culturestrike:

For many of Mexico’s critical minds, it’s a dangerous time to be speaking freely.  Violence against journalists and activists—including murders and terrorization of students and intellectuals who resist both state oppression and drug war violence—have frayed the cultural fabric. 

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In 2011, poet Dolores Dorantes took off from Juarez to seek safety in El Paso, having determined that her work as an artist and activist was becoming too risky. She recently engaged in a dialogue with her friend, author and journalist Ben Ehrenreich, to discuss what it means to be a writer in exile. Ehrenreich, who has reported from the Occupied Palestinian Territories and observed the need for, and risks of, documenting the mass atrocities of conflict, asked Dolores to reflect on her experiences with migration—as a refugee seeking political asylum, as well as an itinerant poet. But the conversation spiraled into a broader reflection on the meaning of borders—in the literary world, between “high” and “low” culture, and in the politics of nation-states—and how individuals and communities can find sanctuary and solidarity, in a world that so often militates against the collective voice.

In Dorantes’s poem, “A/A,” she touches on the vitality, as well as the lethality, of life in exile when she observes, “I don’t know any other way to live except to be lost.” In conversation with Ehrenreich, the two explore the meaning of loss, as a path toward discovering a different sense of the truth.

The dialogue was conducted via email over a period of days, in a blend of English and Spanish, and it appears here translated into both.

For more of Dolores Dorantes’s work, read her poems on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, translated by Jen Hofer.

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Ben Ehrenreich: Maybe we should start by talking about the piece you recently performed in LA  with Román Luján and Juan Manuel Portillo. The piece was called “No Sirvo,” which of course means both “I don’t/won’t serve” and “I’m broken,” or “I don’t work.” On your part, at least, it was a powerful statement of independence–as a writer, as an artist, as a woman, as a Mexican living in the US. The piece suggested a double bind, a rejection of the servile posturing—by which I mean both self-censorship and more literal prostrations—demanded by both the mainly white US poetry world and the Mexican literary establishment. For American readers who don’t necessarily know much about how that system works–how does the literary world function in Mexico, and what did it mean for you while you were still living there to consciously stake out a position outside of that system?

Dolores Dorantes: For a long time I’ve been meditating on the conditioning that keeps us hooked in to certain systems of power and that generates within us the unconscious reproduction of the very systems that we criticize; this year I’ve been thinking a lot about the mark left at the end of that process of reproduction, like the trace of the keystroke the printer leaves on the paper. I’m most interested in the influence of behaviors that mark a radical deviation in the repetition of those processes and that shake off a little of the inertia in which we usually immerse ourselves. I like to employ simple behavioral patterns that we repeat daily all over the world, like servitude. In the performance you mention, I was interested in breaking the repetition that we have so thoroughly adopted about who is born to serve and who to command, and in sowing that doubt as a mark: according to what standards do we serve? What defines a person who is unfit for service? Who dictates these standards? Shouldn’t serving be an act of love instead of an act of humiliation?

I don’t believe in the existence of a literary world, which may be why I was never part of one (nor will I be). Writers exist, like shoemakers do. In Mexico, extraordinarily enough, there is a budget of millions to guarantee the existence of art, and that budget must be spent; we know that with enough money it’s possible to invent a ‘world,’ right? This “world” is one invented in order to justify funding and not a motor that generates art on its own. To impose some order, artists serve as “experts in the field” who decide who will or will not receive a little money in exchange for a commitment to produce art within the institutional reality of the Mexican state.  In this way they get the wheel rolling, as Vargas Lllosa would say, “through bribes,” to subtly, force intellectuals to conform. I am an incurable lover of freedom and for that reason decided to be a prisoner to other trades rather than consenting to commit my talents to a system created by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the institutional party, which is hypocritical to its marrow, not to mention macho, sexist, classist, racist, arrogant.

But intellectual goods are not like shoes. How do you think we should treat them when they are precisely the “material” of our work? How can we give them value?

BE: The more I do this, the more I write and the more I think about why I write, the more I am convinced that the only relevant material is love. I don’t mean that in any goopy romantic sense, and I’m not talking about something that is necessarily gentle or even kind. I am quite sure that love does not need us to lend it value, only that we open ourselves to it. Which I suppose is one of the things that I loved (forgive me) about “No Sirvo,” that you, as you say, turned a posture of humiliation into one of love. You got on your knees on the stage and kissed Román’s feet, and Juan Manuel’s. You knelt in the aisle and kissed my feet, and Anthony McCann’s. It was a supremely uncomfortable gesture, almost unbearably—one that took its power from the discomfort it evoked. Because love somehow broke through, and your defiance was suddenly transformed, and transformative.

But you are not on your knees most of the time, Lola, and we’re supposed to be talking about immigration. The other literary world referenced by “No Sirvo” is the one you encountered here in the US—also not a “world” so much as a series of relationships which, depending which side of them you’re on, are either obstacles or allegiances. The pertinent institutions here are mainly private, or semi-private, and in poetry are mainly lashed in one way or another to academia. And this being the US, the boundaries are primarily defined by race. Which means that on arriving here four years ago, a whole series of fresh identities were dumped on top of you: without wanting to, you had become an immigrant, a Latina, a “person of color,” and a poet working sometimes within but mainly outside a system that was not particularly welcoming to any of those identities. How have you navigated this transition?

DD: I would like to be able to change the way that we perceive our work as a good that has a certain value. It’s a value that someone else assigns, the institution. It is there—in the way that intellectual work is perceived, appraised, esteemed—that I think the waters of these two countries come together. Private or public, the collective perception we have about creativity and its social influence is the same: as if the academy had been born before art, before thought, when in reality the academy and the government are only the sources that dole out money for our survival; we submit to systems of authority that appraise our work and decide if we deserve to live on what we make. We pass through the scanner of academic authority or political authority (two areas that live enraptured with one another). Thinking about intellectual work as a finite good permits those systems to continue exercising their power over us.

That’s how it’s gone with my work in my country and that’s how it’s gone with my work in this country. This country specializes in assigning identities so we can entertain ourselves defending them (just as Mexico specializes in converting its citizens into suspects of the direst crimes), and yes, I don’t limit my thought to identities. As you observe, on arriving here I stopped being me and became: exiled, Latina, indigenous, Black, a woman, single, an activist, a writer, mentally ill. Without taking into account that I am also (sometimes) unemployed, mute, an arriviste, a liar in search of the American Dream, and (other times) suspicious, haughty, selfish, savage, stupid and dying of hunger, like anyone else.  I consider myself fortunate because the institutions in this country have approved of my Mexi-Black identity to vindicate themselves with a dose of “color” and that gives me a platform that allows me to be here today, talking to you, returning the love. I still believe that the infinite good that is our work can open doors by itself, without us having to denigrate ourselves or serve as circus animals that the institution can take out for a walk. What value does infinity have, Ben? How can we restore that value if it doesn’t originate within us?

BE: Part of me rebels against the whole notion of value. It’s the part that can’t stop seeing that word’s connection to money, to the very systems of appraisal that we would like it to be independent from. While of course still getting paid, because this is work that we do, like that shoemaker’s, if less immediately useful. We have rent to pay, and all the rest, and etc. But a shoemaker can tabulate expenses, materials: leather, rubber, thread and glue. And without being too snooty about it, we have nothing but the world, which is to say infinity and nothingness and love. Which is enough of course, as far as materials go.

But  there’s another question, the one I understand you to be asking, which is how to slip the infinite into the finite, how to stuff it in. Because value is just that, isn’t it? An accounting, or an assessment—you see? these metaphors are inescapably financial—a measuring, in this case of the immeasurable. Which is what we do all day with words, shabby vessels of however many letters and however many syllables that leak the infinite all over. Which makes this a version of the more general question of how to live with integrity in relation to a truth that is larger than we are, and never still.

Wouldn’t it be easier if we had just talked about immigration?

DD:  We can’t talk about immigration without dealing with borders. Immigration exists because borders exist, otherwise it would be just men getting to know the world like birds do: one tribe meeting another, exchanging knowledge and illnesses, religions, greed, and other modes of expressing themselves, of living. I think a lot about those people from Africa who have not stopped migrating, who have nowhere to rest or to stop.  I think about the ones who have to hide from bombardments, I think a lot about that boy who immolated himself in front of the government building, I think it was in Guerrero. I think about families torn apart by murder. I think about the impotence of indigenous people massacred and displaced every day. I think about a worldwide policy of extermination. Something bad is happening, Ben, something very bad.

BE: Yes, these are sci-fi bad times. It struck me hard a few weeks ago after the UN announced that the number of refugees in the world had jumped to almost 60 million. There are only a couple of dozen countries with populations larger than that. So we have a growing nation of the displaced being thrown from one fortified border to another. And robbed and raped and imprisoned along the way. And a few weeks earlier that boat sank in the Mediterranean, drowning 800 refugees and the world was horrified for half a news cycle and every month another hundred or more drown and thousands more have died in the desert crossing from Mexico into the US. And those are just the actual, bodily deaths, the ones that can be tabulated, not the ones that people carry with them. And the planet is getting hotter and drier. And the kind of predatory capitalism and truly genocidal resource extraction that is fueling the conflicts that are displacing all these millions—all of it is getting worse, much worse.

And yet if these issues are discussed at all in the US and Europe, they are still discussed as a problem of “immigration,” of keeping what’s “outside” from getting in—as a problem of borders,  as you say. The EU is reacting to its “migrant crisis” with precisely the same stupidity as the US, panicking about borders and cracking down on “human trafficking,” as if all the many legal and hence legitimate forms of trafficking in which their good citizens and governments profitably engage—in minerals, petroleum, water, weapons, all the lucrative architecture of “security”—have nothing whatsoever to do with these dislocations. And in this country, the discourse remains impenetrably wrapped in myth, with room for only two roles: the humble, hard-working, self-sacrificing, “good immigrant,” eager to bow and scrape for a piece of the dream; and the evil, sneaky, lecherous, lazy, drunken and diseased “illegal,” who must be kept out at all costs.

How do you talk about this? How is it possible to speak and write truthfully within (or beside, or beneath) a discourse that exists to lock you out?

DD: “Truthfully,” I don’t know. I think that when you’ve lost everything: your house, your work, your language, your freedom to travel, your country of origin, and when you believed that you were that house, that vocation, that path, that country, and all of a sudden you’re in the center of world capitalism, fighting just to get your immigration status and, all this time, while you were doing nothing but writing and praying—life is making something very clear for you: that you were wrong about everything, except your vocation. After that, it’s difficult to betray the conviction that kept you alive. After that, how can I disguise my vital energy as an intellectual piñata for academic parties? How can I kiss the feet of independent presses run by whites making the most of our dose of misfortune and color? I’m not going to kneel in exchange for a little applause and a diploma. But with all my convictions I haven’t stopped feeling that I am living out of the profound death of what I am, and in a rabid country far from Latin America. Even though I know that after 25 years in Ciudad Juárez, I am a specialist in rabid places. That’s where all the breakthroughs of the soul can be felt, the flashes of dignity and instances of courage. I still remember Marisela Escobedo walking naked from the center of the city to the courts demanding justice for her murdered daughter, I saw her every time I took the bus to give autobiographical writing workshops in the municipal jail. I remember, years before, Norma Andrade, who took over the facilities of the Chihuahua Women’s Institute to demand that her daughter’s murder be solved. I remember the words of Marisela Ortiz, “that’s how us activists have to live here, amiga, like rats.” I remember the journalist Rosa Isela Pérez, who once proposed that we march barefoot to push the authorities to act. What reality has more force, Ben? The reality with war right on its surface? Or the one where war is disguised as justice for the racial identities that it actually despises?

BE: That’s probably the thing that was hardest for me coming back to the US from Palestine, where I was living and working on a book. People here would almost invariably get uncomfortable, and ask with a certain nervous awe, if it wasn’t hard to be around so much violence. And it was sometimes, but the really hard thing was being here, in this country, and seeing violence everywhere, violence that no one else seemed to see. If they did see it, they didn’t call it violence. It was normal, the everyday workings of capitalism, the “rule of law,” and this normality erased the enormous brutality, rendered it invisible.

Everything is fine here. There are tens of thousands sleeping in the streets in this city and police helicopters always circling overhead and police killing people for being Black and arresting them for being poor, but everything is fine, and if you suggest otherwise in anything other than the politest tone, then you’re being irrational, you’ve pushed yourself outside the boundaries of mainstream civilized discourse, which takes as its foundation this manic and fragile certainty that Everything Is Fine. Reforms may be necessary, perhaps some sensitivity trainings, little tweaks here and there, nothing more. It’s as if the entire country exists by virtue of a willed collective blindness that must be constantly reinforced.

But everything is not fine. There is nothing static or stable in this place. All of its wealth is violence. The comforts that it so jealously guards are violence. There is a constant push, a steadily accelerating level of repression, of the open brutality that inevitably accompanies a massive shift in resources—a bold and, for the most part, legal theft. Which is what we are witnessing, and suffering. And yeah, one of the few virtues of war is that the basic falsity at the root of this sort of polite discourse dies off. Other and uglier falsities multiply. Lies persist, and cowardice as much as valor, but no one can pretend that everything is okay.

I want to ask you about the violence in Mexico, and in Juárez. The reigning media narrative here is still that something called a drug war is being fought, that Juárez descended into chaos because competing cartels were fighting for dominance over smuggling routes and markets. I know you see things differently. Tell me how you understand what happened to Juárez, and what’s happening to Mexico.

DD: What I have seen muddies my thinking. It clouds my sight, gives me migraines. The repressive system at work in Mexico has done me a lot of harm, without doubt. It’s like having a mental scar. Anyone who has been hunted by the state would understand. But it’s been precisely this journey through hell that has made me believe that maybe my common sense was right. In the city where I lived, they [the government and other corrupt and criminal forces]  began to blame the community for the massacres, the disappearances, the insecurity. And from then on I suspected that something didn’t square with the official information. Could it be that the soldiers were not in the city to protect us? Why couldn’t I go out walking without seeing soldiers dragging off my neighbors? Why did they shoot down the carpenter in Calle Vicente Guerrero? Why did they kidnap my neighbor, who was an accountant? Why, if you responded to a cry for help, did you run the risk of being shot down as well, as happened to another one of my neighbors? Why was a doctor who went out to help someone who had been injured on Avenida 16 de Septiembre blown up by a car bomb? All of this happened two blocks from my house. Why would the police arrive so long after the paramilitaries struck? Why did the military never arrest a single hitman?

The drugs were the least of it; the crisis had its origins in a politics of extermination. We know there were no journalists whose phones weren’t tapped—by whom? Who was spending so much money to watch over us? The local merchants ceased to exist, the ones who stayed paid “dues.” The upper-middle classes took their businesses and their families and moved to this country. Adolescents from semi-poor neighborhoods were recruited by the armed groups, trained to kill. The victims were stigmatized, human rights advocates subjected to smear campaigns, intellectuals bought off.  

Our experience had nothing to do with any feud between drug-traffickers. Drug-trafficking was used as a discourse to instill terror. It has turned out to be a profoundly damaging one, and efficient. The only thing that I can say for sure is that it was set in motion with hatred towards the population, that hatred was promoted (but by whom?).

I know that you have been in other places marked by war. Let’s talk about hate. What do we do when a population or a person is submitted to a system of constant hate, a sham hate disguised as justice? You, dear Ben, what have you seen?

BE:  Oh god, I don’t want to talk about it, either. Except to say that until last summer, and the events that led up to the war on Gaza, I had always downplayed the role that emotions like hatred play in politics, even in war. From a distance—and all of the US’s recent wars have been fought from a distance—it’s easy to understand war as a rational affair, an extension of politics by other means, etc., etc., to believe that wars are about resources, concrete economic relationships. And to at least some degree, they always are, but when hatred begins to gather momentum, nothing else matters. Except for Israel’s desire to showcase the sophisticated weaponry that it markets to the world, I can think of no material cause for last summer’s war. Gaza has nothing that Israel wants. They have nothing at all. Once the hate broke loose, I realized that it had been there all along and that I’d been too dumb to understand its power. I thought all the violence I had been witnessing was rational, that it served a purpose, not just to take land, but to discipline a population, to systematically deprive a people of its dignity, to sow despair. I was right. But what I didn’t understand was that none of that can happen without breeding—not only in the oppressed but in the oppressor—a deep store of hatred, for oneself and for the other. It was like a dark liquid that flowed beneath the surface of society, that gave the society its shape and direction but that remained invisible until it began to burst and flow from people’s eyes and mouths and pores. All that happened last summer was that Israel’s political class found it opportune to drill a little out, to exploit that hatred for short-term gain, to nourish it. And it escaped their control, and spilled all over everything.

And what do we do, you want to know? I don’t have an answer. Not a good one. Do you?

DD:  Sometimes I think that love is the answer, but what a complex and confusing thing it is to love.

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