Along the Beast Meridian; placement

Before reading Vanessa Angelica Villarreal’s poetry book entitled Beast Meridian, I had to look up and remind myself what a meridian is.

So, from Google:

Meridian: 1. a circle of constant longitude passing through a given place on the earth's surface and the terrestrial poles.

2. (in acupuncture and Chinese medicine) each of a set of pathways in the body along which vital energy is said to flow. There are twelve such pathways associated with specific organs.

The second definition strikes me as the most relevant definition as I delved into this book wonderful book of poetry. I saw that Villarreal referenced people of color from a colonizer’s standpoint and Villarreal gives us this through her use of animal names to talk about her people. Which is why I liked that the poet opened up with a quote from Frantz Fanon that I think gives insight into the word Beast. As this is how white colonizers often talked about the people of the land they were colonizing, when trying to refer to them exactly, as the quote goes.

Throughout the whole collection I was touched by the way that she described herself and her family. We saw this coming on the first page with “this is how we said you would survive” and it gripped my heart. The poet also threads in issues surrounding sexuality, with the lines “si no compones” which I also thought would have been an effective title for the poem; If you don’t comply.

What I found particularly poignant was dating a white boy. I found that part poignant to me, because whiteness labels everything but itself as ‘weird’ but also and more importantly ‘dangerous’ and ‘undesirable’ and I believe the poet struggled with that rejection from whiteness.

Through and through I saw a lot of attention to direction and to placement, sometimes it would appear in a metaphor about the sky. In Aurelio, Seer Tecolote we get a line near the beginning of the poem that says: “The sky is veined with light from an imploded star, a dense magic threaded with blood” (Villarreal 60). I found it profound because the poet is placing themselves along the line of the meridian, along a pathway in the body ‘along which vital energy flows’. Even in the sky, the vital energy is flowing and placing us. It felt like the world was just one large, living and breathing organ.

I also saw a lot of lines near the beginning that suggest this attention to placement in their own body with “I hunt the wilderness in myself” it suggests some kind of ‘purging’ has to take place ‘wildness’ being typically associated with animals. So the poet must purge their inherent knowledge of self in order to become new in order for a ‘little bit of kingdom’. For me this was like the assimilation talked about later on in the poetry book. In order to get this ‘little bit of kingdom’ I must kill my inherent knowledge. Villarreal gives us an excellent collection, located somewhere along the meridian of our hearts and heads.