In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Inferno

           At the end of daybreak. . .
Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it,
           Aimé Cesairé, from “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land”
           (tr. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith)

The Necropastoral is a strange meetingplace for the poet and death, or for the dead to meet the dead, or for the seemingly singular-bodied human to be revealed as part of an inhuman multiple body.
           Joyelle McSweeney, “What is the Necropastoral”

Translator as Dissident

I wrote in my last post about Don Mee Choi's brave statement that her translation of Korean poet Kim Hyesoon is motivated by the intention “to expose what a neocolony is, what it does to its own, what it eats and shits.” Translating a dissident poet, Don Mee Choi herself becomes the dissident.

It's not a normal position for a translator to take. In fact it's not really a normal position for a poet to take because after all we can imagine that someone might just as easily say that the essay or journalistic writing is a much more effective means of exposing what it means to be a neo-colony, exposing what it eats and shits. So one question to ask might be how poetry in general, or Hyesoon's poetry in specific, communicates this eating and shitting in a different way than didactic prose might. I think I know the answer to this question: it has to do with blood and guts and intestines and garbage and bodies and words and the deformation of language and rats and bodies trapped inside of other bodies; it has to do with undertakers, swallowed bags of garbage, catacombs, the sounds that eyeballs make when they blink, the crucifixion of farm animals, pathetic fluids excreted from pathetic bodies. It has to do, frankly, with love.

Or, as Kim Hyesoon writes through the dissident translator Don Mee Choi in her poem “My Free Market”:

On top of my bloated mat as if it's been from a flood
I also have replica lips with burns from all the questions
A bottle of dark wine when uncorked
pours out doubts you detest hearing
Robbed of its skin and mocked by bones
an animal that's left only with its internal organs
A hoarse-throated-scream-basket
A pair of fish-bone-shoes you can slip onto bare feet
What would you like to buy?

Hoarse-throated-scream-baskets, fish-bone-shoes, replica lips with burns: perfect gifts for the holidays.

The Rotten Carcass Economy

If I have any idea why I write poems, and I'm not sure I do, I might guess, to paraphrase Don Mee Choi, that I write poems in order to expose what a neoliberal inferno is like, what a racist, capitalist segregated, privatized death-state, rotten carcass economy looks like: who it eats, who it shits out, who it absorbs, who it refuses to absorb, what it kills, how it kills, why it kills, under what conditions it kills, how much money it uses to kill, what it smells like, what it makes its citizens smell like, what it does to the brain and the body of the people it hates and loves. I think I write poems to expose these things. More importantly, I hope that in real life I work hard enough to expose these things: (exposing, communicating, derailing, battling against, slowing down, reversing, subverting, not dying from, not being subsumed by, finding some way of not being completely absorbed by the horrors of the rotten carcass economy, finding some hope in battle).

I am talking about Chicago and I am talking about Chile as well, with their shared and shattering grotesque privatizations, their grotesque police and military violence, their grotesque economic segregation, their grotesque treatment of public school students and public school educators; their grotesque closing of public hospitals and mental health clinics; their grotesque centralizations of power in the bodies of disgusting men who would privatize every inch of your skin if they were given the opportunity.

I am talking about the Atacama desert, where the bone shards of thousands of disappeared Chileans were tossed away like worthless bits of trash by the Pinochet dictatorship and left to die an anonymous death in the sand, which, to paraphrase Raúl Zurita, loved those bodies much more than the state ever did. And I am talking about the Arizona desert, where there are hundreds of bodies of disappeared migrants from Mexico and Central America, hundreds of unclaimed, unidentified bodies that died trying to make it from country A to country B. I write, I live, I understand the world from a position of anger and disgust. I write with my head in the mud, in the sand, from a hole, buried in the rotten body of a rotten city in a rotten country in a rotten continent in a rotten hemisphere.

I write through the horrors of the rotten carcass economies of a transnational, neoliberal inferno whose fire keeps burning and burning and deregulating and destroying the unions and destroying the public sector and privatizing and cutting government spending and cutting government jobs and reducing and reducing and transacting and reducing and privatizing our bones and skin and hair, our children and sidewalks and air until we will have reached the point where we no longer expect anyone to play any part in maintaining the basic structures that keep individuals and communities alive.

These are Chilean policies implemented in the Chilean city of Chicago.

Chile = Chicago = Chile = Chicago

I come from a Chile and Chicago that have both been labeled as “neoliberal policy labs”; a Chicago that copies Chile's “hypermarketized governance that denigrates collective consumption and institutions” which, according to University of Illinois at Chicago Education Policy Scholar Pauline Lipman, involves:

“gutting social welfare and privatizing public assets as the new urban dogma. {privatizing} bridges, parking meters, public parking garages, schools, hospitals, and public housing,” while driving down the cost of labor through deregulation, outsourcing unionized jobs, {and} casualized and contingent labor. To deal with the contradictions produced by neoliberal policies in Chicago and nationally, the privatizing state is also a punitive state that polices and contains immigrants, homeless people, the dispossessed, and low-income communities of color, particularly youth, and their political resistance. Chicago is notorious for its police torture scandals and brutal policing of African American and Latino communities. In short, neoliberal urbanism has set in motion new forms of state-assisted economic, social and spatial inequality, marginality, exclusion and punishment.”

These are policies designed forty years ago at the University of Chicago, tested out in the neoliberal policy lab created under the smoke screen of murder and torture by the Pinochet dictatorship, policies that included mass privatizations of education, health care, public services, which destroyed the labor unions and created a brutal financial dictatorship where the consolidation of wealth and power destroyed the working class, destroyed the environment, caused massive poverty and homelessness, policies that began in Chile 40 years ago; and these police thrive in Chicago today. We could in fact take Pauline Lipman's paragraph above and, with the exception of the discussion of race, replace Chicago with Chile. And while some might say that my comparison of violence in Chile and Chicago is hyperbolic or inaccurate, to understand the discussion more broadly, one need only look at the numbers of people tortured and abused by the Chicago police, the numbers of people killed on the streets each year, the literally hundreds of thousands of poor children left to struggle in impoverished public schools that lack the most basic of resources. I know there are differences, believe me. But I'm sick of comparisons, of playing the which apocalypse is worse game. All the brutal neoliberal policy labs are murder zones. And someone tortured or killed by the Chicago Police is someone just as dead or tortured as someone tortured or killed by the Pinochet regime.

Chile and Chicago: we drink each other's shit. We are each other's shit. We shit each other's blood. We kill and die by our dollars. Who will write our obituary?

Puerto Rican Obituary

The amazing Urayoán Noel, one of our great poets, one of our great performers, one of our great human beings, has recently published a new, wonderful critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry From the Sixties to the Slam, the first book of its kind to document the Nuyorican writing scene of the last 50 years; and it does so with vividness, with vast intelligence and depth and love. It's a book that should be read by anyone with the faintest interest in what poetry can be in the United States, how it can define diasporic communities, how it can transcend national identities, how it can shape a vision and a practice where poetry and public life are bound together by a politics and street poetics of death and hope at the crossroads of, among others, Afro-Caribbean traditions; experimental US writing; performance art; class and labor consciousness and anti-colonial critique.

I could go on about Noel's great book and at some point I will, but what I want to think about for the moment is his use of the phrase “Documentary Death Poetics” in reference to the poem "Puerto Rican Obituary” by Pedro Pietri, the great Nuyorican poet, playwright and artist, a UnitedStatesian/Nuyorican treasure of a writer who lived his poetry as art to be taken into the street, shoved into your face, and sung with courage and disgust and glee. The Reverend Pedro Pietri, dressed in black cloaks, embodying what Noel calls a punk aesthetic and a punk spirit articulated through his poems and performances, a punk rock Nuyorican anti-poet, anti-genius for whom art and life were inseparable. Noel talks about one of Pietri's interventions, Platonic Fucking for the 90s, which “features Pietri carrying a cross and handing out condoms through the streets,” an act that Pietri characterizes as “another way for a poem to save a life.”

Which leads to the question: what are other ways that poems can save lives? In other words, how do poems fill the infected holes in our body? How do poems make the blood swell and swirl. I digress.

Pietri, a canonical figure in US Latino and Nuyorican writing circles, is unknown to most readers of Harriet (but happily, and to my surprise, I just learned that City Lights is putting out a selected poems from Pietri!). He's scarcely discussed in academic circles, and absent from 99% of the major anglo-centric poetry anthologies published in the US. He'd be a logical fit, say, for Post Modern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (ed. Paul Hoover), if the logic of that 1000-page book wasn't such that it only has, in its latest edition, one Latino poet in it (Edwin Torres); there were, as an aside, a few more Latino poets in the first edition (Jimmy Santiago Baca, Miguel Algarin), but I guess Latino poets diminish in their official versian stature over time. More on that later.

Pietri,—who offers us in his play The Masses are Asses, a scathing, horrific, hilarious, and always revealing discussion of how wealth and poverty are performed in the cesspit of the poorest parts of the UnitedStatesian inferno—has been on my mind a lot lately. And though it's perhaps his best known work, and though it might be more useful to introduce readers to something else by Pietri, I want to think about his “Puerto Rican Obituary,” and to talk about it as a poem that is unflinchingly vomiting out the death culture subsuming working class Nuyoricans and Latinos in the 60s and 70s. A poem shitting out, in ways that are totally unkitsch, in ways that are totally straight-forward, in ways that ask us to reconcile with language as a force that is not abstracting, that is not masking, that is articulating in clear, angry language a stance towards labor, towards labor that leads to death, towards poverty that leads to death, towards immigration that leads to death, towards death that leads to humanity, towards death that leads back to death, towards money that makes us die, towards capital that obliterates the bodies it employs in order to maintain the illusion of its rationality. But who the fuck I am talking to now.

Here are the words of Pietri:

They worked
They worked
They worked
and they died
They died broke
They died owing
They died never knowing
what the front entrance
of the first national city bank looks like

Juan
Miguel
Milagros
Olga
Manuel
All died yesterday today
and will die again tomorrow
passing their bill collectors
on to the next of kin
All died
waiting for the garden of eden
to open up again
under a new management
All died
dreaming about america
waking them up in the middle of the night
screaming: Mira Mira
your name is on the winning lottery ticket
for one hundred thousand dollars
All died
hating the grocery stores
that sold them make-believe steak
and bullet-proof rice and beans
All died waiting dreaming and hating

Dead Puerto Ricans
Who never knew they were Puerto Ricans
Who never took a coffee break
from the ten commandments
to KILL KILL KILL
the landlords of their cracked skulls
and communicate with their latino souls

A Documentary Death Poetics forces us, then, to confront in direct ways, through direct language, the bodies, their names, Juan, Miguel, Olga, Milagros, obliterated by capital and empire and its many forms of physical and economic violence. A Documentary Death Poetics forces us to confront the demolished identities, the humiliation of poverty, the actual ways in which their bodies died yesterday and today, and how they will die again tomorrow.

6

A poetics that names and identifies and classifies the victims of the neoliberal infernos that destroy them. Which brings me to Horacio Castellanos Moya's novel Senselessness, a story of an exiled writer who finds a job in an ex-Central American war zone editing for the Truth Commission Report the testimonies of indigenous villagers who survived a slaughter and genocide though at the expense of seeing their loved ones tortured, murdered, and obliterated (Castellanos Moya himself went into exile from El Salvador for danger of retaliation because of his writing). The narrator, the writer in charge of editing the testimonies, is himself suffering from the trauma of being thrown out of his country, and in his new environment, his delusions allow him to both honestly reveal the corrupt church and civil structures involved in the writing of the Truth Commission Report and, more interestingly, to perversely read the testimonies of the tortured villagers as if they were poetic texts. He is obsessed with the words and sounds and images of the testimonies that reveal the brutal practices of the military; he writes them down, repeats them over and over again in his head, refers to the testimonies as the finest of literature, and even uses them in the act of seduction.

“The pigs,” he says to a woman he is trying to sleep with, “they are eating him, they are picking over his bones.....While the cadavers they were burning, everyone clapped and they began to eat.”

Castellanos Moya's novel moves back and forth between the testimonies as poetic texts, and the construction of those texts into history. In other words, it's about the people who are slaughtered, it's about the history of the people who are slaughtered, but it's also about the insane ways in which the history of the people who are slaughtered is constructed. The vast distance between the constructors of the history—an educated, urban elite, an educated, urban clergy—and the victims of history—the poor indigenous villagers—is navigated for us by a man who is fully aware of the ways in which the words of the villagers will be commodified as both poetic and political capital.

In this book, the creation of history, the documentation of the history of the slaughtered indigenous villagers, as communicated through the Truth Commission Report, perhaps has nothing to do with the actual people who are slaughtered. Their history is written not for them but rather to fulfill the needs of a transforming state apparatus. The actual subjects of history are commodities, consumed for both artistic and bureaucratic purposes. Their bodies, their memories, their words: are a text to be edited, polished, published and disseminated to the world in order to facilitate the murkiest notions of reconciliation.

Naming Names

Documentary Death Poetics. By which I mean: a poetics that names and identifies and classifies the victims of the neoliberal infernos that destroy them. Or: a poetry that names the names.

I want to conclude by talking briefly about Valerie Martinez's 2010 book length poem Each and Her. In this spare, powerful book, Martinez documents with facts, names, and narratives the deaths of hundreds of young Mexican girls and women along the U.S-Mexico border. Many of these women worked in the maquiladoras; they were murdered, tortured, raped and mutilated.

Here is one section of Each and Her:

the number of girls and women
working in the post-NAFTA
maquiladora industry

472,423

while they can't be hired legally
at the age of 16, it is common for these girl-women
to get false documents
start work at 12, 13, 14

And here is another section from Each and Her:

Jessica Lizalde Leon (3.14.93)
Lorenza Isela Gonzalez (4.25.94)
Erica Garcia Morena (7.16.95)
Sonia Ivette Ramirez (8.10.96)
Juana Iñiguez Mares (10.23.97)
Perla Patricia Sáenz Diaz (2.19.98)
Bertha Luz Briones Palacios (8.2.99)
Amparo Guzman (4.2.00)
Gloría Rivas Martinez (10.28.01)
Lourdes Ivette Lucero Campos (1.19.02)
Miriam Soledad Sáenz Acosta (3.28.03)

In Each and Her there is love for the dead communicated through an inferno-rendering poetry that always brings us back to the ways in which the abstractions of bureaucracy and government and capital destroy real, actual, human bodies. We have the names of those who died, but we don't have the names of their killers. The absence of the names of the killers perhaps amplifies the presence of the names of murdered women. There is a lot more to say about Valerie Martinez's evocative, chilling Each and Her, but for now I simply want to focus on the way it forces us to confront the names, the individuals, the lives obliterated at the conjunction of the military-police state, narco-trafficking juntas, border and immigration politics, and the exploitative practices of international capitalism.

To name the names of the dead and to write them as poetry is not to aestheticize them; but rather it's to force the reader to witness the dead; to carry their names in their mouths, to feel their names on their tongues, to understand their names as carrying meaning and life and rhythm and energy. It is to prevent the dead from disappearing permanently. It is to make us confront them as text, and to ask us to consider what it means for our bodies to live knowing that these other bodies have been slaughtered, knowing that our own bodies are complicit in their slaughter, knowing that our own lives are, if we care enough to think about it, intricately connected with their deaths.

Desaparecidos en Iguala

Below are the names of the 6 people killed and the 43 students transferred from police custody and purportedly taken to be killed by drug gangs at the order of former mayor of Iguala, on September 26, 2014 in Iguala, Mexico. To quote The Guardian, the disappeared students “were probably massacred in a rubbish dump.”

Currently the protests against police murderers in Mexico blaze as the streets of the United States blaze with outrage against our own police murderers. The police murderers on all sides of the rotten carcass border. The names of the dead screamed throughout the resistances to the police violence. The names of the dead, the dead dying again, every time we speak them.

6 Murdered in Iguala
Julio César Mondragón Fontes
Daniel Solís Gallardo
Julio César Ramírez Nava
David Josue García Evangelista
Víctor Manuel Lugo Ortiz

43 Disappeared
Blanca Montiel Sánchez
Abel García Hernández
Abelardo Vázquez Periten
Adán Abrajan de la Cruz
Alexander Mora Venancio
Antonio Santana Maestro
Benjamín Ascencio Bautista
Bernardo Flores Alcaraz
Carlos Iván Ramírez Villarreal
Carlos Lorenzo Hernández Muñoz
César Manuel González Hernández
Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre
Christian Tomas Colón Garnica
Cutberto Ortíz Ramos
Dorian González Parral
Emiliano Alen Gaspar de la Cruz
Everardo Rodríguez Bello
Felipe Arnulfo Rosas
Giovanni Galindes Guerrero
Israel Caballero Sánchez
Israel Jacinto Lugardo
Jesús Jovany Rodríguez Tlatempa
Jonas Trujillo González
Jorge Álvarez Nava
Jorge Aníbal Cruz Mendoza
Jorge Antonio Tizapa Legideño
Jorge Luis González Parral
José Ángel Campos Cantor
José Ángel Navarrete González
José Eduardo Bartolo Tlatempa
José Luís Luna Torres
Joshvani Guerrero de la Cruz
Julio César López Patolzin
Leonel Castro Abarca
Luis Ángel Abarca Carrillo
Luis Ángel Francisco Arzola
Magdaleno Rubén Lauro Villegas
Marcial Pablo Baranda
Marco Antonio Gómez Molina
Martín Getsemany Sánchez García
Mauricio Ortega Valerio
Miguel Ángel Hernández Martínez
Miguel Ángel Mendoza Zacarías
Saúl Bruno García