Slow Encounter

I

Natalie Diaz writes, "In my Mojave culture, many of our songs are maps." Diaz does not mean this in the sense of a settler colonial map. They do not "draw borders or boundaries, do not say this is knowable, or defined, or mine." Rather, these maps "use language to tell about our movements and wonderings (not wanderings) across a space."1 The substance of these maps is experiential and performative, enacting movement that is personal and communal. Upending violent limits placed on the body, performances of intimacy can denaturalize the quotidian state of exception, which has become the norm governing contemporary life in the Americas.

Mapping is an exercise in nationalist, colonial, and racial imagination. To move within mapped and regulated space is a political, aesthetic, and ethical act. Movement can be a poetic gesture, capable of revealing the layered emotional geographies of the spaces and land from Turtle Island to Abya Yala and beyond, a gesture I investigate as a distinctly lyric mode. Whereas the lyric is usually a rhetorical transaction of performative address and emotional expression in the first person, I suggest that the lyric can enact a project of communal selfhood. In the Americas, this communal lyric emerges as an embodied political, aesthetic response to settler colonial mapping and provides an alternative critical cartography.

In her essay, "La Güera," Cherríe Moraga writes that, with one foot in each world (white and brown), she feels the necessity for dialogue, even while knowing that "one voice is not enough, nor two, although this is where dialogue begins." Dialogue is a hallmark of survival and resistance shared by women of color, a response to the pressures of life on the margins of the United States from which Moraga suggests a survivor can emerge to "insist on a future, a vision, yes, born out of what is dark and female."2 Moraga was a Chicana writing from the tradition of coalition that insists on multiplicity and diversity of experience. Today, Latinx writers and cultural critics continue to do similar work: defying any monolithic, homogenous identity and building coalition within the margins. Natalie Diaz and Ada Limón are representative of a contemporary multiethnic poetic tradition that embraces an aesthetic response to the problems of identity and existence in the gaps. Together, they are engaged in the kind of emergent dialogue that Moraga defines. In this way, they are engaged in a project of critical cartography, which is rapidly becoming a hallmark of the contemporary Latinx literary landscape.

II

Taken from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs 2003 single, "Maps," Diaz's poem, "They Don't Love You Like I Love You," is a kind of map-song through which Diaz asks us to reconsider "American Goodness." Originally published by the Academy of American Poets in the Poem-a-Day project, "They Don't Love You Like I Love You," describes Diaz's relationship with herself and her mother through the metaphor of maps and the theme of unrequited love. Mixing the original lyrics (in italics) with her poetic intervention, Diaz writes:

I'll say, say, say,
I'll say, say, say,
What is the United States if not a clot
of clouds? If not spilled milk? Or blood?
if not the place we once were
in the millions? America is Maps—

If, as the poem claims, "America is Maps—," we must understand how the Americas are composed and enforced and how those maps disrupt lived experience. Diaz claims, "[m]aps are ghosts: white and / layered with people and places."3 To ascribe the color white to maps is an indictment of the way mapping upholds white supremacy. As ghosts, these unseen images, alignments, and connections exist in a state of presence and absence. Once we understand that the Americas map and are mapped through these layers, we can consider how they can be re-imagined through movement and "wonderings." "Wonderings" do not expel the ghosts; rather, resisting stasis, the body can work to expose their hidden logic. Reclaimed as a mode of alternative mapping, the body is co-constitutive of space and capable of re-ordering it.

Performative poetics offers a different conception of what mapping can be, which includes wonderings across difficult emotional and geographic registers. Karen O's haunting repetition of "wait" in "Maps," emphasizes the speaker's anxiety over the impending loss of a lover to another, but also implies that the speaker can attempt to prevent the outcome. Diaz transposes this into her poem, allowing the speaker's mother to clarify that "Wait, / as in, Give them a little more time / to know your worth" is actually "Weight, meaning heft."4 In Diaz's poem, Karen O's plea to "wait" is revealed to be a burden placed on the speaker because the speaker cannot enact change. These combined meanings imply a burden of desire that Diaz finds to be rooted in a specific kind of sublimation of self:

My mother has always known best,
knew that I'd been begging for them,
to lay my face against their white laps,
to be held in something more
than the loud light of their projectors
of themselves they flicker—sepia
or blue—all over my body.5

Diaz confronts us with the image of the Native as other, a reflection of the self through negation. Here, in the white imagination, a white person always occupies the subject position, relegating the Native to the "objective, the space of object."6 The static image of a Native, "sepia / or blue," as if in old photographs or cyanotypes, contrasts with the body that bears its weight in the final line. This body holds each of these images but also exceeds them. The speaker is relegated to the object position where she is both desired as a canvas for the white imagination and desiring the embrace of that subject. If subjecthood is defined by possession of a discrete self and its objects (here these objects include the speaker of the poem), how might the speaker object to this?7 How might she constitute or navigate the United States as a clot?

The answer may lie in the speaker's desire to be held rather than projected upon. Perhaps this is the space of a clot — coagulation or restriction of movement that sets a stage for a slow encounter. This dynamic is crucially important for understanding how the mother's knowledge of her daughter's unreciprocated love weighs on her. This encounter is one of intimate understanding. The poem concludes, that when her mother said "they don't love you like I love you, / she meant, / Natalie, that doesn't mean you aren't good."8 The body perseveres thanks, in part, to the unfolding of a mother-daughter intimacy that resists regulated mapping of the white imagination. Importantly, "the clot" is an accumulation. It is a process that encompasses the potential to disrupt settler-colonial mapping. Exposing the supposedly neutral processes of mapping reveals the hidden motives of ownership and progression.

Slow encounter is a critical cartography.

III

The aesthetics of slow encounter suggest that the experience of survival is rooted in close relationships that must be cultivated. Ada Limón chronicles this unfolding intimacy through the mother-daughter relationship in her poem, "The Real Reason." This lyric narrative begins with the speaker's conversation with her mother about getting a tattoo, but their interaction reveals an underlying trauma that is not the speaker's "story to tell." Where Diaz's poem shows that the mother knows her daughter implicitly, Limón portrays a speaker who must struggle to understand her mother. When the speaker asks her mother to design a tattoo, she "thought she'd be honored," instead she is met with "[a] silence like a hospital room; she was in tears." The poem soon reveals that the mother resists not the tattoo, "but the marking, the idea / of scars" because she is scarred "from burns over a great deal of her body."9 This realization quickly reveals that the tension between mother and daughter is carried in the mother's body:

my mother is beautiful. Tall and elegant, thin and strong. I have notknown her any other way, her skin that I mapped with my young

fingers, its strange hardness in places, its patterns like quilts here,
riverbeds there. She's wondrous, preternatural, survived fire,

the ending of an unborn child. Heat and flame and death, all made
her into something seemingly magical, a phoenixess.10

Though the speaker does not anticipate her mother's reaction to the tattoo, there is still the memory of an intimate connection. A touch — or the embrace of another body — resets relational movement.11 In this slow encounter, the mother's body is beautiful, the outward sign of grief and loss, and a map of survival.

Beyond the daughter's touch, the encounter is also one of recognition. The speaker's mother, like the mother in Diaz's poem, recognizes her daughter's needs before she can articulate them. Limón continues:

What I know

now is she wanted something else for me. For me to wake each
morning and recognize my own flesh, for this one thing she made —
me — to remain how she intended, for one of us
to make it out unscathed.12

In this turn at the end of the poem, the speaker understands that the map is not her mother's totality; rather, she exceeds it and remains unknowable. Once the daughter recognizes her mother's intentions, she is better able to recognize and locate herself. This triple recognition — mother of daughter; daughter of mother; and daughter of self — is a centering of the self in communion with another.

This kind of intimacy is not limited to the mother-daughter relationship. Limón's short poem, "A Name," depicts an originary desire for relational recognition. The poem describes Eve walking among the animals and naming them, but wonders "if she ever wanted / them to speak back." This conjecture goes beyond hope of connection. It imagines an intimacy where Eve may have "looked / into their wide wonderful eyes / and whispered, Name me, name me."13 The poem ends with this unanswered, haunting plea. Without communion and equal participation in the encounter, movement stagnates and longing turns to unanswered desperation.

Limón follows the implications of this unanswered plea, finding only emptiness and isolation. This lack of connection quickly turns to futility and cruelty. Limón traces similar turns in another poem, "A New National Anthem." In this poem, Limón claims that the "Star-Spangled Banner" does not "mean anything," but insists on violence: "always there is war and bombs"; and exclusion: "the third [stanza] that mentions 'no refuge / could save the hireling and the slave'." Further, she suggests that "every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal / snaking underneath us as we blindly sing." The only antidote to this emptiness is a song "that's sung in silence," a song that "sounds like someone's rough fingers working / into another's." Again, the insistence on touch and encounter rejects the canned imagery of a nation that violently possesses and constrains others. Instead, Limón reiterates that this new kind of song of recognition says "my bones are your bones, and your bones are my bones."14 This recognition is an intimate attunement, which highlights what is between and among rather than projecting upon or demanding an objectified other.

The intimacy of the communal lyric defies the strictures of discrete subjects, controlled borders, and national delineations. As such, identity is a component of this relational encounter, but does not constrain it. Natalie Diaz is often described as both Mojave and Latinx, but she does not necessarily identify only in this way. Diaz is Indigenous, Latinx, and queer, and all of these identities surface in her poems, where she feels a "freedom" of expression that is usually exercised through tension and momentum. She writes elliptically through these identities in order to name herself, and to isolate something that "America hasn't quite been able to consume fully."15 For Ada Limón, Latinx identity looms over her work as she searches for "individual voices."16 But she also frames hers as a collective search: "I, for one, have never made anything alone, never written a single poem alone."17 This understanding of identity as foundational to collectivity is true for many contemporary writers. Guatemalan poet Calixta Gabriel Xiquín's collection Tejiendo los Sucesos en el Tiempo reframes weaving, traditionally Mayan women's work, as a shared decolonial performance. In Xiquín's "Poema" the speaker suggests that the woman weaver literally "crea esperanza con sus manos."18 By weaving threads of red, yellow, blue, green and black, the women are writing and speaking outside the bounds of what can be read in western discourse that insists on individualism. The physical act and performance of weaving, the tandem movement of their hands and the entwining of disparate threads and colors into a single fabric, defy the limited potential of body as a discrete unit of labor.

The similarities between each of these approaches are more than aesthetic homage or echoes of influence. Rather, they form a transnational, multiethnic response to the disrupted lineage of the Americas as an emergent trans-American sensibility.19 Through an alignment of shared concerns and aesthetic responses, the body and its performances indicate a form of coalition or intimate accompaniment. This alignment is not based on a specific shared trauma, but on the generalized experience of a continent unmade by restrictive violence and regulatory mapping. This is not necessarily a plea for empathy;20 it is a collective lyric expressed through embodied intimacy.

IV

"Envelopes of Air," a series of collaborative poem-letters exchanged between Natalie Diaz and Ada Limón in 2017 and published in The New Yorker, reveals a shared concern about the experience of the contemporary Americas, the body, and performance. These poems are both singular and collective. Posing questions and gesturing at answers, the poems allow for "wondering" through emotional and physical geography. Diaz and Limón share the details of their lives, but they also "expose and explore the American character"21 that shapes their experiences. Together they compose communal lyric song-maps that imagine and remake the ontology of the Americas.

These poems trace relational movement and intimacy through slow encounter. Like ley lines, they persist under and through the ghosts of settler-colonial maps that control contemporary existence. A metaphor for this kind critical cartography, these purported geographic alignments of sacred sites and monuments represent overlaps and exchanges of experience. The poetic implication of a Breton lay can also add an interesting layer to this metaphor. While not adhering to formal qualities of a lay, these poems are self-conscious and retain the romantic theme of a journey whose resolution is a realization of the heroines' identity, purpose, and place in the world.22 In "Envelopes of Air" we find not the courtly love of The Lais of Marie de France, but the intimacy of shared experience. These poems align, touch, and encounter each other through bodily performances, engaging a critical re-imagining the Americas.

The communal lyric mode further defines a trans-American poetics where intimacy creates a space for communal and shared selfhood. Focused on "what happens now,"23 the lyric mode is especially adaptable to moments of temporal, spatial, and subjunctive ruptures. In the contemporary, I see this lyric as an emergent performance. To "wonder" across this space is to perform an alternative embodied mapping. To this end, I propose the lyric as a performative methodology in contradistinction to traditional mapping practices.

Limón initiates a project of counter-mapping with her poem, "Cargo." Beginning with a meditation on the body and the landscapes with which it interacts, the poem quickly veers to restricted movements. Limón writes, "we're travelling with our passports now. / Reports of ICE raids and both of our bloods / are requiring new medication."24 The everyday fear and tragedy associated with immigration raids and increased scrutiny changes the way the body occupies space. It changes the way Limón, as speaker, moves through the physical and imaginary space of the Americas. Diaz responds in the following poem, "Eastbound, Soon," that she too carries her passport: "Not because of ICE raids, but because I know / what it's like to want to leave my country." Importantly, Diaz follows this with "My country— / to say it is half begging, half a joke."25 As an Indigenous woman, Diaz's experience is always implicated by a feeling of loss that is similar to Limón's but distinct from it as the object of settler-colonial identity formation in occupied lands.

Struggling with this shared sense of loss Diaz and Limón are left to grapple with the way they can occupy space that is not made for them — space that objectifies their presence. Diaz suggests that perhaps she would "settle for an hour instead of a country," wondering "What joy might be in this hour?" She proceeds to fill it with the body of her lover and their intimacy which she describes as a railroad: "a wave of moonlight riding the dusked rails of her arms / I was tied there — to the moon, those tracks. / Fasteners, sleepers, and spikes. Bound in light / Unbolted from my sadness by the fast engine of joy."26 Limón continues this metaphor by proposing they "imagine a body free of its anchors, / the free swimming, / a locomotion propelling us, pulse by pulse."27 Their joint speculation of movement proposes an impetus to motion that defies the paralysis of anxiety.

Though each of the eight poems works through some part of this affect, the source is not directly named until Diaz's final poem, "That Which Cannot Be Stilled." Responding to Limón's inventory of a body in pain, Diaz writes about the pain of objecthood in which she is rendered as a "Dirty Indian." The phrase forces her to adopt a clinical gaze:

Sometimes I believed them — I'd look around

my reservation, around our yard, our house —

dirty, I'd say,

like I was a doctor with a diagnosis,

except I was the condition.28

This forced point of view, structured by racism, becomes an obsession. Like her work in "They Don't Love You Like I Love You," Diaz deftly reveals the weight of this gaze on the body: "All my life I've been working, / to feel clean — to be clean is to be good, in America." However, this weight is shifted back to its source: "America is the condition." While her body is the desert and the sand, America is revealed to be "blood and rivers, / of what we can spill and who we can spill it from— / a dream they call it, what is American."29 Pathologizing the unnatural condition of the Americas as opposed to her own bodily experiences, Diaz refuses to carry the desire to be incorporated into that dream.

This refusal, implicitly embodied, reinforces the necessity of a corporeal body in the communal lyric. In her poem, "Isn't the Air Also a Body, Moving?" Diaz describes the body with a philosophical proposition: "I am touched — I am."30 This is directly opposed to Western discourse where Cartesian dualism posits the mind as separate from and superior to the body. Similarly, Limón suggests that the body can possess its own spatial poetics: "there was a whole hour that I felt lived in, like a room."31 In this way, the body is a shared space that can be mapped through an emotional geography. Limón reveals a wish to be "untethered and tethered all at once," to be in communion with others. This desire is difficult, leading to a multiplicity that Limón describes as being in too many worlds, "sand sifting through my hands, / another me speeding through the air, another me waving / from a train window watching you/ waving from a train window watching me."32 Limón's movement among these positions disrupts the subject/object dyad, insisting on a flexibility of selfhood in communion with others.

The body, simultaneously inviolable and open, is the foundation for the communal lyric. Rather than reifying an all-encompassing "I" or perpetuating self-sublimation, the body experiences, changes, and is changed through encounters. Diaz writes, "what we hold grows weight. / Becomes enough or burden," and the body discerns this weight. This is not a discrete act, but "an extension / of an outside reaching in." In this encounter, Diaz also experiences multiplicity: "I'm pointing to me and to you to look / out at this world."33 Significantly, this multiplicity is reoriented outward, reminding us of embodiment's creative power.

Even though embodiment relies upon the body and its performances at the intersection of discourse and social institutions, an alternative mapping may still seem ephemeral. Both poets approach this tension through the relationship and interactions of air and the body. Diaz claims that the air actually breathes her, making it possible to continue. She asks, "How is it that we know what we are? / If not by the air / between any hand and its want — touch."34 Limón answers, "it's easier if we become more like a body of air, branches."35 The body accrues density through charged and intimate gestures. The exchange of air is a momentary performance. It is the breath of life.

Producing a critical poetics, an embodied communal lyric can transform aesthetics and engender a poiesis of space and community. As a possible site of resistance, the intimacy of this space may cultivate a subject that is anchored through touch and embrace, but also exceeds that encounter. In this turn toward radical possibility, a communal lyric can wield political power. Exploiting ruptures and deficiencies in dominant discursive modes, the communal lyric can inhabit and reorient settler colonial discourse that maps the world.

All the world is moving, even sand from one shore to another
is being shuttled. I live my life half afraid, and half shouting
at the trains when they thunder by. This letter to you is both.

— "Cargo," by Ada Limón

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References