Lamentation, Remembrance, the Body

Remembrance, as it works through the body, moves in shapes and sensations. Remembrance can be an ache, a tickle, a warmth, a cringe, a sigh; it can end up with you in curling up in a ball, or hugging yourself, or laughing, or shaking your head, or shivering, or laying your head on a table, or jumping up to get away, or picking up a phone to send a text — it happens to the body and it happens through the body. This remembrance might be gestural, or suggestive; it might be a breath shared across time, from one body to another (maybe even from one's past to one's present); perhaps it occurs by situating a body within a scene, so that it interacts with other bodies, or perhaps witnesses the lives of others. As a bodily and lyrical position, remembrance is the voice that speaks poetry, the ears that hear the words; it is the remembered embrace, the clasped hands, the moistened lips, the sickening pain — of love, of loss, of heartache, of anger, of lust, of desire.

Remembrance, as it appears specifically in contemporary Latinx poetry, so often becomes a lament. As a lament, remembrance becomes a lyric mode, a bodily position, a cultural mode, and a sacred way of relating to one's antecessors. Above all, it is a relational and public mode: to lament is to grieve, and lamentation is the diffuse literary form that — as elegy, as hymn, as litany — shapes what is so often massive and unmanageable. As a cultural mode and as a sacred connection to one's ancestors, remembrance becomes lament as a means of calling forth, of putting into words and feelings those who are no longer with us. To attend to lamentation, as a way of thinking through contemporary Latina/o/x poetry, means making visible our losses, not in order to fetishize them, but to bring them to life, no matter how brief this act might be. In other words, lamentation names and gives shape to the body of Latina/o/x poetry — or, perhaps, the body in Latina/o/x poetry. Lamentation provides a body that must be seen and mourned — it is a poetic mode of anguish that demands to be seen and heard. Importantly, for many contemporary Latina/o/x poets, this means naming and mourning bodies that have suffered state violence, racist violence, patriarchal violence, femicidio, and all of these sources of violence wrapped together. Consider Valerie Martinez's Each and Her (2010), or Natalie Scenters-Zapico's Lima :: Limón (2019), or Javier Zamora's Unaccompanied (2017), each of which lyrically reconstructs bodies dissolved by pain and violence. Lamentation gives shape and voice to grief, demands that mourning be heard and acknowledged.

The poems I write about in this essay mourn, and they also recollect — bodies, memories, and spaces are all spoken into lyric being, so that they might be considered again. This, to me, is how lamentation and remembrance mix. These poems do not speak for or on behalf of the lives recalled in their pages; instead, they carefully, tenderly speak with the many people they remember, and lamentation becomes a mode of careful, sentiment-regarding poetry that produces a vibrant other. In reading a few poems of John Murillo's and Aracelis Girmay's, I sketch out how Latinx poetry can imagine the body as a memorial hinge across time, and also how it forms bridges and webs connecting the self to others, in particular familial others. This is partly a result of a thematic emphasis on migration, and the attempts to use lyric poetry to convey expansively the external and internal forces that shape migrant consciousness. In the case of Murillo and Girmay, this further means using remembrance as a way to link the many strands of history that constitute their latinidad — Murillo's Mexican American and African American heritages, Girmay's Eritrean, African American, and Puerto Rican roots. Their poetry expresses Afrolatinidad in a formation that, while distinct from Caribbean, Central American, and South American Afrolatino experiences, forms an integral part of hemispheric Afrolatinidad. Importantly, they do not see themselves as subsumed by the histories that constitute them. Instead, they perceive their position as a gift of poetic license, and they craft their lineages through lyrical consciousness both bound to and liberated by the multitude of voices and bodies they hear, caress, imagine, love, and recall. Lamentation is the mode I attend to in this essay; lamentation, remembrance, and the body form a complex of poetic energy that Murillo and Girmay harness in crafting their work.

When I first read John Murillo's poetry, I was knocked to the ground. His work, much of it online, but also in his excellent collection Up Jump the Boogie, engages a variety of poetic styles — he is a notable spoken word bard, for example, and some of his poems must be heard to best be appreciated: consider "Ode to the Crossfader," in which his delivery, mixing with the words he speaks, makes music. Murillo's gorgeous lines generate a kinesis of form and content, in which the line's thoughts extend the metrical measure into a rhythm that can contain longing, looking, and moving. Murillo writes in a mood of lamentation, and, as he reminds us in one of my favorite poems, "Upon Reading that Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds" (published in Poetry magazine), "but did you know the collective noun / for swans is a lamentation? And is lamentation not // its own species of song?"1 Murillo's poetry takes note of the world, witnessing its many shapes and shape-shifts. Whether in Up Jump the Boogie or in poetry published across a variety of magazines and other venues, Murillo observes, collects, and recollects, and his poetry forms its own version of lamentation as a "collective noun." He notes the beauty, the ruin, the world that we share within the cracks and fissures of coloniality and white supremacy. And, it is in these very cracks and fissures that we might find sanctuary and solace if the world falls apart.

In "Upon Reading that Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds," Murillo remarks upon a world he stumbled upon one night, remembering the moment and his meditation upon it through a long series of couplets. He writes,

about the men

I came across nights prior, sweat-slicked and shirtless,
grappling in the middle of the street, the larger one's chest

pressed to the back of the smaller, bruised and bleeding
both. I know you thought this was about birds,

but stay with me. I left them both in the street —
the same street where I'd leave the sparrows — the men

embracing and, for all one knows (especially one not
from around there), they could have been lovers —

the one whispering an old, old tune into the ear
of the other — Baby, baby, don't leave me this way. I left

the men where I'd leave the sparrows and their song.
And as I walked away, I heard one of the men call to me,

please or help or brother or some such. And I didn't break
stride, not one bit. It's how I've learned to save myself.2

Witnessing the self, witnessing the world, witnessing the two, together, while one image links to another. The overarching image in the poem, the one to which Murillo turns to draw connections and relationships, is "sparrows." Later, he remembers a fight his mother and father have, with a neighbor, Sonny, intervening:

My mother crying out, fragile as a sparrow. Sonny
fighting my father, fragile as a sparrow. And me,

years later, trying to get it all down. As much for you —
I'm saying — as for me.3

Murillo laments, turning to us not for solace, but for relation; not for pity, but for the fleeting consolation of witnessing together. If we want to keep reading, we cannot look away as the poet considers the scene, "years later," and tries to recollect it.

While Murillo uses couplets to bring images together, using stanza breaks between each couplet shows the fragility of these connections. Yet, he urges us, "stay with me." We see the fissures and stumble into and across them, but together, staying with him, we bend and do not break.4 Murillo concludes "Upon Reading" with the image of himself as a departed god. He writes,

When I left my parents' house, I never looked back. By which
I mean I made like a god and disappeared. As when I left

the sparrows. And the copulating swans. As when someday
I'll leave this city. Its every flailing, its every animal song.5

He refuses identifying with a capital-G god, and instead bears witness to himself as an abandoning creator; in fact, he crafts the image through simile, as though the distance he seeks to convey can itself only be expressed through a rhetoric of similarity that is still distance. Yet, does he leave behind the world? Does he truly abandon the sparrows, the swans, the city, his parents? This poem, made of couplets coupling, proliferating, and cascading down the cataract of the page, speaks into being what was witnessed and what will not be forgotten. In other words, the poem leaves us with creation, even in the midst of (or, perhaps, as) abandonment. The lyric speaker here has become a renouncing, departing god, one who either trusts creation to continue, or who has turned away from the world. Yet, what precedes this departure is a cascade of witness, an act of lamentation. It is not abandonment or disappearance, inasmuch as it is a laying bare of the poet's grief for us. Lamentation is not condemnation, and it is not a measuring out of doom — it is mourning, witness, testament, and, above all, desire and will.

Murillo's lamentation is his own take on a longer tradition of the poetics of witness, which he acknowledges in his reflections on Langston Hughes's "I, Too, Sing America": "I write, first of all, in the tradition of the witness. My foremothers and fathers, therefore, come in all shades and with varied accents. Such writers as Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Audre Lorde, Ceslaw Milosz, Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Nazim Hikmet, Sonia Sanchez, and Grandmaster Melle Mel guide my hand whenever I write. And I am honored to list among my contemporaries such fine poets as Aracelis Girmay, Suheir Hammad, and the Mighty Mos Def."6 It's one thing to read this statement, and it's another thing to feel what it means in his verse. To read and, especially, to hear Murillo's work is to open oneself to the vivifying and, frankly, sublime potential within "the tradition of the witness," especially when these various streams of possibility break through the form and content of lyrical containment. Murillo's lines look and sound like Whitman's and Brooks's, especially when Brooks breaks poetic form to express riot and rage, or when she contemplates life's grand gestures and minute moments in prose form in Maud Martha.

Witness, as lament, is a lyrical testament to our lives and the lives of others; it is a call to justice and a call to see, to truly listen. Murillo begins his poem, "Trouble Man," with:

It's the bone of a question

      Caught in your throat,

Pre-dawn sighs of the day's

      First traffic, shoulders like

Fists under your skin. Say

      It's raining this morning.7

Details, for Murillo, are possibilities — and in their appearing or not appearing, they make the world beautiful. The possibilities open toward the future, but also to the past. "Say / It's raining this morning," Murillo writes — and this is a self-consciously fictional gesture, but also one that suggests a setting within a specific memory. The "say" keeps open multiple possibilities, all of which hinge on details that continually open out the poem's frames of reference. That is, the details to not entrench the poem within a single narrative possibility, or seal the poem hermetically. Instead, details work outwards as the poem proceeds: "And say this car pulls near, / Plastic bag for passenger / Side window, trading rain / For music. Marvin Gaye."8 In the following lines, the poem blends speaker and listener: "And maybe you know / This song."9 "You" is the lyric consciousness, spoken of in the second person as the subject of a recollection; it is also, importantly, the reader, who might know the song being played — Marvin Gaye's "Trouble Man."

Aracelis Girmay, whose work spans three collections (2007's Teeth, Kingdom Animalia from 2011, and the black maria, published in 2016) and a children's book (Changing, Changing, from 2005, in which Girmay wrote the story and created the accompanying collages), takes up the call of lamentation throughout each collection. As a Latina and an Eritrean affected by the increased militarization of the border surveillance state, as an Eritrean exposed to the war on terror and its ancillary manifestations around the world, as an African American and Black diasporic person subjected to (and by) anti-blackness, as someone whose lifeworld has been shaped by a world made and unmade through coloniality, Girmay initiates her 2007 collection, Teeth, by declaring her art's purpose: to remember, to lament, and to understand how to live in a world where bodies are subjected to violence, both large and small, both exceptional and normal, both sudden and persistent.

At the very beginning of Teeth, Girmay directs the flow of the poems with "Arroz Poetica," a cheekily titled and deadly serious work about the stakes of living in and writing poetry while the War on Terror is executed on Iraq and Afghanistan. Girmay's first poem produces a litany of lament, in which she mourns never-fulfilled possibilities. About the dead, she writes,

& you will not ever walk home
again, or smell your mother's hair again,
or shake the date palm tree
or smell the sea
or hear the people singing at your wedding
or become old
or dream or breathe, or even pray or whistle10

Girmay's repetition of "or," here, in producing a list of what will "not ever" happen, leaves us bereft with the particularity of detail. Smelling hair or the sea, won't happen, shaking trees to eat their delicious fruits won't happen, hearing people singing won't happen, aging won't happen, dreaming won't happen, breath will have been snuffed, prayers will not be lifted by the dead — but for them — and the mundaneness of whistling has been snuffed by the whistle of bombs. Yet, what brings Girmay's attention to these never-possible details? She tells us:

Your name, I will have noticed
on a list collected by an Iraqi census of the dead,
because your name is the name of my own brother,
because your name is the Tigrinya word for "tomorrow"11

The "list collected by an Iraqi census of the dead" is preceded by "I will have noticed," a future perfect statement of helplessness; it's a completed action that will happen — even as, doubtlessly, it has happened, given that Girmay produces the poem. The violence of time, here, is doubled by the fact that "your name is the Tigrinya word for 'tomorrow.'" This act of assimilation is an act of lamentation, connection, and prayer—it's something Girmay takes up in her gorgeous lyric of melancholic connection, "luam/asa-luam" from her 2016 collection, the black maria:

here, in the after-wind, with the other girls,
we trade words like special things.
one girl tells me "mai" was her sister's name,
the word for "flower." she has been saving
this one for a special trade. I understand
& am quiet awhile, respecting, then give
her my word "mai," for "water,"
& another girl tells me "mai" is "mother"
in her language, & another says it meant,
to her, "what belongs to me," then
"belonging," suddenly, is a strange word12

Imagining the Luam — a name Girmay earlier tells us is shared by four women, and "means 'peaceful' & 'restful' in Tigrinya" — she also imagines a space of shared mourning, mourning conveyed through repetitions with a difference that produces relation.13 "Mai" is a proper name, a name for water, a name for mother, and a name for something possessed — it is all of those things that precede it yet something so much more ineffable. Girmay's use of names and translations as forms (or formal) relations take up the etymological roots of "translate" — moving across. This, in turn, becomes a shared and ethical lament. The scholar Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson, although she is discussing Lorna Dee Cervantes, writes "In her evolving body of Work, Cervantes develops an expanding frame of reference for Chicana poetry, which includes: African American feminism, an urban Chicana consciousness which relates to a Pan-American indigenous one, as well as a global sense of struggle against multiple and overlapping oppressions. Rather than a teleological reading that begins in the personal and ends in the global, I suggest that these interconnections reflect a deeply interanimating dynamic in Cervantes's poetic sensibility."14 The same, I'd suggest, holds deeply true for Girmay, whose poetry insists upon that "expanding frame of reference" Rodriguez y Gibson ascribes to Lorna Dee Cervantes.

Indeed, in "Arroz Poetica," Girmay opens up the possibility that names, as markers in and of the world, can both intentionally and accidentally intersect with a poem — in this case, hers — thus inviting many possible routes of connection. This commencement to the collection demurs from a more expected Ars Poetica poem, such as Horace's initiative "Ars Poetica," Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica" Marianne Moore's "Poetry" (and its revisions), Amiri Baraka's "Black Art," or Wallace Stevens' "Of Modern Poetry." Gesturing to the "field" — of poetry? of the mind? of the dead? — Girmay offers a perpetual invocation through her poetry. She does not reject the power of poetry to voice a speaker's lyric consciousness, but she obviates the totalizing power of the poet by offering her poetic statements — "when I say 'night'" — as also necessarily other-oriented — "it is your name I am calling."15 Importantly, earlier in the poem Girmay references the multitude, directly calling to mind both Walt Whitman and Abraham:

she is born at night,
happy, favorite daughter,
morning, heart, father of
a multitude.

At the end of a litany of things never to be experienced because of the War on Terror's extremities of violence, "father of/ a multitude" caps a series of impossibilities. Yet, in the ending of the poem, "your thousand, thousand names, your million names" are contained in the very saying of the word "field." Unlike Abraham's covenant with Yahweh, or Walt Whitman's expansive "I am large, I contain multitudes," Girmay does not propagate or contain herself — she is no patriarch or self-contained nation; instead, she gives of herself as in a dialogue. The other appears in the act of plaintiveness, of calling out and seeking connection, not of demanding or requiring the other's appearance. Presence is offered as a possibility rather than a prerogative; it is not the alchemical power of the poetic speaker as creator.

In Girmay's poem "Here," she takes up the idea of presence as possibility even further, using a cascading litany of "Here is" statements, most of them end-stopped in each line. She mixes this with "your," creating a more distant lyrical subjectivity, one that we can all look at together:

Here is your father, alone. Here is your mother,
alone. Here is the deep seat of the Monte Carlo. Here
are the refinery torch-lights through the window.
Here, your Saturday, your Sunday afternoon.
Here is the laundromat; lint-screen in your hand.16

"Here is" sets the scene through establishing details, perhaps of an established weekend ritual, of doing the laundry. Importantly, and this is the rub of the poem's lamentation, is separation: "Here is your father, alone. Here is your mother,/ alone." The formally constructed witnessing — the "your" that links us and the poet — forms the connection, and this connection is over the separation we witness as it unfolds.

In a later stanza, Girmay continues this connection-through-witnessing-solitude:

Here is your father trying to tell jokes. Here is your brother
in the backseat, sounding like he is drowning.
Here is his face pressed to the window.
Here is his wet face. Here is the near-quiet of the car.
Here is your stomach filled up with ocean.
Here is your Jurassic sadness. That's all.
Here are your small lavender feet. Here is your hand
becoming a windshield wiper across your small face.17

"That's all" perfectly summarizes the tight, observational clauses. The awkwardness of failed jokes, of a brother "sounding like he is drowning" in the backseat, emphasizes an unbearable and oppressive witnessing. Stated so matter of factly, the "here is" statements lay out the scene in its too-closeness, and the constrained clauses reveal the claustrophobic familial tensions. The "near-quiet of the car," though, gives way to a "stomach filled up with ocean" and "your Jurassic sadness," suggesting a child's sense of metaphorical enormity. Furthermore, the "stomach filled up with ocean" ties back to the brother "sounding like he is drowning." This sense of connection is being extended, specifically by connecting one's bodily feeling of a filled stomach with the brother's sounds. Witnessing and feeling get bound together in this stanza, which concludes with a disembodied sense of self — "your small lavender feet. / Here is your hand / becoming a windshield wiper across your small face." Both feet and face are "small," and the hand becomes a car accessory, making the inside the outside, taking the container of sentiment (the self) into the exterior world (where one can be witnessed).

Yet the poem ends with a statement of presence, of possibility. If "Arroz Poetica" set the stage for presence as possibility, "Here" picks up that thread and expansively, insistently builds towards the enormity of "a love / you have not had to leave, not yet," that is "good & wrecked & here & here & here":

Here is the yellow, yellow day. Here is the black,
black night. Here is breath. Here is a love
you have not had to leave, not yet,
not yesterday, not this morning, who knows,
oh, terrible & beautiful & giant,
hibiscus here, is a fruit tree, a day,
a god who looks you in the face
despite your fifty heartbreaks, now,
Here is a god to make you sing & pray to,
oh, good & wrecked & here & here & here.18

George Herbert's "Prayer" is perhaps operant here, like the "Here is" at the beginning of the final list, which ecstatically closes out the poem. Herbert's description of prayer — "Prayer the..." followed by a sonnet's cataloguing of what prayer can be — falls down, or maybe rises up — who knows — into the sublime. "Here," too, rumbles into the promise and possibility of a transcendental connection to "a god to make you sing & pray to," in search of "a love / you have not had to leave, not yet, / not yesterday, not this morning, who knows, / oh terrible & beautiful & giant." The poem takes us away from temporal expectations of the love to come, and instead translates and moves us. Importantly, the hibiscus tree — as representative of that other place — splits up the poem's continuous "here is" into "here, is": "hibiscus here, is a fruit tree, a day, / a god who looks you in the face / despite your fifty heartbreaks, now." Hibiscus (the jamaica she references throughout Teeth) becomes both a day and a god, "terrible & beautiful & giant." The poem's finale — concluding with its ecstatic "& here & here & here"—takes the here, which when we witnessed it in earlier parts of the poem, seemed more like a there, and recites it as a place where we both are and are not, where we are here with the hibiscus tree: the god, who here, will hear us.

Elsewhere, I've written about lamentation. In terms of description, it's an unwieldy aesthetic form: it isn't only elegy, and it isn't only for rendering grief. Lamentation can also take on condemnation, and it can be a genre of horror (see, for example, all of the major and minor prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible). Yet the expansiveness of lamentation, which cannot and ought not be contained, is precisely what makes the work of Murillo and Girmay so powerful. As a mode, right now, lamentation provides an unwieldy form that shapes the outrageous injustice of a world bending away from fairness, from empathy, from understanding. For Murillo and Girmay, lamentation allows a doubling of diasporic grief: they turn to it to shape the world-spanning pain of their heritages, even as they grasp and revel in the astonishing joy that these heritages have combined to produce. As bell hooks has written, in a short preface to her own poems of lamentation, "certainly in the poetry of women cross-culturally we see expressed that lamentation often brings solace, that it is central to personal and communal healing."19 Lamentation is the refusal to avert one's eyes — Lot's wife is the hero of lament, as Alicia Ostriker reminds us — and it is also the refusal to accept the individual as the primary unit of grief, insisting instead upon the interconnectedness of harm. Lamentation sees the world, and sees the world being undone. In voicing this open-eyed, horrified and weeping vision, lamentation is a truly powerful mode of lyrical possibility, and Latina/o/x poets — Murillo and Girmay in this essay, and as mentioned earlier, Valerie Martinez, Natalie Scenters-Zarpico, and Javier Zamora, as well as Rossy Evelin Lima and Oliver Baez Bendorf, among so, so, so many other excellent poets — bring this mode to the fore. A longer accounting of witnessing, testimony, grief, joy, politics, critique, and memory in contemporary Latina/o/x poetry would certainly provide a more clarifying sense of how lamentation might indeed be a useful description for the multiple origins and relations of Latinx literature more broadly. To do so, importantly, would mean acknowledging this literature as necessarily transnational, multiracial, and multilingual, a recognition that too often continues to be ignored or displaced.

Murillo and Girmay contain a mournful generosity in their works. They are not helpless in the face of loss, and they are not despondent — but they do, importantly, lament. They spread their hands toward us, palms out, gesturing towards the gift of the poem they've spoken into being. For bell hooks, this is precisely the communal work that lamentation, above all else, is prepared to. In describing her own poetic contribution to the anthology of essays and poetry, Dwelling in Possibility, she writes, "Together they are poems of lamentation. They are meant to ease sorrow. They are an invitation, a preparation, a call."20 Murillo and Girmay have called out to us, in the form of lamentation, but have not told us what we must do. They've offered, in their calls, the suggestion that anyone can be their muse, that we can inhabit the shapes carved out by their poems. They've invited us to partake, to hear their laments, to remember with them, and to bring our bodies into the poetic fold. What I'm suggesting, I suppose, is that their poems offer us forms of hospitality that do not tell us how we must be, but that offer their histories and their homes as places where we can rest and listen, and to offer our own imaginations in response. They say to us, we are welcome — "& here & here & here" is where we can join them.

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