The Border’s Bright Dead Things: On Ada Limón’s Embodied Poetics

Late in June 2019, like many others worldwide, I viewed, aghast, the photograph of the drowned bodies of 26-year-old Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria. Their bodies lay lifeless on the river bank overgrown with riparian plants. The girl was still wrapped in her father's black shirt, a gesture of love, protection, and determination against the currents that ultimately overcame their bodies. But if the harrowing image became yet another banner of the border crisis, a crisis exacerbated by the current U.S. administration, it also reiterated the way brown and black Latinx bodies are seen in the American political imaginary: as alien subjects of tragedy, misfortune, and violence, washing up on this side of the Rio Grande. As the image went viral, the migrants' names were drowned for a second time in a sea of sensationalizing media. Their corpses were meant to humanize a crisis, but we remember the singular, graphic shot, not their names, their lives, the circumstances that carried them to the river's waters.

For days and weeks, the vivid image of Valeria's bright red shorts gripped my heart whenever I held my own two-year-old daughter. But I also kept coming back, as if to a life raft, to Ada Limón's lines: "none of this chaos. / Immigration, cross the river, the blood of us. / It goes like this: water, land, water. Like a waltz."1 The lines are from her poem, "The Whale & the Waltz Inside of It," published in her collection Bright Dead Things, in which we are told that whales "have a spindle cell / making them capable of attachment / and of a great suffering."2 Heavy with attachments and sufferings, the whales go on — large, blue, magnificent, singing and swaying, conversing with each other under the depths of the water — possessed of an innate capacity for communication that is contrasted to our own inability to talk frankly and openly about race. As a poignant, almost mythical reflection on race and immigration, Limón's poem asks how we can continue to "waltz" like whales amid so much paralyzing, dehumanizing tragedy and racial fear. The answer is certainly not with impotent silence, but instead by remembering that like whales, "we too are immense and calling out."3 Oscar and Valeria were people of immense importance, with agency and histories. It is our nature and duty to call this out, to make their lives — not just their deaths — heard.

Ada Limón's poetry has often felt for me like a refuge, a place to find the restored humanity of Latinx bodies. She refuses to render gendered and racialized bodies disposable, expendable, victimized, merely wounded, or easily categorized. In her work, the body is fleshy and full of yearnings, mistakes, pain, joy, lust, memories, both personal and ancestral, idiosyncrasies, weirdness and wildness, grief and grace. Limón's body of poetry conveys a profound perception of the fleeting instants and grounding histories that make us who we are. Her poems are a celebration of the body alive, which, while finite and mortal, is never abject: "I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying."4

In an era in which diverse bodies are both a threat and subject to commodification — rendered, like Oscar and Valeria — expedient objects of political consumption, Ada Limón's poetry endows Latinx people with complexity, individuality, uniqueness. And as such, her poetry reckons head-on with the politics of names and identity, including her own. Sour Limón. The untranslatable, unassimilable, accented name, which, as Limón is profoundly aware and deeply wary of, not only racializes her body, but is also often traded as vendible merchandise. She recalls, for instance, working with a saleswoman who unnecessarily stresses her name over and over again "so my name becomes an advertisement, or a product / to be bought and sold. I want to take it back from her mouth."5 And she does take it back in the poem "The Contract Says: We'd Like the Conversation to Be Bilingual," which criticizes how racialized names are tokenized. The poem begins:

When you come, bring your brown-
ness so we can be sure to please

the funders. Will you check this
box; we're applying for a grant.

Do you have any poems that speak
to troubled teens? Bilingual is best.

Would you like to come to dinner
with the patrons and sip Patrón?

Will you tell us the stories that make
us uncomfortable, but not complicit?

Don't read the one where you
are just like us.6

Written in couplets, the consecutive stanzas underscore the succession of stereotyped, racist assumptions projected onto the speaker's body, of which presumed bilingualism is just one. Limón refuses to exchange artistic goods in a literary marketplace in which diversity and inclusion are exploited to shore up normative whiteness or placate white guilt — a marketplace that functions by erasing some names, those of poor, brown migrants like Oscar and Valeria, for instance, while accentuating others, those more presentable like that of the college-educated, brown poet.

As if in response to the many social constraints imposed on the racialized body and the limiting stereotypes predetermining an accented name, Limón at times fantasizes about taking language and her body back, articulating a more authentic, primal relationship to the self and the world around it. As she explores in the early poem "The Echo Sounder," at her most primal "she comes with a language restricted / by its own inability to name things / as she sees them."7. The poem goes on to contrast her innate questions and intuitive perceptions as a child to the things she learns through language as a grownup: "She understands now that bodies can swing / from trees and whole families can be / locked up, that people die the way fish do / starving sometimes, gutted and tortured."8 As an adult, knowing all she knows, she tries repeating language out loud long enough so that it loses its meaning and echoes back as strange senseless, animal-like sound. In doing so, she

           takes comfort
in her animal-ness. She wants to go on
being an animal, not something that represents
something else, but the original object, the
thing before it is named, the fish before she
knew it was a fish, when it was just another
lost thing, individual and shadowy, working
its way toward its own end.9

The speaker thus fantasizes about existing in a world without words or representation, bottomless, in which we are not "echo sounders," not learning about the depths (and limits) of ourselves and others by means of socially reverberating projections and repetitions.

But names and identities, Limón knows, also bespeak heritage and honor. They carry the histories that make us. It is thus crucial that in the poem "The Contract Says: We'd Like the Conversation to Be Bilingual" there is not only rejection, but also remembrance. Halfway through the poem the speaker turns to a memory of her father, a teacher, who was told by a colleague that "his kind" were thieves. Refusing to silently weather this racism, the father steals the man's hubcaps and shows up at work "wearing a poncho" and offering to sell them back to him. Embodying a stereotype to expose and subvert it, the father reveals how ethnic paradigms can also be sources of pride, connection, solidarity, and resistance.

Limón's ties to her surname and ethnic inheritance are, by her own account, sinuous, layered, complex. Growing up, she had been told that her paternal grandfather was originally from San Juan de los Lagos, Mexico, and that he migrated to the United States in 1917 when his land was confiscated during the Mexican Revolution, a story that she too has retold in at least one interview.10 But in another essayistic account she writes that:

As an adult I learned the slightly messier truth: Francisco Limón crossed around 1928 — when the revolution was long over and Pancho Villa had already been shot forty times in his Dodge Roadster — one of five hungry kids living in a chicken coop in Canoga Park, running booze for a bootlegger around the California-Mexico borderlands. They weren't escaping a war; they were escaping an abusive father. It was San Diego, not Laredo. He crossed by pickup truck, not by river.11

Her surname is thus a bearer of complicated, embodied histories, familial memories that morph as they migrate, crossing linguistic, geographic, and generational borders. Her own father was a teacher, and her (white, non-Hispanic) mother, an artist. Limón's parents divorced and both remarried when she was young, and, by her own account, she grew up in a lower middle-class household in Northern California. As she expressed it in an interview: "I was not raised in a bilingual family. My grandfather [ . . . ] worked hard to assimilate into U.S. culture, growing up in a foster family, and eventually graduating from college. I have always identified with Mexican culture, but like many of us, I am not only one thing. I'm many things. I'm Irish, and Scottish, and German too. Part lion. Part dragon."12 Certainly not all Latinx people have the privilege of being able to freely affiliate with or "waltz" between mixed ethnic heritages, but it is her experience, one which she explores with honesty and integrity.

Limón's thorny relationship with identity categories, as well as her abiding alliance with Latinx identity, is explored in the poem "Prickly Pear & Fisticuff." Written as a prose poem, the lines move fast, like the anger that rightfully overtakes the speaker. It begins: "My older brother says he doesn't consider himself Latino anymore and I understand what he means, but I stare at the weird fruit in my hand and wonder what it is to lose a spiny layer."13 The poem then shifts to a bar in Tennessee, subtly underlining the importance of context in our narratives of ethnicity, where Limón's "Mexicanness" foregrounds her drinking companions' racist quips. Furious, she could have "started the night's final fight." Yet she punches, not with fists, but with language, imagining her brother in the fray: "I don't care what he says. My brother would have gone down swinging and fought off every redneck whitey in the room."14 Like her father's response when told "his kind" were thieves, the final turn of the poem conveys how ethnic and racial identities are as much an individual's own making as they are a response to others' racializing and racist projections onto their bodies, while also pointing to a generative anger in response to confrontation with white supremacy in America. Ultimately, Limón's paternal grandfather may have worked hard to assimilate, but Limón's poetry shows that those "spiny layers" of race and ethnicity can't just be plucked away at will, that they continue to sharply bristle generations later. Indeed, in her recent poem "Cargo," the speaker admits to "traveling with our passports now" in light of all the "Reports of ICE raids," attesting to the ways anti-immigrant rhetoric and practices dehumanize not just undocumented migrants like Oscar and Valeria, but also all racialized Americans.15 And it is the case that so much of our debates about borders and immigration has little to do with laws and rights, safety or security, and much more to do with upholding centuries-old, sharply racist, barbwire borders that generations later continue to barricade belonging.

Aware of the power of names to bond and to ban us, Ada Limón takes great care to name the natural world with exactitude and precision, setting bodies firmly in place and in connection with their environs. In her poem titled precisely "Against Belonging" the speaker notes how her sense of belonging is evidenced by her ability to name her natural surroundings: "the American beech, / sassafras, chestnut oak, yellow birch were just / plain trees back then," when she first moved to her home.16 The speaker then recalls wondrously learning the names of flora and fauna as a young girl: "With each new name, the world expanded." And this is an expansion not of the world per se, but of her connection to it. Thus, the speaker, now attached to three "Harmless Eastern garter snakes" that live in her backyard, decides to name them. Ostensibly a gesture of protection — "I've named them / so no one is tempted to kill them — it is also, foremost, an act of recognition and kinship. These garter snakes are not the embodiment of Biblical evil, but an extension of herself. She too, as she reveals in the final lines, is a snake, "what cannot be tamed, what shakes off citizenship, / what draws her own signature with her body / in whatever dirt she wants."17 The poem was published in her last collection, The Carrying, which opens with a small poem titled "A Name," in which Eve not only names Creation, but also yearns to be named by the world she creates, as if she too wants to be recognized, be made in equal measure part of her surroundings.18 These subversions of the Genesis myth impel us to envision a world in which the power of naming and nomenclature is tender and reciprocal, in which we remember and honor our names, as well as those of others like Oscar and Valeria, a world in which we all belong and are able to move our bodies, at will, across borders, those lines in the dirt.

In Limón's poetry, sex is an integral part of this call for bodily autonomy and for unswerving commitment to kinship and connection. Indeed, her many gorgeous sex poems are another way in which Limón's poetry restores Latinx humanity, and especially the agency of the oversexualized and often sexually exploited Latina body. The erotic in her work is never a commodity, nor is it performative. It is naturally raw, organic, fleshy like fruits, and, above all, pleasurable. As the speaker of the visionary poem "Fifteen Balls of Feathers" explains:

The very first time I really loved sex

was the very first time I was happy to be a girl.

I found out there were two hearts in a human body.

I stared down at my smooth stomach, its separate pounding

 crawling out my belly button like a bulldozer.19

This initiation into obliterating sexual pleasure contrasts sharply with many contemporary Latinx literary accounts of early sexual experiences, which are represented as traumatic, painful, and often nonconsensual. Limón reclaims both lust and tenderness as our natural bodily right, an expression of our physical immensity. This relationship between our sexual selves and the larger natural world is articulated well in the poem "Tree of Fire," where the speaker unabashedly tells us: "This morning, we fucked / each other into a regular / backyard bonfire — cold wood / turned to coal in the fine, / fine flame."20 After sex, she notices for the first time a tree outside with "lurid red leaves," aglow, like her post-coital self. And she swears to "try harder not to / miss as much: the tree, or how / your fingers under still / sleep-stunned sheets / coaxed all my colors back."21 This is the body alive, saturated in natural pleasures and consequently more attuned to — more connected to — her vivid and vast surroundings.

Many poems in Bright Dead Things explicitly explore the experiences of Latinx bodies rooted in and uprooted from an environment. In the poem that lends the collection its title, "I Remember the Carrots," a speaker resuscitates a formative childhood memory.  As a young girl, she ripped up her father's carrots with utter pleasure: "I loved them: my own bright dead things."  She carried them "like a prize" to her father, "who scolded me, rightly, for killing his whole crop." Significantly, it is the adult speaker who can interject "rightly," who now, at thirty-five, knows better, but who also concludes the poem by asking: "Why must we practice / this surrender? What I mean is: there are days / I still want to kill the carrots because I can."22Yes, she seems to say, she has learned much self-control, but to survive, she also needs to hold on to her unrestrained impulses and wants, instinctive responses that resonate with the generative anger that Limón's speakers also experience in response to US racism. And it is that roots are a beautiful, prized possession, passed on with both the tender care with which his father tends his crops, and with the violence with which the speaker yearns to take possession of them.

Many poems in Bright Dead Things elicit questions about how we extract and preserve these roots, and especially how we honor the memory of our Latinx migrant dead. Particularly revealing is a series of elegies to Limón's stepmother, whom the poet helped take care of during a long battle with terminal illness. Writing about this experience in "What Remains Grows Ravenous," the speaker reckons with the idea that:

No one wants to be remembered
for their death, or rather,
I don't. So why do I remember hers
and remembers hers?23

This question brings to the foreground the qualitative difference between remembering the dead as dead because we attach immense love and importance to their bodies (as the speaker does), versus when we remember the dead as dead because their bodies were deemed disposable. That is, the way Oscar and Valeria's corpses are sensationalized, or how migrants left to die in sweltering, locked trucks find their way into the newsprint; the way their bodies are only of significance precisely because they are dead, bodies that become the border's bright dead things, highlighting somber news.

The way bodies carry limitations, how they shine bright, but also flicker and expire, is central to Limón's most recent collection, The Carrying. The book furthers Limón's profound, compassionate exploration of Latinx humanity, but now clustered around a new subject: maternal longing and infertility. The book feels birthed from the poet's body: "What if instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?," the speaker asks in a poem ominously titled "The Vulture and the Body."24 But while much of the book seems like an exploration of bodily restrictions — there are bodies experiencing not only infertility but clouded by chronic pain and insomnia, besieged by dementia — it also points to the re-discovery of desire and purpose amid pain and constraints. Limón opens the collection with an epigraph by Native American poet Joy Harjo — "She had some horses she loved. She had some horses she hated. They were the same horses." This is the Latinx body in this book: fierce and frail, vulnerable and vigorous, constricting and colossal, always human.

As a work grounded in the intimate experiences of the body, The Carrying looks unsparingly at a world fraught with violence, political terror, inequality, sexual harassment, and looming environmental catastrophe, underlining both the mad human hopes that make us want to keep procreating, and the broader context in which women's often agonizing bodily choices take shape. In a particularly visceral, unforgettable poem, "Bust," the speaker drives to the airport, listening to news on the radio about a Colombian woman caught smuggling cocaine inside her breasts. A choice made in response to dire economic need, the arrested Colombian woman "was [now] in dire agony. Wounds rupturing, raging infection." Laughing about this horrific news item, the male disc jockey spews sexually crass jokes. The poem's female speaker instead thinks "of my friend who's considering / a mastectomy to stay alive, another who / said she'd cut them off herself if it meant living."25 . Women's bodies, we understand, are vulnerable to slashing and scarring in a way men's bodies never will be. Indeed, as the narrator puts it, "We do what we have / to do not to cleave the body too quickly."26 Yet not all women are forced to sever their bodies in the same ways, or to the same extent, in order to survive; significantly, the "carrying" of a cancer survivor is not the same as the "carrying" of a Latina drug mule. And this is subtly, but poignantly suggested as the speaker walks through the airport's security screening — "Passports and boots that slip off, / a sleepy stream through the radiation / machine. A passive pat-down of my outline."27 The reader is forced think of the stark differences between this "sleepy" and "passive" security border crossing and that undergone by the Colombian woman, what must have been a horrifying ordeal when she was "busted." Throughout Limón's poetry, there is a recognition that we don't all carry the same bodies, that class, nationality, gender, and race all weigh on the body differently, that our various embodied experiences and yearnings — motherhood, mobility, our many maladies — are loads that can't just be set down, that not all bodies cross borders with the same ease, or even survive the passage.

Ultimately, in the face of our very real social, political, and physical impediments, Ada Limón's poetry continues to reaffirm, as means of survival, the whale-like immensity of our bodies, with all the blessings and burdens they bear. Thus, at the end of "Bust," as the speaker boards the jet, she feels a tremor in her chest, "this shiver of need / that moves my hand to my breastbone, / some small gesture of tenderness for this / masterpiece of anatomy I cling to."28 This expression of overwhelming gratitude and awe for the magnificence of our bodies is further amplified by the poem that directly follows it, "Dead Stars," where Limón writes:

Look, we are not unspectacular things.

We've come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

[ . . . ]

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,

if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified.29

These powerful lines provide a poignant reminder that our bodies and futures are intimately interwoven, that Oscar and Valeria, and all other human migrants, neither nameless nor forgotten, are not foreign aliens, but extensions of ourselves, that we have a great responsibility toward each other and all of creation, and much work to do while alive. We are all made from "dead stars," that is, we are celestial, beyond borders, bright, but not yet dead things.

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