suddenly centralized by acts of presencing. There is no single head to behead (or recapitulate), no civilizational singularity (indigenous or “Western”) to aspire toward or regress from, because people and animals and things come in voluptuous plurals and pluralize themselves within a split, wild tongue. Columbus absorbs what he sees but realizes too late that he is being absorbed (consumed, refracted) in seeing. The speaker’s voice is articulated from the perspective of a prismatic consciousness drunk on fugitive light and fauna:
We know how they watch us and wish
To touch us to them our wild birds
Our desire to kill in its outfits of net
We know we are fish and large and lovely
And trees and fruit and wonderful taste
Spiral staircases and personal/historical traumas (in which the personal and the global enmesh and drink blood) stretch out across the book’s outermost circles, but there’s also the pictographic compression of luminous self-knowledge and the unfiltered eros of glimmering light and fruit-moist surfaces at the heart of its innermost situations. Sign-languaging lizards abound, and strange birds made obscene by jungle phosphorescence, as well as childhood memories of BMX bikes, Iron Mike Tyson, and conversations with uncles about UFOs and Santeria. Columbus and the speaker/dreamer (Columbus the speak-dreamer rearticulated by Garcia the dream-speaker) exchange temporalities and geolocative knowledge in the same utterance. What Columbus pillages and steals — speaking of the land’s grandiosity and the generosity of the “King’s Indians” — returns to the poet as the recurrence of theft in a type of counter-colonial reciprocity between “Empires”:
He came back to say the island
larger than Portugal with twice
the people had things all over
not locked up he came back
on a new bike–a BMX he said
in → like in LA
or the IE ←
inland Empire
he hesitated at first to take it but
the way he grew up
you don’t hesitate
with stuff left unlocked
The genesis of Garcia’s book began in 2015 as a project in which Garcia would read, every night before going to sleep, from Bartolome de las Casas’ precis of Christopher Columbus’ journal from the voyage to and exploration of the Americas, a travel log that would in many ways become a cursed object, “damned,” as Garcia writes, “because it is a diary in search of pasts undreamt, a trace without interior.” Garcia’s Skins grew inversely out of dreaming this undreamt past, limning the arc of its trajectory not according to world-historical time, in which only domination and subalternity seemed to exist, but in the interest of mining the secret interior of the journal’s worlding potential, those unremarked cosmic forces that lie within and outside of the traces of colonial trauma and systematic oppression that seem to subsist all too securely in the inane materiality of Columbus monuments and the incessantly rectilinear nightmare of history. Garcia chooses not to behead or deface the self-importance of Columbus’s figuration and its curse upon the descendants of Caliban; rather, Garcia questions such repetitive violence, instead affirming that to “say simply that you could subvert Columbus and the world he left us only stages the inadequacy of the curse to do away with the accursed object.” The futility remains that “iconoclasts are slaves of icons,” and the cutting off of one head leads to the sprouting of another within the same system that empowers their tautological force.
Skins of Columbus, as its title suggests, is a heterogenous text that splits itself into different modes or skins: journal entries, diary entries “strictly speaking,” collages, photos, short discursive essays, a capacious “Notes” section, and an “Oneirograpy” in place of a bibliography. The complexity of its formats evolves from the dream-based methodology Garcia used for the book’s composition:
That night, and every night for the next three months during which he [Columbus] traveled the coasts, tricking history into his tasks, you read the journal before bed closely to have your sleeping mind think intently on its images, plots, symbols, motives, and feelings. You wished to see what, when left to its matrix of associations, your mind made of the colonial story. Notes throughout the night recorded your dreams. In the mornings, you made new notations to chart closer contacts between you two, dreamer and traveler. You composed the text in the evenings, putting your dreams and the journal together into a new story of creation.
Like the Popol Vuh, an influential text in Garcia’s compositional strategy, Skins is a “seeing device” for thinking through, remixing, and reassembling the dream-imagery hidden inside Columbus’ journals, and it is also a story of creation, from dusk to night to dawn again, the book’s petroglyphs flaming into life and metamorphosing just as quickly into a charged atmosphere upon morning light. Its tapestry interweaves Garcia’s personal memories with the situatedness of Columbus’ narrative in a world that defies and consumes his vision. As a “dream ethnography,” the book might also be read as an autoethnography of Garcia’s relation to what he cites as the “mythistory” of the Americas, the “intersection of threads of which each represents different temporalities: mythic, human, animal, mineral” and whose analog might be “a weaving or mat” in which “any pressure or movement on a thread affects the whole structure of time” (xv). Dennis Tedlock, who coined the phrase, theorized mythistory as the Mayan conception of time, in which the mythic and historical are not in conflict (as they tend to be in Western epistemology) but instead belong “to a single, balanced whole.” In this respect, Garcia, who writes movingly of his experiences visiting extended family in Guatemala and El Salvador and of his kinship to the Mayan system of dream interpretation, does not sympathize nor identify with Columbus and his colonial vision. Instead, he declares that with “this book, I wear the skins of Columbus” and effectively transumes the temporal jaunts Columbus undertook as stonework for mythic states that extend beyond the myopia of colonial exploitation. In a rejection of synthesis or conciliation, Skins uses the diary format to dream itself gradually, because “diary creates self,” and the “self is consciousness of contradiction.”
The pursuit and embrace of contradictory selves emanates from the magical practice of wearing other skins, inhabiting other bodies, in the exchange logic of dreams. The human is a compossibility that other animals dream of. In one especially beautiful poem, the poet dreams of his grandmother’s “tiny / room in her tiny, concrete house / outside San Salvador” where he can “smell wet earth past the village trash.” The poet notes that her domestic space, reimagined in the telephoto lens of a dream, presents “composite realities” in which objects, icons, and materials, through an accretive network of incommensurate differences, fabricate a space in which he and his grandmother are “dead and alive” at the same time:
Her bedside cabinet as usual
peopled with icons and saints
perched next to each other
sitting on top of one another
stuck with tape to the wall too
beneath other ones stuck to
Stuck to some of their bodies
are the more familiar faces of her kin:
Sister, children, ancient friends
Note the odd poignancy of the repetition of “stuck to” in the space between stanzas, as if this stuckness were interrupted by its own cadence, simultaneously stuck together yet differentiated by a resistance to the opacity of sameness. The neobaroque density of the grandmother’s cabinet is not a mere assortment of syncretic religious magic, but it seems to offer up a semiotic key to the aesthetic force of Garcia’s book: the kinships that survive through unnatural stuckness — stuck to, on top of, beneath, and with other incommensurable beings — produce not only new organisms, but new worlds, other languages. The syntactical experimentality of Garcia’s poems follow along this aesthetic of stuckness, in which words, emotions, images, and tongues are glued together as a dream fabric, articulating prosodic kinships out of tune with the normative history of melos. Garcia’s music is more interested in the liminality of limbs (also, melos) than in the abstraction of chords, what he calls the “absolute value of bodies.” We see this in lines that bubble up and float like turtle shells from the agglutinative language Garcia melds together upon waking to record his night travels:
turtle at the end of the world
one arm in the sea and the other
pulling against the current
of a river coming down
mountain and valley to beach
The “mountain and valley to beach” are stuck together as a nagual-without-organs, a spiritualization and extension of the self into environmental effects without causes, forming a precipice that looms over and blurs the visibility of elemental bodies, offering a vision of what Garcia calls the “totalizable fragment,” the unsynthesizable, stubbornly visceral shard of memory that sleeps like a splinter in the foot of history.
Ultimately, it is important to read Skins of Columbus side by side with Garcia’s recent critical theory book, The Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020). In this groundbreaking study of the overlooked yet primary influence of indigenous sign systems on Pan-American poetics, Garcia theorizes that sign systems like pictographs, hieroglyphs, petroglyphs, and khipu, rather than being “dead” and calcified systems of meaning and exchange, are very much alive and living in the skin of American (and transnational) poetics. Writing for instance on the pictographic form of Jaime de Angulo’s work and his use of pictographs (in this case, that of an archer) in his writing, Garcia writes that the pictographic poem “moves from icon to environment, from the arrow on the page to the coursing realities beyond the page’s margins,” in a composite performance that transcends the limit horizons of orality or legibility. Indeed, Skins of Columbus often functions in pictographic or hieroglyphic fashion, and some of its pages are filled with pictorial objects and even, quite literally, torn pages from Garcia’s own journals, that suture the resources of orality and lyric performance and point toward realities that spill over from the pages of historical event or personal myth.
If part of the scholastic project of Signs of the Americas is to decolonize poetics from a stubborn credence in the myth of the progressive innovations of modernist and postmodern poetics, then the reciprocal project of Skins of Columbusis to return our gaze to the precedence and formal advantages of indigenous sign systems within contemporary poetics, particularly in Garcia’s own poems. Much like the inamic trope of Aztec-Nahuatl poetry that Garcia explores in one chapter of Signs, the two books — Signs of the Americas and Skins of Columbus — might be read as an inamicpair, or what Garcia defines as a “parallelism” that subtends “mutually emergent and complementary counterforces” that never synthesize but are charged through the volatility of their difference and the beauty of an oppositional poetics.” What Signs theorizes, we read in Skins (on the very skin of the book) as practice; what Skins accomplishes, Signs explicates and empowers. The pristine daytime languaging of Signs, here embodied by a figure like Quetzalcoatl, is complemented by the sidereal nighttime languaging of Skins, whose representative is undoubtedly Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror of dreamtime and night sorcery. Read together, the two works perform a “threshold magic” that transumes the colonial and the transindigenous and creates “countercolonial worlds as readily as it makes colonial ones.”
The aim of such a transumption, or what Garcia identifies as the trope of “metalepsis” frequently at work in indigenous sign systems, is “to alienate native images, metaphors, and figures with crisscrossing introjection of colonial ones.” We do, eventually, encounter a statue of Columbus within the pages of Skins of Columbus not unlike the controversial statue in Chicago’s Grant Park, but Garcia’s strategy to countermand the malevolence of its symbolism is different from that of the protestors who, justifiably, intend to behead and topple such crude demonstrations of power. Visiting his family in Guatemala City, Garcia comes across “the city’s bronze statue of Columbus. Devoid of subtlety, he perches on a globe wrapped in the Spanish coat of arms, carried by African and Indian slaves.” Garcia notes that “Time amasses in such objects,” except it is not a rectilinear “historical time” that burdens their relevance or monumentality, but “time itself, in the crisis of its inequality,” such as that envisioned in the figure of the Mayan time-carrier who (literally) lifts time’s hieroglyph on his back:
“All of those bodies, figures, monuments, machines, and avenues, ‘this against that,’ are incommensurate with one another, each one carrying its own way of organizing the experience of temporal restlessness, many pasts and futures vying to condition a living present, to guide its feelings and thoughts, each one playing thus the role of a whole in a holy theatre of ever-fragmenting parts.”
Much like the refragmentation of Columbus’s journals that motivates the book, Garcia refragments Columbus’s statue–indeed every and any statue of Columbus–to prefigure the countenance of “Camazotz, Lord of the House of Death Bats,” who in Acephalic fashion beheads the Columbus statue during “the Guatemalan earthquake of 1917 […] when he covered the moon with a cloud of black wings to steal the head of the statue of bronze Columbus.” Garcia writes that “[t]his actually happened,” and one can see the “crack that encircles his throat” after the city reattached the Genoan’s head, a crack that conceals “the ocean of myth” which is activated and reanimated within the pages of Garcia’s book and under the dead skin of Columbus’s fractured mythos. As a result, Columbus is alienated from his own voice, shot through with a flight of bats that consume and erode him. Buried beneath the rubble of the cursed legacy he has built, Columbus is pulverized into aperture and lacuna.
Not trading in the easy violence of subversion and agonistic rhetoric, Skins of Columbus is a monumental work of apotropaic resonance whose lyric power reinvents our known languages of dream-vision.
[Published by Fence Books on May 14, 2019, 88 pages, $17.00 paperback]