In making this wager, Moctezuma joins with another
Chicago poet with a distinguished avant-garde pedigree,
Daniel Borzutzky. Between Place-Discipline and
Borzutzky’s recent books, The Performance of Becoming
Human (2016) and Lake Michigan (2018), an ambitious
reader can find a comprehensive poetic map of neoliberal
Chicago—segregated and over-policed, a city of black-sites
and financial machinery.”
—Toby Altman, “On Place-Discipline”
The long flights of steps, the rock-pillared esplanades, and the watery lintels and dolmens of rock along Lake Michigan are strange thresholds into Chicago. Seemingly natural, with stretches of reclaimed prairie behind them, in most stretches these gateways that separate the city from its lake are precisely designed: the embankment reaps the benefit of the towers and high-rises that crowd the skyline. And those towers and high-rises wear the embankment like a mask of Midwest achievement. Daniel Borzutzky and Jose-Luis Moctezuma are poets of that mask and the human cost of its performance. And their Lake Michigan and Place-Discipline are riotous rondels around the threshing sledge on which such cost has been paid.
When we think of city scenes we imagine crowded streets and hebephrenic motion, and when we speak of city scenes it is often with reference to hazard—the scene of the accident or scene of a crime. Borzutzky’s book of poems, Lake Michigan, is divided into 19 such latter “scenes” in two acts with an overture. Many are indeed scenes of crime, whose criminals are a network of agents from Chicago to Chile militantly supporting a racial taxonomy that serves elite capitalist power. The book is a litany of dead boys, disappeared persons, tortured bodies, and mass graves—and, like all litany, it risks repetition. The danger of litany is to make the irreducible singularity of every act of violence it aggregates come to feel redundant in the aggregate. In the “Part About the Crimes” of his 2666, Roberto Bolaño takes on this risky work by humanizing and personalizing the stories of 112 women killed in Santa Teresa (i.e., Juarez) from 1993 to 1997. Bolaño forces you to stay with the irreducible singularity of each act in a cascade of accumulating violence. Borzutzky’s method is just as severe and revealing: in giving no names for the dead, disappeared, tortured, and deported, his book is a transnational template for making poetry about that violence without stepping out of a sacred circle of humility. Its ambiguous address (a productively vague sense of who is speaking to whom about what and where) creates a multiply polarized vision in which the seeming distances between scenes of world violence are fixed into a clear view of a single, persistent, worldwide, and ongoing war on the poor:
And we thank you we sing
We thank you for not killing us through combustion
We thank you for not attaching a heated metal contraption into our head and exploding us
We thank you for not pouring molten metal into our throats and ears
We thank you for not waterboarding us
We thank you for not boiling us
We thank you for not stoning us
We thank you for not shoving tubes into our mouths and filling our bodies with vitamins
and minerals
We thank you for letting us scoop each other out of our holes
We thank you for not running us over with your trucks or electrocuting us
We thank you for not abandoning us in a desert
We thank you for keeping our bodies from dehydrating and we thank you for keeping our
bodies from shrinking
We remember when we were so small we could barely see the sun
We remember when we were so small we could barely see the lake and we ask the police
officers to forgive us
And when they forgive us they beat us and when they beat us they pray for us and when
they pray for us we pray for ourselves and we think of the humans we once loved
We think of our parents and our lovers and our children
And we see our friends in the cracks in the sky and our bodies are shaking and they beat
us so we don’t shake and there are floods now in our mouths and we are crushing each
other
We are the hostages we prayed we would not become[1]
I read those lines and I thought of Bertolt Brecht, who wanted to honor the silences and inexpressibility of violence, while also making poetry: “And when the bitter fight grew less intense / The man who helped me back was kind to me / And in his silence I began to sense / No understanding, but some sympathy.”[2] What Brecht called “the linguistic cleanup” was a kind of wish to enact stern lapidary peace amid the expressible horror of war. And there is a kind of strange peace in Borzutzky’s poems, even though they can be distressingly laconic. The reticent vagueness of such voice marks the blindness that the overwhelming strobe-effect of constant state violence makes—a nonstop flash of colonialism, fascism, war-mongering, corporate-police statism, racial capitalism, xenophobia of all kinds, and the constant killing machine unleashed to maintain primitive accumulation. When names and locales do appear in Borzutzky’s poems, they are caught in such a strobing flash, which gives a mangled lighting to the redundancy of beat up and dead bodies:
They bring in the Chicago bodies the Nordic bodies the Chilean bodies to play
music for us to accompany the wind and the waves
They circle us
They dance for us
They think I might have some power to release some bit of life from the lake
But I have no power
I am nearly as powerless as they are
It’s just that the things I am commanded to do are easier than the things the pale bodies
are commanded to do
I am commanded to guard the Puerto Rican bodies the Cuban bodies the Peruvian
bodies the French and Italian and German bodies the Armenian and Slovenian and
Algerian bodies the moldy dusty white and beige UnitedStatesian bodies as they
move from barracks to bathroom from bathroom to cafeteria from cafeteria to
solitary confinement unit etc.
An imprisoned boy with a ukulele approaches us smiling the way they force us to
smile so that the international observers can see how happy the incarcerated bodies are
here in Chicago [3]
Some scenes of life in Borzutzky’s Chicago: if you mention Chicago in Latin America—especially Chile—the first association bounced back to you will be the “Chicago Boys.” This term refers to the group of economists who carried the message of Neoliberalism—deregulation, privatization, and the necessary glory of the free market—from Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago to the US-aligned governments of Latin America in the 1970s and 80s. The most famous employer of this group was General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, who enforced the rule of El ladrillo, a brick-thick dossier of economic prescriptions prepared in collaboration with the CIA—a plan whose forceful and persistent (because too sacred to fail) implementation would, as Pinochet said, “make Chile not a nation of proletarians, but a nation of entrepreneurs.” Then, in another scene, if you say “Chicago boys” in Chicago the first association is the spate of killings of young black and Latino men by the city’s police. The first name that might arise in your mind is that of Laquan McDonald, if only because the released video of his killing at 4100 S. Pulaski intensified the massive public pressure to release information on officer-involved killings—information that the city keeps secret. That secrecy has its most actualized metonym in the Chicago “black site,” a warehouse in Homan Square where detainees were said to be “disappeared,” interrogated “off-the-books,” and tortured. Brecht: “Stop searching, woman: you will never find them / But, woman, don’t accept that Fate is to blame. / Those murky forces, woman, that torment you / Have each of them a face, address, and name.”[4]
Borzutzky’s book tunes in to these scenes to take them apart, revealing the broken arms and bodies of inter-American exploitation that continues to exact its cost on people and their places—shooting people when they are trying to live their lives. The overlap of “Chicago” in its Latin American and Midwestern scenes has still more deranged realizations. The resemblance between these black sites and the interrogation techniques used to fight the post-9/11 wars on terror is more than incidental—the Chicago detectives also appear in the rosters of interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. I think that it was in Argentina that the term “desaparecido” as we use it today was coined; or, at least, where the use of the term “to disappear” caught on (the neologism was the dictator-there’s doing—although of course such practices were familiar in Nazi Germany and have persisted in various ways into the present; the students of Mexico for instance). To disappear a person is to remove them from the legal documentation of life and death. To be disappeared was a condition of terror common in Chile, as well as the various other states aspiring to be nations of entrepreneurs. The first time my mother went to El Salvador after some twenty years of staying away, she returned with a picture of her high school class. We sat together looking at the picture while she pointed out the young men who were disappeared during the Salvadoran Civil War, whose final whereabouts were never learned.
This global circuit of black sites, violence on dark bodies, theft of the commons, and the wars for unrestrained markets is not usually very thickly described. The blinding persistence of the violence tends to disappear its mention, but in Borzutzky’s poetry it is brought to life. Lake Michigan gives an energizing voice to the danger of that blinding repetitiousness.
The other thing that is made to disappear under the mask of progress is the name and identity of any person who refuses to wear the mask. Moctezuma’s very different kind of book—Place-Discipline—is populated with such names, drawing from a long historical range (it stretches from Babel and Ur to Tenochtitlan and “Checagou”—so it has a more synchronic or all-at-once feel than Borzutzky’s ). My sense for thinking about the two books together is that they are two books that bring to life inter-racial solidarities in Chicago (poems of the Americas located in the blackness of the city of broad shoulders)—Borzutzky thinking about the relationship of the city to hemispheric practices of exploitation and subjugation; Moctezuma thinking about the relationship between the city’s Latinx migrations and black migrations); more crudely put, both are books about black and brown Chicago written by second-generation Latinx migrants. Still, these are two different kinds of poets, with different relations to historical time. Whereas Borzutzky writes a litany with free market ideology in its crosshairs that is very much in a precariously pendant present tense, Moctezuma writes paeans to possible forms of congregation and harmonization that might escape the threshing sledge, indeed that might escape history itself.
Here are some of Moctezuma’s refusers of the city’s necropolitics: Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sun Ra. In their blast of negation, these heroic voices are made to speak in a mixture of modernist cant, Nahuatl and Anishinaabe, and Chicano or Latinx Spanglish. This kind of hybrid poetics would seem to be out of step with the aims of a book that also critiques smooth absorption into the achievement of a totalized whole (a happy hybridity bathed cleanly in the aim of exploitation and monetary gain). And in Moctezuma’s book the problem is more about nationalism than neoliberalism—it is worried about the danger of recreating that old hybridism by which actual inequality is made to appear leveled, a matter of cultural difference only. Rather than a hybrid, what Moctezuma is after then is a shifting form whose shifts do not cohere into an identity, but instead remain a strategy of responsiveness—a resource of negativization that he calls “Megapolisomancy,” or the city’s spell turning upon itself, enchanting a sense of place from the seeming recesses and silences of a city’s subjugated spaces. In its own way, then, his book is also concerned with the institution of race in its globalized forms, in its urban instances—but it has a distinct giddiness about it:
taxonomy ::
of bacteria of
:: globule capital
citicorp decomposes
into citigroup (a traveler’s group
or the highwaymen, the quarry
discharged
/ euro-ameri-bank / banamex((
chase mannahatta for 60 guilders
((what a deal
coins jp
morgan chase ((wash our
mutual interests / great west- ern finance // ah!
manson family /
dimes bancorp / first chicago / banc 1 / 1st
commerce /
jpmorgan le fay / on relay
chemtrails
-lyric bank / bear the stern ursa major
& ursa sub-
prime))
america’s bank
[because
l’amerika lycans
homo homini
lupus est [5]
In thinking with the two books together, the difference between nation and neoliberalism seems to be one of temperature. Across the two books, nationalism is feverish and hallucinates, always jumping into the burning spotlight that reveals the hateful contents of its brandished forms; while the free market political formation has a kind of cool calculation to it, invisible as math when it can be, calmly corrective in its calculus when it can’t. Moctezuma’s book is hot—burning with names, celebrated and recriminated. That is maybe its most modern quality—a flaming illumination of the signifier as such, of the sign in its forceful autonomy. But his is a modernism that can stand to be modern: with it, we are reminded how desperate the 1930s are to recur, how close we are to that reactive break into racial nationalism and its obsession with signs of difference. That is, Moctezuma’s book is much more a book about Trump and those aggressions that Trump signals in word and deed: hateful nationhood, virulent xenophobia, racial hierarchy, policing permeable with criminality (ICE), an epidemiological emphasis on borders, and, through that emphasis, a capitalism purified and directed to help whites at the expense of others (the kind of thing that will kill you if you are brown). Brecht on a picture of smiling Hitler eating: “You see me here, eating a simple stew / Me, slave to no desire, except for one: / World conquest. That is all I want. From you / I have but one request: give me your sons.”[6]
In Chicago the major sign of such turns to the blaring nominalism of racial nationhood suffused into pure commercial gain is the Trump Tower that stands at the bend alongside North Michigan Avenue on the Chicago River. My experience of that street is mixed: it is where major protests against Trump’s aggression and illegality have taken place. These have been scenes of amassment, crowding, chaos, and immense energies of focused distress. But in the day-to-day atmosphere around that building there is a distressed and unfocused embarrassment. If you walk along the bridge at North Michigan Avenue in the middle of the day it is interesting to note that many people won’t look at the building. Or, with the ones that do, the stolen glance comes from an inward refusal not to be kept from looking at the gross symbol on the river—not to be embarrassed by their embarrassment, or perhaps not being so open about their relishing the signifier. This is Chicago after all. Elsewhere, the delight of flashing Trump’s name is pure political joy and jubilant aggression.
“Why is Trump so enjoyable?” anthropologist William Mazzarella asks in his chapter of Sovereignty, Inc. (2019). Why is there such “enjoyment in brandishing the word Trump”? In probing that question, Mazzarella’s Lacanian understanding of enjoyment teases out a relation between the Trump brand and its emotional brandishing, which Mazzarella stylizes as “brand(ish)ing”—that is, marketable enjoyment of that abased tickle that turns into the agony and scream it always in fact was. It is a product “where pleasure and agony become indistinguishable”—“you know you’re around enjoyment when people seem quite willing to see the whole house go up in flames rather than give up their attachments—which is also part of what gives enjoyment its ambiguous double aspect of morbid self-destruction and heroic sacrifice.”[7] Mazzarella connects this sense of enjoyment to Marx’s conception of surplus to point out that the project of fusing commerce and state has been one of “economizing enjoyment”—of branding the debasement that people feel in their lives as pleasurable agony, allowing them to buy it and brandish it. Remember: “Trump Straws—Pack of 10, $15.00” because “liberal paper straws don’t work!” They suck! And your planet collapses all the same. And one must be delighted. Melting like plastic in the hellfires of delight….
The list of corporate names in Moctezuma’s book examines the dark magical act of political delight unleashed in the pandemonium of capitalism. In the above poem, he returns to those many other non-Trumpbrand “mergers of capital and state sovereignty”—as Mazzarella puts it—to see how this reality show of branding the spiritual excess of exploitation has been with us since long before Trump. Yet, rather than stay frozen in the deadly intimacy of enjoyment, Moctezuma constellates it in new, because surreptitiously older, myths. On the bridge that crosses the river at the tower I saw a woman lift her phone at an awkward angle across her chest to take a picture without being seen by those around her. There was a happy irony in that scene, flashing to life in a regular summer afternoon. Behind her staring defiantly and directly at the tower was the bust of Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable. In fact the bridge is named “Du Sable Bridge.” This is another kind of scene in Chicago. The capstone poem of Moctezuma’s collection is an “Hommage” to Du Sable, reminding readers of the inescapable scenes of resistance carried by the city of Chicago:
vacancy of tomb by the lakeshore the fusion & cry
of redcheeked cardinals the riverspeak which speaks
of correlation
at end of daybreak in the forcefield of
pecuniary corrections: fur trade tales of black fox gunflints
& flintlocks
awls & glass beads exchanged for marten & otter skin
kettles & axes for beaver & bearheart on bark canoes width & scale of
diffuse flows
a throng assembling in dire cold the instinct to monopolize
what can’t be caged or enframed what resists equation emergence of
capital fervor
contra wilderness the machines of civilizing schemery
that make shanties out of groves that enslave the thought
in time-filled men
what makes objects of people & spreads its cancer
across contiguous ecologies the sundering of organs &
the scalping of skins
at some instance the advent a father of nationtime
blackbelt migrations in his eyes the occulted patriarch strikes
fire in the freeze
))fire in his eyes lumen in his face)) as he worlds within
his solitude the increments of decision: lake cabin in the wood
bordered
in the black sand at nightbreak the deerskins flapping
in carved wind the Métis speech of hybrid forms out of sync
with whiteness [8]
Du Sable was the first permanent non-indigenous settler of the area that came to be Chicago, a successful black trader who married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa, and who later sold all his lands to relocate to the Missouri River Valley to operate a ferry. At first one wonders if perhaps Moctezuma’s Pindaric ode makes too much of this settler colonialist simply because he was nonwhite. Moctezuma’s poem is aware of the problem. In it, Du Sable is no less colonialist than he was, and no less involved in the expropriation of goods and resources than his white counterparts. And, as such, he is no less entangled with the effort of fathering a nationhood whose wealth was accumulated in its foundational instances from the resources of indigenous people. But that sort of sanctimoniousness doesn’t make for the kind of transhistorical, interracial, and transnational political solidarities that animate the vision of Moctezuma’s book, or for very interesting poetry. Instead, Moctezuma is willing to get messy to have the fact of blackness and indigeneity meet in originary counterforce to those voices that say that neither belongs here, or that bear the ignorance to tell either or anyone to go home.
Moctezuma’s book wishes to think beyond the brands that now sell us sovereign racism, and often does. His conception of Du Sable is sometimes fantasy, but if so, it is a fantasy needed for imagining a place in which people can live together without hating one another, without living at the expense of one another, and where they can talk. It is a utopic sense of symbols. And the left has just as much enjoyment and elation in its political self-organization—Mazzarella: “the apparent senselessness of Trumpish enjoyment points not so much to any epochal political crisis of liberalism as such, but rather to the need to acknowledge the enjoyments that have sustained (and exceeded) liberal-democratic public culture all along.”[9] But in Moctezuma’s poems such rapture is localized, obsessed with virtualizing new possible futures of political cohesion and always from the historical location of a racially saturated Chicago: “demonstrative / of future racializations in the future that never became future / a past that unswerved the past a moulded grammar unmoored in / mirrors.”[10] Moctezuma’s eye is set unswervingly on the terror of the Trump brand, whereas Borzutzky remains indignant about Obama’s oversights and offenses, or at least the complicities of Obama (and those around Obama) that fed into the mundane normalization of elated white supremacy. As such, the books speak to one another and work together in a kind of dialectical critique. One stages the theatre of political disappearance and silencing that the other populates with revolutionary roles and voices. One is litany, while the other is ode; negativizability and the changed tones and viewpoints that the negative (that is, the hiatus of critique) enacts on subjects and makes possible for its objects.
Together, they form what poet and scholar Roberto Tejada calls in his newest book “the contrary consciousness of New World displacement.” Tejada refers to a fundamental gash in space and time that was enacted by the wars of colonial conquest in the Americas. At times this gash is the distance between the dreadful actors on the stage and the distressed audience helplessly watching from the pit; at other times, it is the distance between the actor and their mask; still in other scenes it is simply the “compulsion to repeat those displaced attitudes and actions of New World relationships to location and identity.” He adds: “In scenes from the emergent state of a New World theater depicted now as idyllic utopia, now as holocaust-apocalypse, traces left by these writings combine genocidal aggression and victimization underscored by mutual terror, cruelty, and amazement. Relationships of uneven but mutual dispossession emerge between conquista and maternity, between shipwreck and the disintegration of a household, between the struggle for command and the search for one’s children, between anthropophagy and child death […] mirror-occasions of those other custodies set into motion by colonizer and settler alike.”[11] That gash is what Tejada also calls—quoting William Bronk for the title of his book—a “still nowhere in an empty vastness.” Occasionally, a poet arrives to test the depth of that empty vastness. Their echoes fill the hollow of the empty vastness with the feelings of a world possible, or maybe even a world possible in its analytic compulsion. One such poet of critical counterconquest for Tejada is the Cuban José Lezama Lima, whose formation in the plenitude of difficulty and contradiction fills that hollow (“el pabellón del vacio”) with a body and effect, an affective and persistent differential that is life itself. Tejada could as easily be writing about the way in which Borzutzky’s and Moctuzuma’s books entangle themselves in each other, working together to form a comparative analytic in the felt hollow of present bodies: “The two Lezama Limas—the poem’s persona and the eventually evaporated ‘other still walking’—make voluptuous the spellbound qualities and quantities that, in any given historic moment, may be deemed the shortcoming of one’s vernacular, or the productive excess of the other’s. In the barrenness of an interpretive hollow, in the metaphoric interplay of counter-conquest and utopia, a baroque image of the body, ‘the first and final path,’ emerges at last in excess of itself.”[12] There indeed we have a scene of a body self-possessed in its contradictions and crises. And both these poets have found that scene.
Notes
[1]Daniel Borzutzky, Lake Michigan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 42-43.
[2]Bertolt Brecht, War Primer, trans. Stefan Brecht and John Willett, (New York: Verso, 2017), 52.
[3]Borzutsky, 63.
[4]Brecht, 25.
[5]Jose-Luis Moctezuma, Place-Discipline, (Oakland: Omnidawn, 2018), 46.
[6]Brecht, 26.
[7]William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster, Sovereignty, Inc.: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 124, 126.
[8]Moctezuma, 100.
[9]Mazzarella, 150.
[10]Moctezuma, 102.
[11]Roberto Tejada, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness: History + Metaphor, (La Cruces: Noemi Press, 2019) 38, 41.
[12]Tejada, 124.