December 18, 2014

This report has been filed in accordance with the proper policy for
identifying the dead

Who’s the killer Brenda Berenice Delgado?
Who’s the killer Alma Chavira?
Who’s the killer Verónica Martínez Hernández?
Who's the killer Esmeralda Herrera Monreal?
Who's the killer Mayra Reyes Solís?
Who's the killer Guadalupe Luna De La Rosa?
Who's the killer Griselda Mares?

—Juan Felipe Herrera, “Señorita X: Song for the Yellow-Robed Girl from Juárez”

Who's the Killer?

In a previous post, I talked about poems that name the names of the dead, and later it occurred to me that I might have included Juan Felipe Herrera's poignant and moving “Señorita X: Song for the Yellow-Robed Girl from Juárez,” which asks us to consider the dead as they might be seen from many perspectives:

This is the song of mourning mothers with revolution
       guitars...
This is the song of dead uncles and dead aunts still in search
       of you...
Here lies
The coroner's office tiny flat table chrome a hacksaw a
       hammer a string
Here lies
The maquila dressing room tilted oblong wet walls the floor
       spotted set for rape
Here lies
The police report trapezoid open at the beginning at the end
       closed stuffed erased
Here lies
The bus tire track the chófer the steering wheel the tires the
       gasoline all in agreement to kill

From the coroner's office and the maquila dressing room and the police report we move eventually through the names of the dead and to how:

The mothers walk the mountain edge with a mysterious sign
The mothers float over Juárez in long ragged dresses of fire...
The mothers rip open the earth with their mouths open open
The mothers drain the river el Río Bravo the snake blade in
       green wounds

Central to my last post, and perhaps central to Herrera's approach, is the poem as a form of historical documentation, a Documentary Death Poetics, a phrase I appropriated from Urayoán Noel's discussion of Pedro Pietri in his book In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam. Herrera's poem names the names of the dead, perhaps, so that we might look for their lives, so that we might understand them as individuals, as girls and women whose lives and deaths ought to mean something to us. The first name in Herrera's list is Brenda Berenice Delgado, who according to the website of El Universal Nacion was only 5 years old when she was found murdered and sexually abused in 2003. I can barely read the article. I feel sick reading the words of her mother, sick from even trying to articulate what happened to her, sick from this incommunicable horror. Language is useless here. It's a darkness I can barely consider.

Admittedly, I am engaging with the poem in a way that most readers wouldn't. But in reality I am doing no more than accepting an invitation the poem offers. And the aftermath of this investigation makes me feel sick, makes me want to cry, makes me literally want to hang my head with sorrow and shame. The poem led me here. The poem asked me to interact with the dead, with history, with transnational economics and violence. But more than that, it asked me to see Brenda Berenice Delgado as an individual. It took normalized state and market violence out of the abstract and made me think about its real and horrible effects on actual people. It exposed the unspeakable, and I don't think it's an understatement to say that I am changed by the experience. Herrera's poem did, in short, what great writing can do.

One way, then, of understanding the naming of the names is as a means of maintaining a public record, of giving the dead more respect than they were given by the state, by their employers, and by their unnamed and anonymous murderers. It honors the people that were disposed of. It's a memorialization and a condemnation. A record of an atrocity, a communal and horrific failure. But it also asks the readers to confront those killed, to engage with them, to understand that these are actual human beings we are talking about when we read them as words on a page.

“Poetry,” writes Audre Lorde, “is not a luxury...{it} is the way we help give names to the nameless.”

Terror as the logic of the state

But perhaps at the level of concept, Herrera's poem exemplifies what I wrote about in my first post: a desire for a poetry that exposes our “bloody inferno in no uncertain terms and with no attempt to make it any more palatable in order to speak to any particular poetic lineage, aesthetic affiliation or political or communal institution.” Experimental poets like to talk about acknowledging the artificiality of language, the masking of subjectivity, the political value of form and diction. I won't generalize too much here, and I understand that this is a long discussion with roots in all kinds of 20th century philosophical debates about the intersections of art and atrocity. I can say a lot about this. But mostly I want to say that I'm tired and sad and angry and that horrible times call for direct confrontation. The apocalypse keeps happening again and again and it keeps happening right here and it keeps happening yesterday and today and tomorrow (and maybe poets have more important things to talk about than poetry). And while I don't want to mistake political writing for political action, we are in the midst of many atrocities, and I personally am not particularly interested in poems that pretend that these atrocities don't exist.

State terrorism in the form of police murderers; state terrorism in the form of torture; a normalized system of violence and terror that criminalizes, terrorizes, eliminates and murders people of color. Or, as Henry Giroux writes in his recent essay “State Terrorism and Racist Violence in the Age of Disposability: From Emmett Till to Eric Garner”:

What drives the increasing brutalization and killing of innocent people in the United States is a form of state terrorism free of social responsibility, guilt and morality. This is a form of state violence fed by gun culture, the criminalization of poverty, the militarization of the culture of low-income and poor people of color, and the misery spurned by neoliberal, slash-and-burn policies aimed mainly at the poor and the welfare state. The face of terrorism can be captured in images of the police spraying tear gas into the crowds of peaceful protesters in New York City. It can be seen in reports of the police choking students, firing hundreds of rounds of bullets into the cars of civilians, beating a defenseless mentally-ill woman, and in the ongoing comments of right-wing fundamentalists who instill moral panic over the presence of immigrants, protest movements and any other form of resistance to the authoritarian state.

Giroux's analysis is justified and not at all hyperbolic. The only thing I might take issue with is the narrowness of labeling the fundamentalists as “right-wing,” which implies that so-called liberals don't enact and support the same violence that Giroux is referring to above. Chicago, of course, is owned by shit-bag Democrats, who have turned the city into a privatized, neoliberal, authoritarian, racist death zone where the police regularly torture and taser people of color.

Grief, morning, anger, pain, shame, exasperation, fear, disgust: I don't know what else to talk about right now, what else to feel. This sinking tower of shit.

(“When I reread what I've written,” writes Clarice Lispector. “I feel like I'm swallowing my own vomit.)

Who's the Killer?

“Unarmed People of Color Killed by Police, 1999-2014” was posted on Gawker just a few days ago. As the editors write:

On Wednesday, after the announcement that NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo would not be indicted for killing Eric Garner, the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund Twitter posted a series of tweets naming 76 men and women who were killed in police custody since the 1999 death of Amadou Diallo in New York. Starting with the most recent death, what follows are more detailed accounts of many of those included in the Legal Defense Fund's tweets.

Gawker provides short narratives about the deaths of each person, like this one for Dante Parker of San Berardino, CA: “Police responded to a call about an attempted break-in. The suspect fled on a bicycle. Police found Parker nearby riding his bike. He was unarmed. He resisted arrest and a struggle ensued. Police tasered him and he died."

Or this one for Ezell Ford of Los Angeles: “Ford was shot by police who were conducting 'an investigative stop.' 'A struggle ensued....' Ford's family members say he was lying down when shot.”

I won't re-post the narratives, though I think you should read them. I'll simply conclude with the names of those on the list who were killed by police in 2014:

Rumain Brisbon, 34, Phoenix, Ariz, Dec. 2, 2014
Tamir Rice, 12, Cleveland, Ohio, Nov. 22, 2014
Akai Gurley, 28, Brooklyn, NY, Nov. 20, 2014
Kajieme Powell, 25, St. Louis, MO, Aug. 19, 2014
Ezell Ford, 25, Los Angeles, CA, Aug. 12, 2014
Dante Parker, 36, San Bernardino, CA, Aug. 12, 2014
Michael Brown, 18, Ferguson, MO, Aug. 9, 2014
John Crawford, 22, Beavercreek, OH, Aug. 5, 2014
Tyree Woodson, 38, Baltimore, MD, Aug. 2, 2014
Eric Garner, 43, New York, NY, July 17, 2014
Victor White III, 22, Iberia Parish, LA, March 22, 2014
Yvette Smith, 47, Bastrop, Texas, Feb. 16, 2014
McKenzie Cochran, 25, Southfield, Mich, Jan. 28, 2014
Jordan Baker, 26, Houston, Texas, Jan. 16, 2014