Passing, White spaces and journeys to healing in Beast Meridian  Vanessa Angelica Villarreal

The namesake to the collection so eloquently reveals the way that Villarreal says as much with her form on the page as the striking, devastatingly brutal and beautiful words she strings together in each poem.  Here the “old strange hurt” of “deep memory,” the “archaeology of memory” (27) is excavated and healed through the naming of the grief that splits the body and the naming of the star patterns written in the sky at once.

“The widening line that splits          your body into halves

Was always a star map                  to home……..

every star pattern                          is a watchful grace

find their names & the split will heal & return the land

to that lineless open   join hands with the invisible

the disappeared   the forgotten river flooding

the land nourished   the blooming mourning/  the return of beasts.” (78)

This healing of both current wounds and ancestral pain that the constellations of astrological beasts reflect from thousands of years ago is offered as the path towards healing the land, our relationship to the land, and the healing of ourselves.

“our cut land” (52),

“[each new tree we try to plant]          [dies

Too}      {something wrong with the soil     ]     (23)

    Following immediately after Beast Meridian is lopez, Praying Herd: Requiem:

“Draw   a line  through/ Our    scattered bodies/   the meadow reveals  our constellation”

    The last line and imperfect echo to the first line of the section Halo of Beasts.

“Draw a line through our scattered bodies.  The pattern of fallen calves in this meadow will mirror the constellation above” (Preying Herd: For Safe Journey, 49)   

Is the modification of this repeated image to show the erasure of those who have made the journey across the meridian/border or to draw a parallel to the way that as we die we become written into the earth-meadow-stars?

    Dissecting the form and format of these poems and the book as a whole is fascinating and I struggle to digest it all.  I was first struck by the gaping white space around which the poem Malinche is written, or rather how the poem builds white space.  As Cheryl Harris theorizes in Whiteness as Property, the construction of whiteness is built through the creation of race and othering people of color, through a myriad of laws like the one drop rule or blood quantum laws that in turn defines who has access to land and its “resources.”  This white space is an emptiness, defined by the words of Malinche  that explore what it means to be a person moving in two worlds and the complex feelings of betrayal of self, culture, and of the land that moving in and living in the North/USA/Empire creates.  “I am she who betrays blood for a little bit of kingdom.”  

    Who belongs and who is written out of belonging?

“Matter (n.)  Physical substance which/ occupies space;   an affair or situation under consideration; the reason for distress or a problem:    3.The tricks of English tricks of the trade….

the voices that  matter (n.) are the people who matter (n.) ivybringht and ivory”  (36)

Whiteness is made to matter, to take up and own space:  “The earth belongs to the wicked,”  and yet  “ It begins with the estrangement from the land, born into a system of dreaming, of dreaming/ about the dream.  This dream divides the land into low dwellings and high. Where the uncursed live-north and somewhere. All beings born into the dream feel its old unhealable wound.” (83)

All beings suffer the wounds of this divide as does the land. All beings are bewildered by a system of false signs.  

Throughout the collection that blocked shape is repeated, offering a sense of what it feels like to exist in that white space as an outsider, what assimilation takes place.  Most important of poems taking this form is the piece Gulf Pines, or Final Assimilation Room after Frida Kahlo’s Wounded Deer:  “antlered/illness made creature punished into   deformity suspended mid-run an animal/ body’s instinct   is to survive pain and flee its/ hunter” (37).  A poem that speaks of this existence as a centaur like human, part human/part beast, suffering the wounds of this liminal space this Nahuatl, this tierra entre medio. Like Kahlo Villarreal suffered illness in her life and connects her illness to that of the wilderness- “wilderness is myself,” that stolen land that has been claimed by whiteness.  Also like Kahlo, Villarreal struggles to pass, moving between worlds of north/south, gay/straight, suffering the violence that passage of these meridians incurs and the lack of belonging constructed by these meridians.

“Another kind of amor prohibido” (31)

“Aqui no quiero jotas” (28)

And

“We beg the moon since she changes, as our circumstances must also change…

We call to the moon since she passes, as we must also pass.” (49)

“Trespassing is passage” (42)

“Each day a passing/ (cross leg uncross) new record    hidden

track:   Nevermind   nameless Overwritten”                              (33)

 Personally she suffers the domestic violence of her father, the structural and institutional Trauma of racism and the intergenerational trauma held through ancestral legacies of violence.

    “I inherit a palace of locked doors…./I make warriors of the ocean,

    To obliterate borders, explode walls, overwhelm the fences       uncross the river

For the great violences hidden inside women/For the women hidden inside great violences.”                        (Tropical Depression, 40-41)