excerpt from ¡chicharros!

“What sleeps in the violence we don’t address?” writes the poet Angel Dominguez in Desgracidado: The Collected Letters. Ghosts, I would posit. The kind of anger I’m after acknowledges the knocking mischief of America’s spirits and how they possess us in degrees, as if empowered by the ever-glorified balance scale of justice. The more authorized the voice, the empowered the mouth to mow down people’s dignity, the less the body weighs. The less listened to the stories and witnessing, the documents and testimony, the heavier one’s skin, and the back bends and curves almost textually. But the apparition of ghosts coincides with an instinctual repudiation. So, I would add that what sleeps in unaddressed violence is both a ghost and a repudiatory utterance. And maybe that’s why the anger in poetry cuts people so. Why it’s met with affirmation in some of us, yet another anger and refusal in others. An internally wired act sparks in lyric voice. Its vatic speech, its speculative drawing together this motley, cubist looking crowd of different weights and sounds preserves a civic sanity by reinstating trust in a knowledge American difference has otherwise parsed out to unjustly, inequitably. I make the civic distinction here because a ghost’s true power isn’t how it appears before an individual, only in how it disrupts that individual’s belonging to a civic reason. Divorced from the collective cortex of a civic tradition, an individual has no linguistic means to fear ghosts. There’s no context of apparition for a ghost to be anything other than a passing aurora. A fleeting sensation amongst others. It is a ghost’s being marked socially as an entity not plugged into the financial equation––the ghosts that haunt Ebenezer––that insinuates a fear that is to be avoided or denied, like a baby bird that can’t go back to its family because the smell of human fingers on its silky feathers.

The poetry I am talking about is exploratory. It travels between realms of civic reason and apparitions. Goes fully into that space by leaving the civic stasis behind and venturing into the upside down. A poetics of anger comes back to the text, to the performance of speech with knowledge from those worlds. But it’s a changed knowledge, a knowledge that embraces uncertainty as merely a ghost that has yet to appear. How many times can a ghost pop its spectral face in front of yours before you can whisper “chicharros”?   

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I am part of a diaspora community prompted by civil war, and our civil war prompted by American intervention. I was born in El Salvador. We left when I was a few months old. My mother’s body retained a great deal of distress around the time of my birth. It’s thought trauma is a specific kind of thwarting of experienced time, and I mean experienced in the under-defined way of clumping together what we witness, desire, are told, and retell ourselves after. Something gets in the way of one of these tracks being completed. Biologically, evolutionarily, time is about life: survival. Survival includes safety. Trauma is the experience of survival, as temporal, being threatened. The temporal is perhaps the most sensitive variable to any capitalist society. While my mother retained the distress of an experience cut short, I have recycled the loop of expectation and void. Mine are a painful many maladaptive and self-destructive behaviors. Writing has given me permission to find resemblances in larger definitions of experience. This kind of sharing decenters my painful focus on one linear insecurity. It decolonizes the hold of exceptionalism on my right to find safety in caring and healthy ways that do not destroy the safety of others, or, as the therapist Resmaa Menakem describes it, “blow through others.” Safety is a socialized fantasy that binds us to our human past, as political and technological creatures. Anger is the remainder of this paradox, lived out with others.