Review: Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien by Alan Pelaez Lopez

Reviewed by Diego Báez

Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien
by Alan Pelaez Lopez
The Operating System, February 2020.
$24.00; 122 pp.
ISBN: 9781946031723

One of the first defining features of Alan Pelaez Lopez’s full-length collection of poetry —one that readers won’t help but notice upon thumbing through or scrolling down its pages—is that this genre-bending “print document” defies every category of its classification. Published by The Operating System and released both in print and as an open-access digital download, Intergalactic Travels challenges conventional notions about what constitutes poetry, what can live within the container of a collection, and how poets can expand their prowess beyond language. The result is an exhibition of interdisciplinary intelligence that engages every facet of Pelaez Lopez’s artistic practice: stirring lyricism, installation and visual artistry, jewelry-making, embodied performance, and critical inquiries of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality.

Equal parts aesthetic treasure, autobiographical interrogation, and decolonial praxis, Intergalactic Travels incorporates sincere and sensual verses, experimental text, trilingual testimonios, concrete poetry, handwritten lyrics, photographs, collages, SMS screenshots, and documentary fabrications. Appended by copious notes, an expansive interview, and an explanation of the publishing imprint’s urgent work toward “queering the normative forms and expectation of [creative] practice,” the book itself is inseparable from—not just informed by— the author’s unique perspectives and embodied experiences.

A self-described AfroIndigenous poet, multimedia, and adornment artist from the “Coastal Zapotec community of what is now known as “Oaxaca, México,” Pelaez Lopez draws on their experiences as a queer, “Black NDN,” who migrated to the United States as a child, and who now inhabits the country as a formerly Undocumented person. They frame this identity against the cruel tyrannies of patriarchy, capitalism, colonization, and genocide; and by vocalizing the plight of runaway slaves, indigenous children, and “illegal aliens.” From so many angles, Pelaez Lopez interrogates fugitivity in five movements: “Unknown,” “Undocumented,” “Hyper-Documentation,” “PostDocuments,” and “A Future: Elsewhere.” These sections move through a history of European colonialism, PTSD as a result of personal migration, attempts to secure legal status in the US, grappling with the fallout of temporarily expired illegality, and visioning of another world, respectively.

Whether conjuring memories of “iguana stew and roasted grasshoppers resting on clay bowls,” articulating a childhood dream to one day give birth by becoming a seahorse, or confronting the trauma of the crossing—via la Bestia, through overland checkpoints, or beneath the wooden floorboards of boats—Pelaez Lopez harnesses the heart of their migratory experience while embracing transgressive play, eagerly dispensing with traditional forms. In the appendicular interview, Pelaez Lopez explains: “My anger needed an outlet, and betraying poetic form felt like a good outlet at the time. So, I took to visual art, writing in forms, and leaning on my PTSD […] In all of this, I began to exercise my right to opacity.” This impulse toward opacity manifests throughout the book, with text splayed across the page, annotated, fragmented, enlarged to gigantic fonts, and jammed into emphatic diagonals that slash and play with and fuck up the white space. Conversely, several concrete poems assume the shapes of things: hands in supplication, a corazón (called “Ars Poetica”), and the enticing outline of a mouth (“illegal is to find pleasure on the lips of another alien & call it living”).

Notably, Pelaez Lopez also interjects a variety of visual artworks, including:

• A photo of an altar that includes the portrait of an ancestor, burning candles, a button proclaiming “NO DAPL,” and the chapbook Nostalgia & Borders by Sonia Guiñansaca. 
• “The Pledge of Allegiance” mocked up against a red, white, and blue background, with a bold line striking through references to “America’s Aryan Race,” and “God’s instructions to settle, steal, exploit, kill and rape.”
• The words, “Papers Will Not Protect Us,” repeated in columns, projected against a wall and the author’s own body. “I AM MORE THAN POLICY” projected onto Pelaez Lopez’s chest, their back, their buttocks. A projection that uses Google’s predictive text to finish the query, “why are undocumented immigrants…” 

The visual art expands the scope of Peleaz Lopez’s poetry, which they define as “an organic action that one’s body produces.” In several cases of photo-collage, it’s literally the author’s body that becomes both organ and action. A repeating figure in the book is the image of a boy, crouching, in what looks to be a traditional outfit. The boy shows up intermittently, appearing adrift in a scribbled ship, perched atop a segment of the border wall, shackled and in shadows, and superimposed on the translucent plastic casing of a quarter vending machine calling itself, “AlieN InvasioN.” In an endnote, Pelaez Lopez explains that they are four years old in the photograph and are participating in a schoolwide event to showcase various musical genres from across Mexico:

………..I was one of the few children asked to dress as an “Indian” because of my Oaxacan roots
………..(I did not have the words back then to be specific and identify my Zapotec community). I
………..find this image fascinating as the attire isn’t linked to any specific Indigenous community
………..in Mexico, but instead, represents the colonial fantasy of the “Mexican Indian,” which is
………..perpetuated by non-Indigenous Mexicans and Eurodescendants living in Mexico.

This “colonial fantasy” that Pelaez Lopez once performed, and now deconstructs, stands in direct opposition to the historical, social, and personal realities addressed in their work, so much of which concerns itself with authenticity, representation, and recognition. This positioning of the self as existing somewhere between stereotypical depiction, concealed escapee, and actual living person in the world, can reclaim art from artifice. It can reconcile a legacy of literary and linguistic white supremacy with the promise of a mongrelized future. By collapsing the personal and political, by erasing trite discrepancies between “speaker” and “author,” and yet by exploding the potential for how poems, poetry, and publishing can function, Intergalactic Travels enacts an emancipatory aesthetics. Indeed, a series of questions posed in the first pages of Intergalactic Travels provide an opening to answers: 

how does one describe a form of resilience
that requires the magic of
326 different Indigenous communities?;

is there a noun for the type of energy
the Black body feels when it senses danger?;

is there an adjective for the type of sex
the Alienated wanna have in order to stop time?;

is there a verb for traveling into another dimension
to understand how the Self is surviving?;

is there the possibility of being Human once again?;

These questions create space for possibility, for a vision of a future that affirms the humanity of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and queer peoples, a vision that can “interrupt settler-futures” by holding hope and joy and emboldened expression. For if poetry is a way to reterritorialize, if the survival of fugitivity is the experimentation with “(re)making, (re)shaping, and (re)imagining of our bodies each day,” then surely the future of poetry must resemble the ambitious purview of Pelaez Lopez’s project: audacious, unrelenting, and out of this world.

Diego Báez is a writer and educator based in Chicago. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Book Critics Circle, CantoMundo, and the Surge Institute. He is a regular contributor to Booklist, and his poetry and reviews have appeared most recently in The Rumpus, The Georgia Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review.