violence written in the body

The Verging Cities Natalie Scenters-Zapico and Unaccompanied Javier Zamora

    I want to start with Zapico first...

    The poem placement chronicles different artistic pieces made in response to the deaths at the border, most of the artists claiming little relationship to Juarez, the border, or its people. The poem stands as a list of placements but also seemly of transgressions to the humanity of the lives they attempt to be illuminating or witnessing. In much the same way that Fazulla asks who is responsible or suited to account for and talk of death, Zapico calls into question the soul of such work and to what extent reflecting on these atrocities reenacts the violence its purpose claims to illuminate and dismantle.  “Some say you have no right to talk about the dead./ So I talk of them as living, their bodies standing in the street’s bend” (29). What is the right “Placement” in relation to death that might render a person’s perspective humane, compassionate, or in the right? Later Zapico finds herself looking for violence, saying:

    “I am disappointed that/ nothing more violent has happened./ The streets are only shadows cast by figures and not shadows of the dead (55).  What are our expectations based on cultural narratives despite our own relation to place?

How do we begin to see the world for the story we are told rather than our experiences?

And too, how do we account for death, make sense of it?

“We eat breakfast in f(x)=2x and fuck in d(5)=76f+86pie..our earth is made of triangles that never 180.”  (6)

“The ants form the contours/ of your face-geography/ of a body I cannot begin to measure.” (17)

There are many illusions to this attempt to make sense of the world, to account for violence and death throughout the collection.

She asserts though that despite all the attempts at creating borders and boundaries, we work against nature, “We mark the world in lines/ and forget the land never knew them.” (58)  The weeds grow up and the lines are blurred between sides, “the cities/ verging again and soon no one/ will tell the difference between the shanties/ of this colonia and the iron gates of that neighborhood.” (68)

And the lines blur too between borders and bodies and between body and body….

“I could never tell if it was your sewage or mine” (57)

and

Mouths full of fences- “living stranger opens mouth and finds a fence” (18)

The main theme that I gathered from reading these two books in tandem is the liminal space created by borders, by violence, and by trauma.  Zapico feels in her body those spaces physically embodied and mentally consumed that have been constructed on land in the form of walls, fences, gates, and cityscapes.  She plays with the merging, converging, and diverging of these boundaries in the body and mind, in the ways that they dictate, inform, influence, or play out in our relationships and in ourselves.  Similarly Zamora explores how these national boundaries and physical distances map onto our psyches, define relationships and how we move in the world, and function as forms of violence in our everyday.  

The poem Dancing in Buses stood out to me both in the  way that it speaks to the merging of culture and how our culture informs everything we do, and how trauma of violence informs our everyday as well.  This poem, written in a series of movements almost as a dance routine chronicles a life of constant motion-obligatory actions or joyful reclamation I am uncertain-but nevertheless ending with the inescapable realities of violence in a border existence where “the protect-your-face-with-a-hand” is a commonly known “move” and shooting is just part of the day.  The flow from one movement to the next into a position, breathless, hands on the head, laying down with the barrel of a gun in the mouth is fast pace, flowing and makes the last few lines of violence feel inevitable and ever present in this bordered, war torn life. violence becomes written in the body through daily movements and through its the constant threat.