Present at the Tectonic

Review of Borderland Apocrypha by Anthony Cody (USA: Omnidawn, 2020)
By Niccolo Rocamora Vitug

The theorist Chela Sandoval has written in her book Methodologies of the Oppressed about the possibility of love and hurt as the punctum, the piercing, through which people of Hispanic origin have burst forth with artistic expressions. I think that the book Borderline Apocrypha by the poet Anthony Cody, through the decolonizing of communicative and linguistic conventions, breaking them into what might seem anarchic, is a gushing forth of blood and desire. I see in this book the push to be free in life as in language, expanded resolutely to include many historical and cultural interventions.

What immediately struck me in Borderland Apocrypha, selected by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge to be the winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Poetry Contest, is the slipperiness of the book's contents. It is as if, though contained in what might be thought as a genteel repository of ideas (isn't this how a poetry book is sometimes thought to be?), what Cody does is struggle to escape and be heard. This, to me, is clearly seen in intertextual workings, the manipulation of angles and spaces, whether within the page or between characters and lines, in poems expanded from portions marked with superscripts.

One detail that intrigued me right away was the mention of Gil Scott-Heron, a Black American poet and jazz musician. The fact that the snippet of text about him has a superscript number beside it led me to explore how this man is connected to the part where he is mentioned, which is sparked by the speaker's experience of lining up for a passport photo.

The snippet is what seems to be the title, in a larger font, of the above poem. The lines connect the title to the various associations that are made through the inspiration of Scott-Heron's song “Running,” which also slips from one train of thought to another, an embodiment of the panic and letting go that a Black man caught up in racism has to do to survive.

In the above excerpt, the absurdity of the speaker's situation is indicated in the two lines “like a door / that must be opened and while a clave exists / you cannot make it from your mouth.” The speaker says that the key (clave) is not in the mouth–this must refer to the experience of speaking a language that is a wall of discrimination and prejudice between people. This must be the experience of the speaker while lining up for a passport photo, which for a person of Mexican descent slides easily into white suspicions of escape.

Borderland Apocrypha, in general, appears to avoid the lyric utterance, perhaps because the focus is a fragmentation that opens up the space for a historical reality. Cody writes in the Notes to the book:

The lynchings and events referenced in the collection are rooted in the history of the United States following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The ability to forget, reshape, and erase the histories of “the other” and the atrocities committed against “the other” by the United States, its agents and citizens, allow these acts to become part of the fabric of the nation.

The space created for the historical traumas opens up spaces within the reader, through distraction from typical modes of reading and understanding.

Perhaps the clearest manifestation of cleared space within the book's pages is to be found in the extended poem “Prelude to a Mexican Lynching, February 2, 1848, Guadalupe Hidalgo; or the Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits, and Settlement.” What stares at the reader in the middle of the page is a broken line that literally spells out the border between Mexico and the United States. The words on the left side are in English, whereas the ones on the right are in Spanish. The words are distributed within their allotted spaces in a way that makes the words look like indications of areas on a map.

In the above excerpt, a reader can already find meaning by staring at what is on the page. The ninth article of the treaty, according to the colonizer, indicates that Mexicans should be obedient. However, what the Spanish text seems to indicate is that the creation of regulations by those from the United States leads them to give up urban civilities. The bracketed word “[Stricken ]” at the bottom left is rich with ambiguity–was a passage stricken in the drafting, or were the colonizers struck by the dispossessed?

I think that feeling one’s way through the combination of words and space is a workable reading strategy. The eyes, admittedly, might tire from moving through the irregular layout of the words. Moreover, in “Prelude to a Mexican Lynching,” the reader has to follow two long threads, which have independent and meaningful segments. The extra effort called for, it needs saying, is necessary: the breaking through language is what enables new insight. What it calls forth from the reader is a commitment to a rereading, re-feeling, and revisiting the history and culture within and without the text.

Having said this, I insist that Cody is very capable of a lyrical utterance. This is seen clearly in the poem “Nopales, A Mexican Lynching, No. 39.” This piece builds on the idea of the lynching of Mexico through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo by focusing on a nopal, a variety of cactus in the area. The use of both English and Spanish in the poem highlights the tension that the speaker feels, and the breakdown of lines and punctuation indicates a breaking of the conventions in the language of the oppressor.

It is no coincidence that cacti are full of water, which is what makes rivers powerful:

The lyricism that pervades the whole poem, a response to a hateful quotation from the Stockton Times dated April 6, 1850, might be “una pacencia de ríos,” a patience as profound as that seen in rivers.

The forms of assault in Borderland Apocrypha are various, changing throughout the history that Cody rewrites and reconfigures. The irrationality of the violence startles in the sequence “A Request for Information: ICE - Regarding Immigration Detention Services Expansion, 2017 (Chicago, St. Paul, Detroit, Salt Lake City).” The wrangling that happens here is wrought by the author against the distortion—erasures, redundancies, displacements—of placidly laid-out instructions and diagrams pertaining to immigration and deportation services.

Some of the images from the archive of torture (such as what I think is an impression from a passport above) will not be obvious right away, considering that the book presents so many in blow-by-blow fashion. There are words that are bunched up against each other like what is found in passports, legends that are used to identify locations of places on a museum map, and faint watermarks that are seen in government documents. There are numerous pictures, news articles, and shape configurations that might make one think that the book is really a scrapbook of survival—which it really is.

Borderland Apocrypha comes to the reader at a great cost. Cody intimates a sense of trauma in the poem “Self Portrait: Upon Viewing My Own Crime Scene, a Mexican Lynching,” wherein what looks like two lyrics side by side is really a opening of wounds. Reading from left to right or from top to bottom creates different readings but what remains the same is the rawness of the pain and fear that attend one in a long and ongoing situation of oppression.

The reader might wonder who the corpse mentioned is—a person whom the author is observing, someone else entirely, or the author himself? Moreover, the author also seems to be numbed by trauma while continuing to be paranoid about others imagining him.

This book seems to burst through pages, akin to the surge of water through insufficient channels, to the desire of a victim to escape. There is much more to see literally in Borderland Apocrypha, which contains what is typically covered up in histories written by victors.

Borderland Apocalypse takes its place at a time when poetry books, such as Terrance Hayes's How to Be Drawn and American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, reconfigure language and form. For Hayes, the work of innovation is to ensure that poetry does not end up as a, in his words, “lying ass song.” Anthony Cody upholds oppressed and invisible lives in Borderland Apocrypha. As he elaborates in the title poem: “Life is proprietary. Do not listen. Join the present at the tectonic/ And continue to be. Push.”

Niccolo Rocamora Vitug, an alumnus of the Silliman National Writers Workshop, graduated with an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies from the Ateneo de Manila University. He is taking his PhD in Music at the University of the Philippines while teaching at the University of Santo Tomas. His collection Enter Deeply, a finalist for the 2020 Gaudy Poetry Book Prize, is forthcoming from the University of the Philippines Press.