American Poets in the 21st Century
Page 15
To cycle back to my epigraph, it seems appropriate to view Borzutzky’s self-proclaimed “failure” to create a novel through the lens of a poem by Chile’s antipoet Nicanor Parra—a text that itself loops to make a poetic statement about the power of Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo. As Parra’s poem demonstrates, the already transnational landscapes comprising “Latin American” literary conversations link Parra’s far southern nation to Rulfo’s Mexico, situated precisely at the northern borderline with Anglo-America, against which the idea of a Latin America is regularly defined. Borzutzky follows similar traces toward the dead who murmur under Rulfo’s fictional Mexican town in the 1955 novel Pedro Páramo, where their persistence makes burying the past impossible. The title of Borzutzky’s 2015 collection, In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy, respects the insistent voices of the dead, and it is inspired by his discovery that Rulfo once intended to call that novel The Murmurs.10
Borzutzky’s prominent deference to Rulfo is the tip of a hemispheric literary iceberg. Another Latin American novelist important to Borzutzky is the celebrated Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. Internal to Bolaño’s works are peripatetic characters, exiles who operate in continual awareness of the parallel, extreme incidents of state-sponsored violence connecting late twentieth-century events in Chile to analogues in Uruguay, Argentina, and Mexico. There is no space left for his protagonists but transnational diaspora, emotionally delineated by sensitivity and proximity to sites where mass violence has taken place.
When reading Borzutzky, it is rewarding to pause and consider the ways in which he recycles imagery and language embedded not only in expressions used by Chile’s diaspora, but in influential transnational rhetorical patterns which expanded outward from that diaspora when they were adopted by organizations such as Amnesty International. The term “rhetoric” can be negatively charged in discussions of poetics, particularly when associated with unsuccessful flourish and empty gesture. But rhetorical speech, with its central function of persuasion, animates public life. Borzutzky defamiliarizes rhetoric permeating specific inter-American scenes, examining the language that supported state-sponsored violence as well as corresponding campaigns for human rights and solidarity.
The 1970 election of Marxist politician Salvador Allende to the Chilean presidency crystallized a key political question in turbulent times: Could socialism be achieved through peaceful means? After a military junta executed its 1973 coup d’état, removing Allende from power, the new regime adopted persuasive rhetoric opposing public sickness to health. It aimed to rescue the nation from a “cancerous tumor.”11 Led by Army General Augusto Pinochet, the government used this language to justify numerous actions for eradicating the left in Chile, and “exile, first and foremost, was the centerpiece of the military’s strategy for gaining and retaining control of the country.”12 Other methods included state-sponsored torture, executions, and “disappearances” to which clues are still being uncovered today; these created an environment of terror that drove an estimated two hundred thousand citizens abroad, while the government portrayed exile as a voluntary choice. A complementary wing of the regime’s labors addressed economic and social policy. Reversing the Allende government’s positive view of state intervention and centralization, which the Pinochet government reframed as “unnatural” and “unhealthy,” the regime turned to putatively “normative” and “scientific” rules mapped out by Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago. Chile’s new leaders converted their nation into a testing ground for policies associated today with neoliberalism. On the social front, Chileans were expected to accept a right-leaning culture, a set of civic habits seen by the regime to be “healthy.”13
Mass exile, however, gave Chileans expelled from their own nation an international platform. Exiles not only protested state violence in the 1970s but gave voice to memories of state terror, “experienced as a past continuous that inhabits present life conditions” in both territorial Chile and its post-1973 diaspora.14 Writing in the twenty-first century, Borzutzky continuously registers diasporic knowledge, including attention to the persuasive rhetoric that enabled the military government’s deeds and risks enabling others all over again.
Borzutzky’s publications from 2007 to 2016 also draw upon diasporic rhetoric and action essential to the collective Chilean attempt to name, survive, and remember extreme violence enacted in proliferating forms: he writes what he calls “durational art: of endurance, accusation, resistance, insistence.”15 While his poetic work is unique, then, it engages the global Chilean experience in significant ways. After 1973, observes Patrick William Kelly, a paradigm of remembrance and speech arose in tandem with action: “Chile, more so than any other country, remapped the terrain of human rights activism, especially on the transnational plane.”16 Two activist camps arose after 1973, one emphasizing the language of human rights and the other (with an epicenter in Mexico City) organizing more around the concept of solidarity. “Together,” Kelly summarizes, “these two groups developed a new transnational discourse of human rights, and also created new activist techniques” to galvanize outrage and political support “by revealing the prevalence of torture through the power of personal testimony.”17
Within diaspora, the will to recall and describe events from the late twentieth century has passed from exiles and their allies to their children, some of whom crafted a “mobile diasporic landscape of memory for remembering and mourning the afterlife of the dictatorship” far from Chile’s bounded geographic territory.18 Because the reality of the second generation combines a remembered Chile with concerns proper to their present and the variegated terrains in which it takes place, their cultural practices acquire hybrid qualities. It is this type of hybridity that Borzutzky enacts while constructing a poetics with conscious, looping re-combinations of cultural repertoires.
His interest in the sentence works well for delivering statements about violence past and present. Many read as emphatic declarations and/or explore a chant-like escalation of feeling through repetition and variation, often describing some blend of imagined and real atrocities. His intergenre books follow two primary methods of organizing sentences: he groups them into block poems, which gather the mounting energies of the sentences; and he intersperses them with poems that expand more across the page, with a different pace that can allow for the release of energy into white spaces between statements. Whereas the block poems tend to project a sense of rage against systems, the placement of sentences in less confined space enables a potentially wide array of emotional effects.
A key component of the ethical imperative driving Borzutzky’s dystopic poetry is a constant call to reign in violent polities, checking the entities to which governments delegate their violence. The following observation from Borzutzky was made in specific reference to The Book of Interfering Bodies, although a grotesque aesthetic remains equally relevant in other works through 2016:
The political violence of our time (e.g. state sponsored torture, endless war, the bombing of civilians and other “non-essential personnel”), the social and economic violence of our time (e.g. the collapse of the global economy, the barbarism of corporate greed, American poverty and neglect of the poor, the war on unions and working people, the attacks on immigrants, on women, mass inequalities in access to food, water, education, health care, etc.)—these things are themselves grotesque. Thus if one sees the effect of politics and policy as grotesque then grotesque language and imagery is a way to craft a literary response.19
The grotesque vein permits Borzutzky to advance occasional dark humor while retaining an insistence on the absolute necessity of naming violence—enduring it and confronting it in one form and another over the course of time: “In the world of this poem, a ball of dust is a Neanderthal man with a club; a cobweb is a poppy field full of landmines; and a horse on a road is fourteen illegal immigrants in a stable” (Interfering Bodies 18).
The title poem of The Book of Interfering Bodies culminates with the rework
ed image of a man thrown into a body of water and merged into a mountain, recalling Pinochet-era practices for eliminating undesirables by throwing them from airplanes into Chile’s waters and cordillera. The anonymous man resurfaces as a present-tense, violated, collective self:
He opens his mouth and a famine falls onto the pages. He is an emigrant, and through his eyes he communicates that he is homesick for his former body, for the wool rags he used to wrap himself in, for the hair they cropped before they threw him in the river, before they sunk him in the mud and made great economic advancements as he dropped to the bottom of the sea. I am not an individual, the man says […]. I am a dead mountain; my mouth is a bloody carcass; my belly is a dead river; my face is a city drowning in a storm. (103)
Incidents of violence rapidly repeat, evolve, and spread across the pages of Borzutzky’s books. Grotesque, dystopian bombardments risk occasionally numbing the reader. Even if this effect loses some readers in the short term, it is essential to a substantive evocation of massive violence.
Dystopic writing may appear to conflict with utopian desires animating social justice movements, such as diasporic rhetoric validating human rights and hoping for concrete improvements. Yet dystopic and utopic modes can complement each other. A commonly recognized purpose for the dystopic vein is to offer warnings about the predicament in which society finds itself, making the necessity for change visible. Exaggeration, a dystopian literary tactic that Borzutzky uses with gusto, is one method for delivering an atmosphere of danger: “From now on all culture will be body parts floating in milk, shouts the miniscule hermaphroditic poet terrorist through his bullhorn” (Interfering Bodies 11).
The unconventional treatment of the landscape in the preceding fragment from “The Book of Interfering Bodies”—its surreal imaging of a landscape that subsumes and expresses human violence—is built out of another facet of Borzutzky’s work: literary translation. Borzutzky recalls an important overlap between translation and the composition of his original literature. It occurred during the period when he was writing The Book of Interfering Bodies while also translating a book by Raúl Zurita.20 Borzutzky discovered a poetic mode of address to a specific Chilean history, a history out of which he could conceptualize global continuities of violence while retaining personal relevance:
Zurita, because he was writing about torture and disappearances, about people being thrown out of airplanes and into the sea, was writing about something that as a Chilean (or a descendant of Chileans, Chilean-American—whatever it is I am) I felt immediately affected by, because I knew people who had been arrested, I’d grown up hearing stories of people my family knew who were thrown out of airplanes. And here in Zurita was a language that was speaking to this thing, this history, this horror, that seemed so utterly impossible to represent. He opened up an approach for me, an approach to how one writes about the horrors of the immediate present, to how one writes about violence and global interconnectedness, to how one even writes about love and emotion, to how one writes about oneself amid this mess, and for this I am very grateful.21
It is possible to situate Borzutzky’s own poetry as an extension of the Chilean landscape poetry tradition, following a conversation with luminaries such as Mistral, Neruda, and Zurita, but located at the point in a cultural continuum where “Chilean landscape” no longer relies on the bounded territorial location of Chile. The landscape becomes transnational, moving with its diaspora. The transnational continuum gains extra energy by functioning in two directions, rather than as a one-way trajectory: Borzutzky’s work with violated landscapes moves back toward territorial Chile in his award-winning translation of Valdivia, a dystopic work by Galo Ghigliotto published in the United States in 2016.22
Any discussion of a second-generation transnational literature written in the United States would be incomplete without reference to Chilean American cultural geography created by the first generation of post-1973 diaspora. Chilean American literary figures best known in the United States to date are of the generation who fled into exile as adults, forced out by the 1973 coup. Their collected works participate in the transnational dialogue about human rights, including its commitments to naming violence and calling for attention to human rights over the span of decades. Prose writer Isabel Allende (b. 1942), the niece of deposed Chilean president Salvador Allende, made a fleeting appearance in Oxford University Press’s 2002 anthology of US Latinx literature, Herencia, and is one of only two Chilean writers who made it into the 2011 first edition of the magisterial Norton Anthology of Latino Literature.23 Allende is probably best known for her 1985 novel The House of the Spirits, despite an active career and many subsequent books. Working in more experimental veins of feminism and transnationalism is Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948), who happened to be on fellowship in the UK when the coup took place. Her poetry and interdisciplinary art are prominent in various circles and partake of the rich New York City arts scene, which became her adopted home. Borzutzky has intersected with Vicuña around numerous events and is the author of the introduction for her edited collection from Kelsey Street Press. Lastly—and here I turn to a significant precursor for Borzutzky rather than completing an exhaustive list of this generation’s writers—is the other Chilean who made it into the Norton’s first US Latinx panorama, Ariel Dorfman (b. 1942).
Like Borzutzky, Dorfman is the descendant of Jewish, Eastern European migrants with a connection to Kishinev (eventually part of Moldavia). Flight made possible by Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Organization brought Borzutzky’s family, like Dorfman’s Yiddish-speaking mother and her parents, to the Southern Cone and a new life as Latin Americans in the early twentieth century. Dorfman’s father, also Jewish, was originally from Ukraine. Foregrounding this earlier history, the body of Dorfman’s memoir Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey complicates his overt North-South transnational axis with an awareness of doubled diaspora.24 The historical axes of Jewish diaspora become a constant reminder that the violence and exile so associated with post-1973 Chile have deep roots in world history. Dorfman incorporates more than one Latin American receiving country: his family went first to Argentina, and only later to Chile. As a result of cross-cutting spans, Dorfman offers a literary address to human rights in which “the specifically local is also globally relevant.”25 His most studied work, translated as Death and the Maiden, “centers around the problems of using art and language to seek the truth in the aftermath of torture and betrayal” but tends to avoid easy answers; Dorfman often explores ambiguity.26 Borzutzky acknowledges this play as an influence.27
Chilean heritage, including a Chilean Jewish diasporic variant, does not dictate that a Latinx poetics can be taken for granted. Borzutzky has good reason to work within these categories, but it must be noted that he has questioned the way that ethnic groupings are invoked in contemporary culture, suggesting that he belongs with Chicago poet Paul Martínez Pompa among “the outliers, those of us who are affiliated with a certain ethnic identity but who don’t feel as if we are official members of this group’s official literary culture,” to which he adds that the outliers “are much more commonplace than is probably acknowledged.”28 A pause, a blank line, then he continues: “But what the hell do I know. I hardly have any memories of what it’s like to be the only member of the Western Pennsylvanian School for Chilean-Jewish Poetics.”29
Borzutzky’s distancing is not a rejection of identity as a category of discussion, but a strategic response to an atmosphere wherein US Latinx poets become increasingly visible as such in the early twenty-first century. Improved visibility is an essential development in US literary culture, where prior Latinx writing had long been all but invisible at the national level despite long histories of presence. The partial new visibility and attendant naming, pitched against a backdrop in which the general and literary US public has little substantive exposure to Latinx traditions and the diversity within them, has sometimes led to expectations in the literary world of predictable perfor
mances (such as the repetition of poetic strategies important at an earlier moment), and these expectations can become oppressive, as can mistaken assumptions that poetry engaging identity cannot be meaningfully experimental. If there is no evading the pressures of language around identity, their existence is not negative. Borzutzky observes that one can penetrate these rhetorical patterns, converting them into fodder for new work that comments on realities of social existence.30 His poetics statement for this volume constitutes one such meddling intervention into discourses about contemporary US society and literature.
Granting these complications inherent in his historical moment, it would make little sense to suppress comment on transnational components animating Borzutzky’s poetics since they are so well integrated into the form and content of his work. As a second-generation Chilean, Borzutzky was born in the United States in 1974. Like Vicuña, his parents happened to be outside Chile at the time of the coup and would remain outside it, following events closely and sympathetically enough for their son to absorb concerns of Chileans whose exile was far more abrupt and violent, or who did not leave. Borzutzky did not grow up in a high-density Chilean community, but he had contact with other Latin American families in the Pittsburgh area where his family lived. Perhaps the lack of a local exile community led to his parents’ minimal expressions of a feature found in much exile discourse: nostalgia. Yet he was aware of being identified as a member of a Chilean family, and he took in other elements of diasporic experience after 1973:
I understand from my family experience the complications that follow the decision to leave or not return to an oppressive country, and I understand how truly awful it was for so many people who stayed or could not leave. And I understand the resentments that were felt for those who left, and I understand the ways in which families and friends inevitably grew apart and were broken and damaged through exile.31