Especially since Passover is on Friday, I've been thinking about the desert a lot this week. I'm Jewish in all my lineages as far back as I can trace and even without being well-versed in biblical scripture, I recognize the sacred and complex role that the desert holds in the diasporic Jewish imagination. Jews have inhabited and crossed and escaped deserts for nearly 3000 years.
In both Javier Zamora and Natalie Scenter-Zapico's poetry collections, the desert is borderland, city, despair, the land of the forgotten, and home. The desert marks distinctions - El Paso vs. Ciudad Juarez - and also dissolves them: "In this new city, I am worse / than the city of thousands dead; / I am a wound red with iodine," Scenter-Zapico writes. It is a barren place ("how common / to find a woman who has crossed the border without / enough water") and a place of so much carnage ("bodies dried / to bone") and yet it is also desperately alive: Zamora writes of "the red fruit clutched to saguaros, / the ones at dusk / I threw rocks at for the sake of slashing hunger," and which he cannot find in any botanical garden.
Perhaps more than anything, the desert is alive with stories. The stories of those who sought safety; who sought reunion with their parents; who were seduced by the saguaros; who made it as far as a Target parking lot; who were caught and celled; whose clothing was the only thing that survived them. Scenter-Zapico writes "the desert in the afternoon / is haunting," but both collections made me think about the desert as a haunting. How can the land be separate from the violence that has happened there? As the same poem, "In A Dust Storm" goes on to show, the land and the violence exist in perpetual tension: "these fliers / will never stop begging the brush / to stop their constant flight."
The desert - and all that it has become - doesn't only haunt the people who live there. In "Placement," Scenter-Zapico deftly implicates all the artists and documentary directors and novelists and poets haunted by the violence in Juarez and want to "expose" it without being willing to visit or return to it. I appreciate that Scenter-Zapico gestures at the grossness of this, while also giving a nod to the reasons why somebody might feel that way: "Another poet says he keeps returning to the border. I tell him / I wish I had the same curse." But perhaps she feels that way because she recognizes that she can never truly leave. She speaks to exactly this in one of my favorite poems, "Angel Reassures Me I Have Escaped the Verging Cities." One of the things I most love about this poem is that it's the ants who tell her the truth and reveal what she has inherited.
And later I drank insecticide, but the ants poured out of my every orifice.They
whispered: Now we know your deepest tissue -- it is rotting.
And I asked: Have I been rotting since they deported me? And they said: No,
we've been boring holes in you much longer than that.
The violence cannot be escaped. For both Zamora and Scenter-Zapico, they were born into it. But they are both intent on grappling with it, refusing to let the desert or the story of those who cross - or don't cross - collapse into a single story.
i appreciate that you referenced the desert while others focused on the border--they are inseparable in the crossing experience b/c the desert, as you point out, is where the blood is shed, the stories are held.
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Arya,
ReplyDeleteWow, this is amazing and also puts more into perspective. I agree with Elmaz that referencing the desert other than the "after it" is unique and appreciated. I love your remarks on the desert being alive with stories. The thing is, people will continue to cross it and only the desert will know the secrets it holds. Its quite something beautiful. Thank you Arya.
Perhaps more than anything, the desert is alive with stories. The stories of those who sought safety; who sought reunion with their parents; who were seduced by the saguaros; who made it as far as a Target parking lot; who were caught and celled; whose clothing was the only thing that survived them.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading natalie and Javier's books, it reminds how deadly the desert can be with a combination violent immigration policies. If one is near the Mexico-us border you know you are there because of so much enforcement surrounding the area. They create a desert of fear. If you're brown youre treated with distrust if your brown they treat you as if you are a body threatening the land of white. When in reality the southwest has always been occupied by brown indigenous people. The southwest and the sonoran desert is home to many people especially indigenous people of north america, so it makes me wonder why we treat our relatives in mexico and central america as if they are indigenous to the desert? Sorry this is super messy but yeah, lots of feelings and emotions about la migra, the border and the desert.