Honor, celebration, and memory come to mind when I think about the idea of monuments. The process of harnessing collective moments into a physical manifestation, something representational of the essence that surges a person’s core—that’s a monument. All the feels—rage, suffering, release, distrust, comfort, melancholy, ambivalence, ache, compassion, mercy, the urgency to remedy—contribute to constituting and dismantling monuments.
Too often public spaces glorify power by monumentalizing mythic realities, affirming the marginalization and erasure of people of color. Indigenous people in the US play a frequent role in mythic tales about Manifest Destiny and westward expansion—our tongues staked down into one-hundred-and-sixty-acre parcels of allotted land, held in trust—our flesh fashioned to advertisements, militarized as gambits of ongoing wars. The racist and overt symbolism these monuments celebrate reinforces genocidal colonialism as a unifying value, a bounty price still attached to our spirits. The consequences of those values permeate the blood-stained ink of federal legislation, educational textbooks, and the sometimes visible scars etched as roadmaps where place names and land markers have changed or been pummeled over, covered, negated. The movement to take down monuments questions the values of identifying who and what gets memorialized, or dismantled. Over the last few years, there has been a global movement to break down and remove/rename monuments. This examination of cultural memory is a foundational process to understand who we are as a community, a country, a humanity.
This special issue brings attention to the idea of monuments in order to map and reframe contrived or mythical systems of power, to extend narratives through repositioning focal points. The submission call was literal but for me it was also internal. Before I began my guest editorship, I had already pried and peered into the rubble from the reorganization the Poetry Foundation was undergoing. I was able to identify some of the remnants, be witness to the laborers and the laboring process of salvaging, naming, labeling. And in my short time working alongside the magazine team, my journey as guest editor cosmically aligned, allowing me to attest that recovery is underway.
Being invited to be part of a system that is challenged to redress an established framework required an emotional inventory—ruminating on the past, anxiety about the future, all part of a tenacious extraction. The mineralizing process produced a tincture I needed, an adaptogen. Indian tribes are constantly examining/being examined, challenging/being challenged at re-envisioning the foundation of tribal sovereignty/identity. I inherited that legacy of taking inventory of emotions, position, and voice, and that reciprocity would all contribute to the building/dismantling/realigning work, which is at times afflictive, most times useful. That same process helped clarify my role and usefulness as a guest editor. I was welcomed and my ideas were welcomed. The feat was collaborative and patient with a large billowy resting place when deep sea swells stretched emotions like a taffy-pulling machine.
In my last issue as guest editor, I invite you to celebrate with me poetry as monuments, as unifying offerings, the revising of history of so many existing monuments, erased and rubbed out, and now redrawn. The unsaid no longer ruminating, no longer a hungry ghost, no longer a missed call. The issue opens with a trilingual monument to an Indigenous woman, a human rights defender from Mexico, and it ends with a monument to Indigenous publishers, highlighting two recent editors who are providing more opportunities in the field for Indigenous writing.
My final thoughts, dear readers, are to you. I struggle to find the most accurate cornerstone from which to forge forward, the most delicate phrases that balance breath and heart. Rather, I bid you capacity and energy to nest into the soft earth like a determined pullet constructing a safe and comfortable spot to find rest.
A Diné (Navajo) multimedia artist and writer, Esther Belin grew up in Los Angeles, California. She is a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts and the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book of poetry, From the Belly of My Beauty (1999), won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. She is also the author of the collection Of Cartography (2017).
Belin’s parents...