Self Portrait
photo credit: Marcelo Hernández Castillo
“Because We Come from Everything:
Poetry & Migration” is the first public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two
organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to
our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry
makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds.
During
the month of March, coalition members CantoMundo
and Letras Latinas are partnering to
present posts by CM fellows that will include essays, creative non-fiction,
micro reviews and dialogues between writers. This year’s theme borrows a line
from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” Please return
to this space and enjoy all the pieces in the series, and leave comments to
participate in the dialogue.
Barbara
Curiel, CantoMundo
Francisco
Aragón, Letras Latinas
Dear
Jenni, Dear Marcelo
by Marcelo Hernández Castillo
While my mother was being
held in an ICE detention center, a man committed suicide by stuffing a sock
down his throat. She told me she couldn’t sleep for three days because she
worried she would miss the guards calling her name. Everyone slept on the
floor. I didn’t write anything in my journal that day.
Migration is inevitable. To
move from one place to another, whether out of force or free will, is
inevitable. So too is poetry. It is impossible to stop running away from
something, or toward something—to be less or more lonely.
I read a line by a Mexican
poet named Mariana Rodriguez Espinoza whom I met in Mexico City. It goes: Admiro a
Jenni Rivera porque es madre y es como una mujer que a pesar de todo lo que le
pasaba lo superaba y era como mucha hembra. Si la conociera le diría eres de poca madre.
When I think of Jenni
Rivera I think about mujeres de poca madre. I think about the
space she carved for herself in the masculine world of Música Regional.
Her song, “Los Ovarios,” opens with “Que alboroto traen conmigo / como les está
calando / en el negocio de grandes / la señora está rifando…” It’s basically
how Beyoncé opens “Formation” with: “Ya’ll haters corny with that illuminati
mess / Paparazzi catch my fly and my cocky fresh / I’m so reckless when I rock
my Givenchy dress. Stylin.”
Sometimes I drink too much
and want to call someone and apologize. Walking away has always made sense to
me.
I wonder what went through
that man’s head as he rolled up his own sock and filled what empty spaces were
left in his throat? Sometimes it’s just too late to change your mind. I wonder
if they let him be buried in the US, with his family. Such a small desire: to
move.
I was in a courthouse
recently and the judge kept playing with his pen. I was holding a shoe box on
my lap because I’d bought a pair of dress shoes for my brother at the Macy’s
next door. I wondered if that’s where the lawyers got their suits. I’ve told my
therapist I would like for once to not be so fucking paranoid. He smiled and asked
questions about my love life.
Recently I’ve gained a lot
of weight, nothing in my closet fits me anymore. Thank you Prozac, thank you
Wellbutrin, thank you Clonazepam, thank you Alprazolam.
This is a love letter to
myself.
Dear Marcelo, what are the
conditions for poetry? Did you have to immigrate in order to collect your
inheritance of tragedy? Dear Marcelo, did you inherit your parent’s trauma? Are
you stuck with those brief moments of silence when your mother decides to
change the subject and turns up the volume on the radio? Are these the
conditions for poetry?
Gayatri Spivak asks: can
the sub altern speak? Can we think about Latinidad without cooperation in the
ongoing colonial project?
Western academic thinking
is a product. It is produced in order to support Western economic interests.
I’m tired of this conversation playing on repeat.
Academic Fallacies:
First criterion for Latinx Pxetry: What does she mean to you?
Second criterion for Latinx Pxetry: Did you heal?
Third criterion for Latinx Pxetry: Is there a memory or a break in communication?
Fourth criterion for Latinx Pxetry: Polemical categorizations.
Jenni Rivera didn’t say
this but I like to think she did: camino sobre todas las palabras / del otro lado / estoy
vacía / y es el
borde del mundo.[1] What
is on the other side? We have lost so much, or rather, we have been robbed. This
is the new world. Jenni, I’m looking for an exit with my eyes closed.
What are the conditions for
a decolonization of the mind?
What are the conditions
that must be met to end white supremacy?
It’s not that I didn’t want
to stay in one place. I was five. There was no food. I wrote my first poem
after thinking I could get away it.
Despite the mechanisms of
absurd possibilities upon which a person can function. Despite having endured a
vivisection of the imagination and the body upon crossing the border. Despite
the idea of vivisection. Despite what one poet says to another in a drunken
mess over the phone. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Despite the
documentation of bodies into clean and orderly spreadsheets. Despite the
credibility of fear interview my father had to undergo before being released on
probation. Despite there existing a credibility of fear interview, meaning that
fear is quantified, calculated. Despite the convergence of past, present, and
future in my rented car speeding away from Calexico. Despite the queering of
the landscape. Despite the violent narrative founded on the tenets of
penetrated versus penetrating. Despite the bright, bright teeth of a man
hovering above me in his crisp blue fatigues mouthing a list of numbers.
This is a copy of my green
card. My alien number is A-***-***-***. My place of birth is Tepechitlan,
Zacatecas, Mexico. I have a tattoo that I got as a teenager after a break up. I
wanted my body to be pierced again and again. It healed by the time we got back
together. I married her, Rubi. I swore I would never get another tattoo. We
always make love as if we’re looking for something. I have trouble falling asleep. I am lying on
the floor in my underwear. There’s dog shit everywhere because my dog isn’t house
trained. I haven’t written a poem in two years. This isn’t a poem. I’ve
collapsed my allotment of explanation. Que se vaya mucho a la chingada.
In an interview, I was asked, yet
again, “[Marcelo], do you feel that there’s a pervasive aesthetic box Latino
writers are frequently pressured (or assumed) to inhabit? If so, what does that
box look like? What are some of its limitations?” This was my response,
verbatim: “Whatever you want to call it, or however you want to describe it, I
think the point is that Latinx writers are at once challenging this aesthetic
and uplifting it. But why is this only asked of us, or of POC in general, as if
we’re the only ones who can be pigeonholed into these narrow definitions?…So, I
guess I’m wondering why this question is always asked of POC. I feel like it’s
a question that has already answered itself. I feel like it has already implied
what it wants to hear, and has dismissed how I would like to answer it.”
The man had to witness his
own dying. No one heard him suffocating on his government issued socks. If I
could do it all over again I would probably be a Satanist, or at least some
kind of brujo.
When I climbed el cerro de
Tepeyac with Rubi, Derrick, and JD, in Mexico City where the Virgen de
Guadalupe first appeared to Juan Diego on December 9th 1531, I felt—immobile.
The original church looks over the entire city. The flowers that are brought to
her altar are crushed by the Carmelite convent and their perfume is infused
into rosaries you can buy in the market outside. I bought one but didn’t know
what to do with it. Rubi bought a wooden plaque with her image. I didn’t write
anything in my journal that day. I lost my phone in a cab. We drank at the bar
inside the Palacio de Bellas Artes. I cried in the theatre as we watched Amalia
Hernandez’s dance company. We all drank for different reasons.
It’s been 485 years, 1
month, and 1 day since her first appearance.
I don’t know how to heal. I
don’t know what home means. I went blind when I crossed the border. No one knows
why, but I know. I grew up thinking that I didn’t matter. I’m going to open the
borders of my hunger and call it a parade.
In grad school, someone asked
if I got a Chalino Sanchez reference from Breaking Bad. I saw one
episode and thought it was funny. I couldn’t get the image of Hal from Malcolm
in the Middle out of Brian Cranston. Every narco has gold teeth and a
glittery satin shirt which, ironically, is the queerest thing in the cancer
that is Mexican machismo. Growing up, I was in love with Chalino, his bravado—the
shiny guns he polished on his album covers.
When my mother was released
at San Ysidro, I swore I would never write another poem about her. Rubi and I
drove her as fast as we could, as far north away from the border. I’m lying if I
said I didn’t like pushing 100 down I-5. We got a flat so we took the train
from Bakersfield. Rubi held my mother the entire way.
correr / desaparecer /
correr / desaparecer / de las esferas vacías / vaciarse escribiente / de donde
brotan estos mundos[2]
Even naked and tied to a
bed, that man would have found a way to kill himself. It was that great,
his desire to crush whatever it was that kept him from moving.
correr / desaparecer / correr / desaparecer / de las esferas vacías / vaciarse escribiente
/ de donde brotan estos mundos.
This is a love letter to
me. This is a love letter to you. We all know how this is going to end.
[1]
Yaxkin Melchy, El Cinturon de Kuiper, 2013 Editorial, Mexico City
[2] Yaxkin
Melchy
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and crossed the border through Tijuana at the age of five with his family. He is a Canto Mundo fellow and the first undocumented student to graduate from the University of Michigan’s MFA program. He teaches at Sacramento State University as well as at The Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida. He was a finalist for the New England Review Emerging Writer Award and his manuscript was a finalist for the Alice James Book Prize and the National Poetry Series. His work has been adapted into opera through collaboration with the composer Reinaldo Moya. His poems and essays can be found in Indiana Review, New England Review, Southern Humanities Review, Gulf Coast, PBS News Hour, Fusion TV, and Buzzfeed, among others. He helped initiate the Undocupoets campaign which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country.
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