Review: Essay of Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color

Reviewed by Marcos Gonsalez

Essay of Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color
Poetry Anthology
Nightboat, May 2018
$16.77, 204 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1937658786

A photograph in the archive of American history opens Roderick Ferguson’s seminal text, Aberrations in Black: Queer of Color Critique. The photo is of a segregated railroad facility in Georgia held within the Library of Congress. It’s not what is in the photo that he concentrates upon but what is not in it—the what of exclusion, absence, haunting, erasure. He knows this what because he lived not too far from where this photo was taken. He knows what absences it visualizes: “the transgendered man who wore Levi’s and a baseball cap and chewed tobacco; the men with long permed hair who tickled piano keys; the sissies and bulldaggers who taught the neighborhood children to say their speeches on Easter Sunday morning.” That what (the finger pointed at a body which cannot be discerned, the stumbling to name, to know, to classify, to signify bodies) that is the queer of color: What are you?

That question, that conundrum, that stalemate of being.

What are you? To be or not to be.

What are you? Somewhere between and nowhere between.

What are you? Visualizing ourselves into the picture: the uncle dying of “his illness,” the cousin living across the country with her “roommate,” my boyfriend and I who are just “friends.”

What are you? The quotations imposed upon us, the quotations we give ourselves, quotations all in efforts to emphasize to conceal to represent to abstract that what: our difference, our intimacy, our kink, our pleasure, our taboos.

What are you? “                                                       ”

Now you see me, now you don’t.

The queer of color is a being of quotations. In them, out of them, around them. To hide in plain sight that what, to expose beyond exposure that what. My Tio Cano, contrary to what his obituary says, did not die from some unidentified “illness,” contrary to what my relatives won’t say at all, was not uniquely “heterosexual.” He, in fact, died of AIDS and had sex with women and men, though I try to tell my grandmother this and she shuts me out. My boyfriend is my “friend” to my father, and that’s how I want it, for now, though queer (white) media tells me I should be ashamed, that I am a liar, that I am not out and proud.

For better, or for worse, quotations define the queer of color. It is our history, our queer lineage and ancestry, so many precedents we could never even name as precedents. To name would have meant to give it away, that what one is. Some of us live outside the quotations and critique them, and some of us live inside them and critique them. Our survival depends on such a critique.

The queer of color is unique in our ability to live with quotations in style. And where there is style, as queers have demonstrated so exquisitely through time immemorial, there is pleasure. Marsha P. Johnson turning the throwing of a brick at police into a poem, a manifesto, a work of black trans art. My imagination paints a still-life of the moment, imagining her rage, her fury, her palm gripping the brick accompanied by a mile-high smirk kissing the corners of the eyes, delighted in hearing the sweet bang of a cop’s car window, a cop’s helmeted head. And Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga bringing together writings by radical women of color for their groundbreaking anthology, This Bridge Called My Back. I can only imagine the pleasure they must have had in arranging, editing, organizing, and collaborating with all those voices, all together in one unified effort, one combined front against the many –isms working against women of color. Before Madonna, before Paris is Burning, before any camera lens cared, there are queers of color on the streets of Harlem: hands extending opulence, backs bending exquisite, faces poised and ready. Stylize the body, queen. Sashay away those straight and cis brothers and sisters who would rather see you dead. Girl, death drop from the skyscrapers of Fifth Avenue, Wall Street, 42nd onto that world of white below.

Critique and poetics and pleasure. These three components, so important to queer of color expression, queer of color being, take center stage in the recently published anthology, Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color. Edited by Christopher Soto, the anthology draws from the past 100 years of queer of color poetry, beginning with poets like Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, moving towards the end of the century with Audre Lorde, Assotto Saint, and Nikki Giovanni, then following through with those writing in our contemporary moment, such as Caleb Luna, Ryka Aoki, and Ronaldo V. Wilson. The title, as Soto elaborates in the introduction, is a Nahuatl word Gloria Anzaldúa uses in her writing that is “meant to connote a transient feeling—the feeling of shifting between various communities and identities.” Nepantla does just that: moving between different poetic forms, races, languages, tones, sexualities, intensities, genders, and bodies. There is no universal to these poems. Their specificity and particularities demand attention. These poems do, however, congregate around a shared sensibility in that the poem becomes a means of critique. In critique, there is pleasure.

“I wonder/ why he wants/ to make me fatter/ and shrink himself,” Caleb Luna writes in their poem, “feeding me starving,” where the poem’s narrator reflects on a sexual experience with someone who “‘used to be/ 245.’” A body of size is a body scrutinized. Eyes and fingers and tongues and fists and kicks critique us. A scrutiny tells the scrutinizer they are somewhere higher on the food chain, something to be idealized. And, nevertheless, “when/ will he text me back i’m/ hungry.” Not self-hate but self-love turns the scrutinizer into a meal to be devoured. Absorption is annihilation you shit out:

you spread my legs & slip a finger inside me
then two / an arm / a torso
until you’ve disappeared, a casualty
of my greedy body.

Consuming stanzas. The words, the white space, the forward slash, the period—nothing can escape Allyson Ang’s stanzas in “Wet Dream.” Different volumes, different sizes, and different girths each consuming in their way.

“How does your skin do that?” a guy on Grindr asks me, loose skin hanging over my pants. I want him to consume me, see me as consumable, but my former fat body is a trench-coat around this smaller frame. Skin dangles, hangs, sways. Impermanent is my weight loss, filling out the skin once more. So much for that. These profiles on Grindr feel emboldened to critique bodies: bodies deemed too fat, too round and out of shape, our shapes are scrutinized because we are the devourers of limits. “she’s so heavy, tectonic plates shift beneath her feet/ so huge, lake erie is her bathtub” where, in tatiana de la tierra’s “Ode to Unsavory Lesbians,” exceeded limits, the “lesbian who’s always broke// walks/ streets barefoot// a lesbian who’s fat and fleshy” is pleasure. Munching and gobbling and crunching on the abject, our abjectified back rolls and love handles, man boobs and double chins, is pure indulgence.

Is that the function of critique? To highlight what is wrong, what needs fixing, what can be better? Critique as critique is a concept co-opted by those with investments in the normative, in the status quo, in not thinking past the frameworks given to them. How often do we hear, “Let me give you some positive critique” from an unsolicited source. The critique is full of knowledge, full of itself.

Jay Dodd’s “When a Nigga Calls You a Faggot” forefronts critique, critique as (failed) allyship, critique as bond, though you have been violated: “Like the pot calling the kettle/ a more dangerous thing// When a nigga calls you a faggot,/ you still gotta call him brother.” Friction requires the intimacy of touch: “When he swings his fist,/ duck down and tackle him to/ the ground with soft kisses.” Turn an enemy into a lover. Between love, pleasure, and hate is a thin line. Can love win in such a contestation? Or are these kisses more than love? “You still gotta pray he makes it/ home at night.” To critique him is to hope for his survival, too, a critique for him, too. Survival becomes the thin thread holding tomorrow in place.

“Maricón,” a man on the street says to me. Is that what I am? Si, papi, si, if you keep looking as hard as you’re looking, at these short-shorts, thick thighs thin skin, you’ll see the butterflies flutter out from my backside, these depths of me: wings and antennae and thorax. I don’t like to tell my white friends (or any friends, for that matter) these encounters because they affirm their racial imaginary they have conjured, the notion that men of color are more queerphobic, that colonized people and people living in the afterlives of slavery are inherently against queerness, transness, gayness. What a simple story that tells.  

What is the function of critique? To highlight an insufficiency, a limit reached, a fallacy of thought? Explaining to the reader why he chose to utilize theorist Herbert Marcuse, considering Marcuse’s engagement with the problematic Heidegger, José Muñoz, in his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, writes, “critique as willful disloyalty to the master.” One such disloyalty to the master is how the queer of color mediates pain. Uprooted from the work it is intended to do in the world, to hurt, to disavow, to impoverish, to dispossess, to kill pain and its aftermath, its futurity, its everydayness, is reutilized, manipulated, by the queer of color. The worded violence of the online world—chat rooms and comments and direct messaging—are compiled into Meredith Talusan’s poem, “DataLounge-Gay Celebrity Gossip, Gay Politics, Gay News and Pointless Bitchery since 1995”:

I don’t understand how this Meredith Trans chick gets all these opportunities to have
articles published when (s)he was a stalker / harasser / sociopath?!?!

Albino Black Trans privilege

…

In a few years, meredith will have been kicked out of Cornell for not graduating, and she will be doing performance art pieces in Williamsburg which will involve her dumping chocolate sauce over her head and screaming, “TRANSPHOBIA! PATRIARCHY! HATE!”

Talusan documents violence, the language of harassment, insult, and hatred made to be read as poetry. Is there pleasure in reading such a poem? To say yes is to sound morbid, for it is to say yes to violence and harassment and pain. But that is the particular paradox that poems by queers of color materialize: the pleasure in pain, the pain in pleasure.

Of pleasure? Of pain? What’s the difference? We must bear witness at the end of the day. Rajiv Mohabir’s “A Boy with Baleen for Teeth” has a softly spoken devastation: “What to make/ of deep silence/ that swallows the body,/ crushing brown boys/ with its tongue.” Is that how it goes down when the queer brown body is crushed, left for dead? “You are a sign/ are a plank are a raft are a felled oak./ You are a handle are a turn are a bit/ of brass lovingly polished,” the thud thud thud of Donika Kelly’s “Self Portrait as a Door” is easier said than done.  

But there are no victims on these pages. Salvaging pain is in the name of innovation, form, aesthetics. A poem is a pleasure: queers of color know how to do this best. This anthology is a testament to such a feat.

How to do critique? What is the formula? What is the point? Kazim Ali’s “His Last Stand” provides an answer: “Cast out or cast down/ What do I know about sacred books or men/ Nothing.” To relish in knowing nothing, merely wandering and loafing about in thought, the attempt is the pursuit the joy in just thinking, knowing the fullness of knowing nothing. Or again Kelly’s lines, “There is your hand/ on the door which is now the door/ pretending to be a thing that opens.”

***

The title of this essay is a nod to an old, dead white man. I presume him to have been heterosexual and cisgender, but who really knows that for fact. Critique of Pure Reason is the magnus opus of philosopher Immanuel Kant. I bought this book a year or so before I was going to apply to grad school. Many of the scholarly articles and academic monographs on literary study I was reading to prep myself for the rigors of graduate work were engaging with Kant. Writing pages upon pages of incomprehensible close-reading of his words, scholars dutifully committed to unpacking what Kant was trying to mean. I was astonished by how well they could sum up the ideas of another, flex their memory muscles, cherry-pick quotes to support an argument, and, at the smallest level, write asides that would note something as “Kantian,” “vis-à-vis Kant,” or “a la Kant.” Today, I still have no clue what arguments such referencing was trying to suggest. I did know, however, that such referencing was to a certain kind of audience: those who wasted the days away in their own thoughts and dwelling on the thoughts of old, dead (presumably heterosexual and cisgender) white men. Those who knew. I wanted in on what they knew, the secret to being a thinker, of knowing how to pass judgment, of being deemed worthy and unworthy, of having the entitlement to do so. I have still not found it, nor do I care to anymore. I think elsewhere.

Recently, upset I wasted ten or so dollars on Critique of Pure Reason, and even more upset I lugged it through several NYC apartment moves, I decided to read it. Try as I might, I couldn’t get past the first 100 pages of the 600-page philosophical treatise. There was no poetry in the translated language. No style in its argument. No pleasure in trying to understand its meaning, or make it mean anything at all. My sensibilities do not open this text up to me, this oft-cited work so pivotal to so many monographs collecting dust in university libraries, so key to scholarly articles uploaded on online databases that charge to access them, so foundational to Western thought itself.

In the future, if I have the time and will, I hope I can read Kant. There’s a lot to learn from old, dead white men, a lot of pleasure to be had in seeing through the veneer of their universality, their all-knowingness. We inherit modes of rationalizing, interpreting, comprehending, and thinking from them whether we like it or not. What is commonsense is commonsense because our white forefathers have told us so. Perhaps Kant is unreadable because it is my queerness, my brown queerness, that looks to words as sources of pleasure, whether those words be philosophical treatises, my boyfriend’s grocery lists, jargon-filled science fiction novels, academic monographs, or the poems of my queer of color peers.

Maybe that is what language is for: pleasure. The pleasure anthologies like Nepantla give us. An anthology that ambitiously champions our differences as queers of color, our ranges of experience and styles and voice, allowing them to thrive in one book. The pleasure to read between the lines, to decipher connotations, to feel the impact of syntax, the devastation of enjambment, to read for filth the world at large with the poets on these pages. Our many shades of pleasure, the bricks thrown, the pens against paper, the bodies moving with style, the poems side by side in the pages of Nepantla, our critique a fabulous and opulent fullness.

Marcos Gonsalez is currently a PhD candidate in English and Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and teaches writing and literature courses at City University of New York. His essays can be found at Electric Literature, Catapult, The Rumpus, The New Inquiry, and Black Warrior Review, among others. He lives in New York City.