asylum : after nation

from the author

My affiliation with America goes back to 1978, though I wouldn’t be born until 1979. My attachment to the American lyric won’t articulate itself until much later. I wouldn’t be naturalized a citizen until the early 90s. I do not write a single poem until the 2000s. But in August of 1978 an elderly but lively couple are walking home from dinner in San Salvador, El Salvador. Pushed together with the traffic, the trees and the monuments, people are comfortable being close to each other. Despite the heat. The heat reminds one of a certain impossibility. In geometry an asymptote refers to a curvature that approaches a tangent to the point of infinity. The theoretical trajectory that exists only to remind the curve and all the mathematics undergirding its existence, like the heat in El Salvador does as it fits itself between every possible physical space, that they will never touch. There is a comfort in this impossibility as an immigrant who can’t return home in the fullest sense, or ever feel at one with place as a concept reciprocal to national belonging. As a poet this seemingly pessimistic realization of impossibility has blossomed into an infinite horizon of yet to be articulated, tangentially documented emotions.

Back in 1978, however, this couple, fondly regarded in their neighborhood, is walking past a local radio station. They are runover by a car.

The car will have US CONSUL license plates. The car will disappear.

The clothes are stripped from the bodies of these two new grandparents, their identification taken. The radio station makes a live appeal, The appearance and disappearance of the car, the transformation of walking bodies to laying bodies, dying bodies, transforms the scenery. It is traumatic. The event, however, will not be the only catastrophic rearrangement of the sensible.

I do not find the language for the trauma of these moments in 1978, or understand my indebtedness to complicated anger in the form lyric poetry, a genre normally dedicated to the beautiful, to the lovely, to the woven music this memory begins with until 2019, when I hold my own child. The news plays soundbite after soundbite of children crying out for their parents, or for anyone not wearing a uniform in detention center after detention center. I listen for the “voices overheard,” as John Stuart Mill describes the lyric in 1833, but the very sound of asylum has been disfigured by the impact of detention on bodies I cannot help but place myself into.

asylum : after nation is a work in progress that continues to think through the care of children within constructs of Nation, which are alluded to here in the catastrophic effects of detention at the Mexico/US Border, and on the linguistic codification of national institutions, including citizenship, dwelling, and power, and after. 

in P-QUEUE