To Cross the Distance

I’m at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. I love the festival itself, the music, animal smell of the racetrack, salt of my own sweat, though I’m conscious the group I’m with thinks of me as other. So I try to take care with my difference. I smile often, dance when they dance.

In the taxi over, we passed by homes still marked with X-codes, spray paint flashed over disaster like graffiti. Not long ago, FEMA marked these doors after the waters receded, wrote under the large Xs: ____ alive/ ____dead. I think of  the history of  this bridge when we pass it, where hundreds of refugees walked from New Orleans with their last clothes and their children’s fists in their hands towards Gretna, but parish deputies blockaded the end of that bridge, fired their shotguns above the crowd while across the city, prisoners hung their T-shirts as flags from the building, scrawling help us as they flooded.

On the Fais Do Do stage, the musicians are pulling the slides from their trombones as they blow hard on their mouthpieces. They slide the brass along their forearms as they force air to turn to music.

The group I’m in is so happy, the players are happy, my hands are in the air, too, in surrender, when I see the leader of the group hand something to the youngest to hold. It’s fabric wound onto a long pole, something I saw them heft together. When he unfurls it as flag, part cloth, part air, a declaration of the group’s identity high over the fairgrounds, over the city of New Orleans, it’s a flag with a monkey painted onto a stark, white background. As if in initiation, the group leader flattens a monkey sticker to my chest. She presses her palm against me, holds the animal shape above my heart.

——

Claudia Rankine is discussing Citizen for the Los Angeles Times. She calls up the final image she uses by J.M.W. Turner, which on the left page of  Rankine’s book shows a ship at sea, the sun. But on the right page, she zooms her audience into the painting, to the detail in the ocean, so what at first may seem hidden becomes visible: the upended drowning man, his submerged body; above the churning water, his chained foot. “There’s something very beautiful about this image if in fact you just glance at it. So it holds a kind of normalcy, and even beauty. But then when you are pulled in to examine what is actually happening, you see that in this case, the slaves have been thrown overboard,” she says. “What happens when you interrogate, actually, what’s going on?”

In Citizen, Rankine writes:

Between intention, gesture ... the conversations you have with your eyes translate everything and nothing. What will be needed, what goes unfelt, unsaid ... words encoding the bodies they cover. And despite everything the body remains.

I’m showing my students this video in a classroom at the University of Texas at El Paso. “I didn’t know there was a word for that,” one says about the word microaggression. “I did,” another student says, then tells us how when a police officer pulled her over for speeding, she pleated to her knees before his drawn gun. She blinks. Everyone here breathes from inside a Black, Indigenous, Latinx, or Asian body, so there are things we can say, and other things we need not name aloud. We already know what it’s like to be spoken to and acted with through assumption instead of perception, our hands in the air, our hands waving before our bodies, trying to name who we are and what we know below our contorted faces. How such experience, how we are seen by strangers who see us as other, is tied to language: stop, please, you.

I don’t say aloud the difference between the prefixes micro and macro, because such discernment can’t measure how the small so quickly becomes a weight, how used we have become to what should be uncarryable.

“There’s a word for that,” she says, “a word.”

——

A student from our Bilingual MFA program is flickering across my computer screen, the pandemic become this distance between us. She is telling me that perhaps this weekend she’ll play a video game with her mother in which there are gender-fluid avatars, so her mother might eventually learn her pronoun, ellx—might sight, in the changed clothes, the lengthening hair, her child.

It is a word which in Spanish was missing, but as a writer she has made it, ellx, and one can see the contours of the femininity and the plurality of it in English, but in English, there is still no translation. In my first language, Tagalog, when we speak of a person as apart from us, we don’t denote gender, only plurality: every someone is siya; every group, sila. I tell her, in Spanish, that I hope the game goes well, that I hope her mother will play.

When we meet next, she hasn’t yet told her mother about who she is, who she’s become, is becoming. There was no way to wade across the distance. She drops her head toward the screen, knowing her poetry can at least cross our distance. We talk about the word cargar, how each language holds an absence against the meaning another language bears, like a cargar lo que es insoportable, a cargarlo en el cuerpo, the English words to carry or to cargo too weak or too slow to lade the weight the Spanish knows.

——

When I teach lineation in poetry, I teach from Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s “Arriving at the Heart of  Tragedy”:

There are certain things that cannot be
Undone. Lot’s wife glanced back at Sodom as she was
Fleeing—and just like that she became a pillar of salt.

Sáenz, who is from Juárez–El Paso, knows certain things cannot be, just as certain things cannot be undone. In Spanish the word border becomes la frontera, which is to say at the verge, or outer front, of one kind of space touching upon another kind of space. Instead border in English has become confused with boundary, opens in subsequent breaths to words like wall and they and our security. But for we who live here, the wind courses through creosote, sagebrush, and the crevices of our windows in both Ciudad Juárez and El Paso indiscriminately, gathers the loose dust so when it finally rains it sometimes rains mud, withers our skin, and wraps its old song around each movement we dare make inside this desert.

The Chihuahuan Desert streams from what we call Texas and New Mexico into what we call Durango and Nuevo León, and yet, because of the brutality of the word border, we enforce limits upon a stretched out space; from language, imagine into iron post and gun, places untrespassable.

In his series “Meditation on Living in the Desert,” Sáenz writes:

I am looking at a book of photographs.
The photographs document the exodus of  Mexicans crossing the desert.

 .......................................................................................

I know and you know and we all know that the documents are forged.
The official is not in the photograph.

Only the frightened eyes of the girl.

On a bank of the Río Bravo, photographer Julia Le Duc captures Salvadoran migrant Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his two-year-old daughter, Valeria, who drowned.

That same week, my husband and I find three dead cats in our yard. We call Animal Services, who say they are being poisoned, how people will kill whom they consider stray, but coddle in their homes whom they consider their own. Michael, my husband, helps me to carry each animal gently into our chests before we dispose of them, as if a moment of postmortem rocking can tender their near weightlessness to some weight again.

In the photo, Valeria’s diaper protrudes from her red pants, which clinch above her tiny calves. She has died trying to cross a river called border with her father, her body swathed inside his shirt, which, bunched up, has bared his back, but almost covers all of hers. Óscar Alberto’s right arm crooks from his body and disappears into the muddy river as if the water could float them to a soft weightlessness. Valeria’s right arm is slung over her father’s neck and ear in a last moment of reaching and touch.

In class, I watch the faces of my students, who are mainly from Central and South America. The rest are from across México, and Juárez–El Paso. Their mouths open and close between intention and gesture. We who are immigrants are only here, talking of poetry, by the privilege of planes and papers, and the words writ on those papers which have somehow named for us each a tenuous belonging.

We talk of the seeming normalcy of a river in terrain split by the word border. How when one interrogates it, some bodies are free to move in space while darker bodies, even if fleeing for their lives, are held to a limit. We talk of words encoding the bodies they cover: how a difference of language—you, them, nosotros, nuestro—can delineate what a body is allowed to freight from one lyrical line to another, bank to riverbank. And despite everything, the body remains.

How brutal how whitespace can turn the word be from auxiliary verb to a state of being: things that cannot be.

We read together, down the page: There are certain things that cannot be/Undone. Past the margin, the resolution of the sentence feels as unyielding as that which cannot exist—there are things we can do from which we can never come back—and though for most of us English is not our first tongue, we bob and roll in the violence of the language: “Undone. Lot’s wife glanced back at Sodom as she was.”

——

In my first language, Tagalog, tag-ilog, which means we are from the river, the English word you changes depending on who is acting, who is being acted upon, if something is for you, by you, done with you, or done unto you. Meaning ebbs and flows with context, not just syntax, and while linguists agree that Tagalog is verb-initial, some disagree if it’s a verb-object-subject language, verb-subject-object, or a topic-comment language, where sentences swirl around topics rather than subjects or objects—so many outsiders have come to our archipelago and gathered our different tribes into a word called nation, or colony.

In English, a stolidly subject-verb-object language, the you is firm, and known at all times whether subject or object, no matter the verb. For people from the Pasig River, which drifts now with mud and plastic but still ripples under the sun between our standstill Manila traffic, the word you can be sa iyo, sa inyo, ikaw, kayo, ka, mo, or inyo. I am trying to translate my uncle’s darkened hands shaking from Parkinson’s as he offers the glistening half of an opened crab to Michael. Like a poem, the gesture says what I hold here, I hold for you, it’s yours, as my uncle has risen shaky before sunrise to brave the slippery wet market, used the money we give him for medicine to buy these six crabs, one of which he has willed through his tremors to crack open so that he might offer as his to give this opened body, glistening with orange fat and ochre eggs. He is saying words that mean for you and this is yours, from us but not from me, by you, aware of the provenance of the money used to buy these crabs, and it sounds like how I know Tagalog most, heartbroken flutters, a kind of Morse code struggling to cross the distance. I don’t yet know how to hear it, or use it, beyond ache. It is the only language I speak that is not a language of empire, and the contexts in which it is spoken are always humbled by circumstance.

How to tell Michael in real-time English you must take this,  he’s saying it was always yours, or to say in poetry to an English-speaking audience who cannot understand such want, that I still have family who die from hunger?

I try to teach that it’s in the absences, in the unspeakable spaces we pry open inside language, where we can find moments of rest or acknowledgment, especially as writers of color who must give shape to the lived refusals our bodies know. Sometimes, against boundaries and limits, all we can do is make space for such recognition, to allow our subjects a little rest between the end of one line and the beginning of another. Sometimes, all we can do is flood language with our intent.

——

I was educated in the subject-verb-object syntax of English and French, as an adult learned the verb-subject-object and subject-object-verb structures possible in Spanish, but I still think, as a Filipina, that intent and signification can yaw with context. I love how in poetry the same words can shift meaning between line and sentence, and from one line to the next. Poetry is the only language that matches how I feel and speak with how I’ve been taught to think and write; it is the single language which, encoded into other languages, allows for the flux between that which is unutterable and that which we can dare aloud, because poetry is a language made both of river and air.

Before the river of words surges the page, Sáenz allows rest for Lot’s wife with the line, “Undone. Lot’s wife glanced back at Sodom as she was.” Here she is, as she was before fleeing, undone, becoming more undone as she turns to salt, but Sáenz gives her, and us, in that line break, one moment that extends her being before her dissolution: as she was—before she, and all she knows, is ruined.

After our race-based massacre in 2019, when a twenty-one-year-old gunman posted words on the website 8chan like Hispanic invasion, them and us, our way of life, then drove through Texas to shoot the people of Juárez–El Paso, my friend told me his cuñado was a first responder. All his cuñado heard in the parking lot, and inside Walmart after the shooting, were text messages from the phones in the pockets and purses of our crumpled, each chime a flare in air become a song, an ask for breath, sound of another person from across our two cities, asking, asking each slumped love for touch back or reaching.

In class we recite Ross Gay’s summons in “A Small, Needful Fact” for Eric Garner

continue to grow, continue.

His words unfurl as part flag, part air, a hope made that can only exist in language, and no longer the body—that is, even if only in the limited space of a poem, a place where we can still imagine a difference: extend being before dissolution. It is a possibility spoken precisely at the limit of history, our present, and at the verge of poetic line.

In Antígona González, Sarah Uribe writes of our land and river:

¿Es posible entender ese extraño lugar entre la vida y la muerte, ese hablar precisamente desde el límite?

una habitante de la frontera

In Spanish and English, we have a conversation that translates everything and nothing. We say tú and you, you’re ours, as we inhabit this border. We try to lift, then offer to one another the separate animals pressed above our rushing hearts, and we search in our poems for the bodies that remain. How to open inside an order of words that can—against our lived realities—still churn toward some form of refuge?

A student writes: hoy se cumplen 4 años del asesinato de mi padre... Sobre mi padre: he escrito mucho de él. Y después de todo la literatura es una forma de salvarnos. He is Ñuu Savi, from the people of rain, writing to me in his second or third language, in my fourth language. We are both water people, know the many ways language can drown. Today is the fourth anniversary of my father’s murder ... About my father: I have written much about him. After all, in an acknowledgment which surges through the pain upon which such recognition was built, literature is a way to save ourselves. It is a commitment that comes from a lived knowing that pierces grief.

In Juárez–El Paso, poetry is not just a language we share, but for some of us, it is perhaps the only language which can fully hold our silences, our places of anguish. It is also a language that can course and trill, gush freely from bank to bank of white space and still engulf us in the music of its capaciousness: where there is space enough to find moments of recognition against the violences of all other languages. The rest is felt, but unsaid.

How to carry, how to cargo, that which should be unbearable inside these bodies, our hands waving above the papers we hold between us? Undone, we glance back for a moment as we are. Then we turn, together, to poetry.