(Ed note: This is part 3 of a 4 part series. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.)
We need a dead (wo)man to begin.
-Hélène Cixous
There were realities I could not fathom, even as I stood there watching my grandpa’s casket sink into the same dry Texas land he walked weeks before, where he was born, where I was born, where we shared meals and grew things: his body will stay there forever, he will decompose.
The fact of decomposition consumed me and soon I walked the earth very aware that there was decomposition happening all around me. That there were probably bones and strands of DNA under the soles of my feet at any given moment—from this century or that.
Sometimes I didn’t know why I was writing anymore. I wanted to lay flat on the earth and be with the decomposing things of the world, including my grandpa. It seemed the decomposition of him composed the earth. I wanted to do that. I wanted to help build the earth.
But I had to keep working. I arrived in El Paso to do a couple of readings at El Paso Community College and UTEP 61 days after grandpa was buried. I had never been and I had never been so close to Ciudad Juarez, so close to the brutal femicides that had taken place there, just a few short miles from where I was. I could look over the wall and see Mexico and probably everywhere I looked, someone was decomposing. This felt familiar. But while the land where my grandpa lay was quiet, this land was pulsating.
I remember the violet peaks and red sand of El Paso. And I fell in love with the Ocotillo, a cactus I was unfamiliar with. I remember thinking that the folks in El Paso were such sad bunch—the waiter at the restaurant, the store clerk, the mothers with their little babies trailing them in the streets, and the men who looked like they might collapse if they had to lay one more brick, swing one more hammer. El Paso was quiet, but I was so split open by my own grief that I was privy to sounds I don’t think I would have heard otherwise: I could hear, faintly and in the distance, the screams of women. And maybe then, I knew what the people of the border knew. Maybe you have to know grief to know the border. Or maybe you have to know the border to truly know grief.
The students I met from Ciudad Juarez were the ones I most wanted to talk with. How many of them had lost a sister? A daughter? A niece? Mother? Did they feel the pulsating ground? For the first time since I lost my grandfather, I felt that there were people around me who knew what I knew. More so, knew a kind of loss that I could not comprehend. I found myself wanting to pull their stories out of them, but I hadn’t the strength nor the right.
I couldn’t stop myself from imagining the brutal deaths of all the women of Ciudad Juarez: mothers and daughters and sisters. I lost myself, recalling details, specifically, from Valerie Martinez’s book about the murders, Each and Her: a nipple, a shoe. All the Marias. Maybe there was a Laurie Ann? I was so close to the border, on the border, in fact, and I could hear my dad’s voice, who had just lost his, insisting as he did just days prior: Don’t be alone, Laur. Don’t you dare cross over. Stay on this side. This made me angry—who was I that I might be spared? And who are you, man, to utilize your right to protect your child? And who are you, man, trying to protect me, a woman?
But I stayed. I stayed in El Paso imagining my life if I had been born on the other side: the loss I had experienced, on this side, was nothing. It was part of life. There was nothing unnatural about our loss. On I went: I imagined my own brutal, horrific death. I imagined the details they’d have to tell my children, my mama and daddy, which left me weeping alone in El Paso in September. I cried for every loss on both sides of the border that night.
I carried El Paso & Cuidad Juarez with me throughout the writing of my crown of sonnets, named in honor of my grandpa, Gumecindo: But who am I to honor one man and not all these women?
And with whom do I feel the most solidarity, really?
And note the decomposing bodies that build the earth…how dare I wish to build any damn thing.
But it was these women on the other side of the border that offered different lenses through which I might see the death of my grandfather and the man himself. I felt many things: I was embarrassed that I was so distraught after the loss of him.
I felt shamed--by my own tears, by the recognition of his full and glorious life, that he had 82 years to make magic and did, often.That I had never heard him scream.
Then I thought, in their death, perhaps they’d find each other. And where I had been grandpa’s one and only, now maybe he’d have so many granddaughters to love and be loved by. And I was jealous.
And with whom did I feel the most solidarity, really?
Then I thought maybe now they’ll have someone to protect them in death the way they didn’t have in life. And then I was disgusted by my own internalized sexism. And how dare I wish to build any damn thing?
And I didn’t want to write the sonnets anymore.
Grief is a ruthless and complicated monster.
But I knew that --as a woman, a living woman-- I had been brought to that border place to contemplate both sides, to feel the grief, to get angry, to be ashamed, and to understand that, like the Ocotillo, there were many things I would not be familiar with and that they would exist regardless— with or without me. The border both ravaged me and centered me: so many bodies building the earth.
I could only have understood this in El Paso.
I went back to the business of my grief, knowing the geography of my life rendered me lucky. Social, personal, political, and cultural histories were converging here. And, too, the intersections of time & space, race & class, gender & occupation meant my job as a Tejana poet meant I had to write sonnets. I had to write sonnets in defiance--with my sadness and fear and jealousy and loyalty and anger and fear and prejudice and speechlessness and ignorance and Texas pride and shame and fear and fear that I also inherited.
I had to steal the crown.
-LA
Laurie Ann,
such a mighty read... the rage and ravage of wrestling"the monster" with a 14 count knock out...
Posted by: bill | September 03, 2015 at 02:15 PM