Ariana Brown: “A Division of Gods”

The speaker in Ariana Brown’s “A Division of Gods” excavates hard truths of identity and colonization while exploring a religious relic that time has turned into a tourist attraction. Throughout her work, Brown writes much about the exploration of identity; she identifies as a queer, Black, Mexican American poet, so many of her worlds converge in “A Division of Gods” in ways that ask readers to question their own inherited pasts. The poem cascades, forcing readers’ eyes to move jaggedly down the page, across, through, and over in movements akin to exploring the ruins of Templo Mayor.

Today, Templo Mayor is a museum in Mexico City. Folks from all walks of life visit to tour the former capital city of Tenochtitlan and view the large collections of Aztec artifacts. Originally built after 1325 CE and conquered by Spain in 1521 CE, the ruins provide a glimpse into both the indigenous and colonial past. The Spanish conquerors eventually demolished the city and built their own churches and structures on top of it. The ruins were rediscovered by accident in the late 1970s, which led to the excavation and opening of the site to the public as part of the galleries highlighting the history of the Aztec Empire and the inheritance of its demise and colonization. 

The poem begins in the middle of a reckoning: the speaker is visiting the museum and contemplates taking the same path as the conquistador Hernán Cortés, but the verb reckon is a double entendre set up from the very first line. The speaker must face their complicity in commodifying the space. What accounting should there be for those of us who covet history and are also troubled by it? 

By the third line, the speaker might seem more akin to Cortés than her Mexican ancestors if readers conflate the speaker with the poem’s author. The poem seems to be an autobiographical meditation as the questions about who and what we are, how we trace ourselves through the rubble of others are laid bare throughout this work. However, as the poem continues, all of Cortés’s actions are strung together in one snake-like line of text (“walking the same land Cortés did/walked/tried to own”), only slashes separating what he was able to do, where on the land he might have trod, literally and figuratively, and how he tried to possess something intangible: the spirit of the people and the ground he didn't discover or create. The speaker both identifies with this foreign conqueror walking among ruins of a land neither belongs to and clearly opposes the ramifications of that tread.

What was once a center of Aztec worship has been replaced by a Catholic cathedral. Everything is “in the shadow of” Cortés and the presence of the colonizers who dismantled indigenous life. The entire complex is a site for the curious now—an eight-exhibit hall museum that, simply because of its limited nature, can’t tell the whole story of the people who once walked the land; no single site or museum could do so. Colonization brought with it slavery and the hunt for gold on the American mainland, so many of the places and people who suffered under its hand were the darker-skinned inhabitants who had established their homes long before European settlers found their wares and wonders, not to mention their inhabitants, appealing because of their monetary value. Of course, the Spanish claimed that the Aztecs needed a more civilized religion and that, by being colonized, they were being converted to Christianity as a service. Often, Cortés and other conquistadores are said to have been moved to tears by the human sacrifices they saw taking place among the Aztecs; it is also possible Cortés cried because he feared becoming one himself. 

However, the poet by way of the speaker wonders if Black people are included in the records of the conquerors—those who have been most traditionally left out of the archive are the marginalized, those considered “uneducated,” the pagan, and the powerless. Brown, through the speaker, brings her Black identity into the equation to further complicate her relationship to Cortés and to Templo Mayor’s ruins. The speaker asks, first, if any Black people at all have been considered and then, by means of a careful line break, extends the question so it becomes “Are there records of Black people who were taken to the sites of plantations and shed tears over the treatment they witnessed there?”

 Templo Mayor is now a museum.
                  are there records of Black people
   visiting plantations and crying?

History is not often given this kind of “interchangeable” hindsight. The conquered are made out to be savages when the conquerors write the history, but weren’t the practices of the colonizers from Spain, Great Britain, and France just as brutal in the eyes of those brutalized? When the speaker declares, “I am grasping,” surely this means “I am coming to understand” as well as “I am reaching for something far-fetched each time I try to align these dichotomies.” Readers feel a kinship with the speaker who wanders amid these contradictions as we have wandered among the stories of accepted history. Wandering through museums, we often have the sensation of being fascinated and enlightened as well as repelled by stories and objects we see removed from their contexts.

There are no easy solutions to these paradoxes. The poem asks a question that would give most people pause: 

      what makes people want to tour the “end”
 of something?

What is the human fascination with death and endings; if a civilization became extinct, why would people want to see the site of that extinction? What does studying endings–of people, nations, or lifestyles–teach us about ourselves? 

Throughout the poem, the shape of the ridged lines moving across the page forces readers to pay attention lest they misread what was supposed to come next. This is an uncomfortable experience for readers, and the discomfort mirrors the speaker’s discomfort descending into the ruins of the temple. There are so many unknowns, including enjambed lines and caesuras in the middle of phrases and sentences with no capitalization at the beginning to herald them. The white spaces between words leave the poem looking a little like a timeworn map. With the poem’s shape, these unknowns all come at you with ferocious speed, much like the past, much like the often overwhelming steps into an ornate relic preserved perhaps for our understanding—or perhaps because it can be consumed, and an entrance fee can be charged to see it. 

Isn’t it interesting that the archaeologists who worked to preserve the site had to break some of its walls, further destroying the space while trying to preserve it? Is this preservation another kind of violence?

Midway through the poem, readers are reminded that this museum is a tourist space, not so much a holy one. The adjacent cathedral is described as a “holier house.” T-shirts are screen-printed with Aztec designs that tourists might find appealing while the most difficult parts of the Aztec story are conveniently left off the merchandise. History is prettied up for consumption. 

No one is saying the Aztec way of life was perfect, but it was theirs, and in it were traditions they’d cultivated for centuries before Spain decided they needed reformation. The Aztecs built pyramids, invented a calendar, and were athletes, sculptors, warriors, mathematicians, and agriculturalists. Theirs was a self-assured and powerful civilization, one not struggling to survive, thriving because of the Aztecs' own means and content in their own customs. Such is the case with most colonized nations. From these collisions, readers can trace contemporary cultures. David M. Carballo notes this in Collision of Worlds: A Deep History of the Fall of Aztec Mexico and the Forging of New Spain:

When Spaniards, primarily from the kingdom of Castile, came into contact with the Aztec, Maya, and other indigenous Mesoamerican civilizations, they marveled at the size of their temples, marketplaces, and orderly plans of their urban centers, especially the Mexica-Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. Spaniards and Mesoamericans were … struck by how the others standing before them were in some ways similar and in other ways vastly different from themselves. It was the meeting of two worlds that had developed along their own trajectories. … Their collision was violent, but it also intertwined the richly layered history of both places to create something distinctive, serving to forge a New Spain that became a template for similar colonial endeavors in the rest of Latin America. By connecting trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific colonial exchange networks, it was a key event in creating the globalized world we inhabit.

On any class trip, as in the poem, many sights are the same: students run and jockey for space in the corridors, everyone is tempted to touch whatever they can though the signs say they shouldn’t, and the gift shop lines stretch outside the glass doors that open into the lobby as everyone vies for candy bars or a commemorative token of what they’ve seen. Here, one classmate is impressed that the tour guide speaks English well, though how “good” it is and whether this is another vestige of another conqueror might be up for debate. The speaker doesn’t argue semantics: she is working on conquering fear—perhaps of the atrocities, the space, and this sorted antiquity:

   I enter the Cathedral
                    so I cannot be afraid of it

Even amid fear, there is still reverence. The speaker won’t reach out to touch the volcanic stones used to make the ancient enclosures; perhaps they seem sacred, fragile. Who would want to erase the prints of either set of ancestors who were present 1,000 years earlier? 

The divisions and their repercussions are seemingly endless. The speaker won’t mar “each stone spilt” or: each stone taken apart and made to build the original walls or, on the other hand: each stone torn in two by the conquerors who did not acknowledge their worth as it was, or perhaps even: each stone demolished and made into something else, covering the holy land of others, now sinking under the weight of itself and time. 

The poem ends with the speaker addressing readers directly after coming to terms with how the world sometimes works, for better or worse:

I don't know if you understand the birth of nations:

     everything old is made to look new
                             or gone.

The truth of the matter is that to bring nations into being, other nations are often destroyed. Humans have a penchant for pillaging what they find valuable—gold, minerals, skills, people—and making the evidence of this ravaging, this forced renewal, seem like an act of mercy necessary and for the good of the people they pillaged—or, simply, in order to make the mistakes of our past disappear. This poem asks readers again and again: who are the gods here? Whose history is it? Who decides what’s worth saving?

Read more about these palimpsests by Valerie Mejer in her artist statement.