Atonement for the Dead

I realized today, as I was walking by myself in Mills Hall, that I favor poetry that makes death its subject. Morbidity is such a heavy feeling to take on (constantly),  but I find that when I read poetry that details the ways in which oppressed people are killed or consider death, there is a atonement that occurs in this re-creation and an access to power that can't happen when expressing the details about oppressed people living.


Let me explain myself.



In Javier Zamora's "Instructions for My Funeral" death becomes an immediate access to autonomy command for the speaker. Simply by beginning the poem by "don't burn me in no steel furnace, burn me in Abuelita's garden," we get a sense that the speaker in death can dictate a power over their body that isn't accessible in waking life. For me "[please no american meirdas]" (no american shit!) is an indication of this power. Specifically, with american being written in lower-case, and series of commands that dictate how indecent (improper/uncivilized by american standards) they should behave further explores how death becomes an opportunity to agency for those who are living as well.

I love this poem.


When I was a young girl, I remember going to family parties. When we arrived by 8pm, we ate first. By midnight the adults were drunk singing mariachi music and hollowing at the moon. If I was lucky enough to sneak in to hear an adult conversation, I could hear about how they wanted to be buried or cremated or handled if they were on their deathbeds. My Uncle Pete, a Vietnam Vet,  and usually the drunkest person at the party, always said he wanted to be burned in my Uncle Paul's backyard. Before his body was lit, he wanted everyone to take a shot of his favorite whiskey, Jim Beam. After his body was burned, he asked that we sing Frank Sinatra songs until the police were called and had to shut the party down. My own nana (everyone calls her Grandma Concha), if she was drunk enough to talk, always said she wanted be buried by her husband, Miguel. And my Tia Loretta, who was the toughest of all, youngest of her siblings, and a recovering alcoholic, would always tell them to shut the hell up, because she was certain she would die after everyone else, and didn't think it was fair that the burdens of their death plans were to be put on her. What this poem does for me is not only evoke memories of my own cultural upbringing, but makes me realize that death for brown and black bodies becomes the space in which we can enact our greatest celebration...life.

The Verging Cites by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, I feel does a different type of atoning. In poems like "Woman Found Near Sunland Park" and "La Mariscal Ciudad Juarez, Mexico" the pervasive and detailed accounts of death that occurs for women in Juarez, sheds light on how the border between Mexico and America is a deep well of unspoken, often forgotten, violences. A well that is drenched and muddied by the bones and blood of women who are undervalued and underserved. I think Scenters-Zapico, although gruesomely depicting dishonorable acts of violence that these women/bodies endure, does so effectively to create recognition and clarity to be understood about the reality of what happens to women who dare cross or live along the border.