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Article Excerpt
In "La Jornada," the Chicana poet Antonia Quintana Pigno poses an important question about the relationship between "poetry" and "land":
Consider querido mio poetry-- how it changes only perception not the land (184-5)
Pigno here seems to insist on the limits of poetry: it can change "only perception, not the land." At the same time, however, it does change something--perception. That is, she claims for poetry the ability to influence the interaction between landscape and observer, and, by extension, the way that place is experienced, imagined, and represented. The "land" here might refer simply to the material reality of the landscape--rocks, dirt, mountains--which poetry cannot change. But if "land" also designates the meaning attached to that physical locale, poetry becomes a much more powerful tool for reworking the relationship between person and place. Despite the caveat in Pigno's poem, I would thus like to argue that "La Jornada" offers a model for rethinking the relationship between poetry and place.
In his 2003 book titled A Nomad Poetics, Pierre Joris claims: "The basic desire of poetry is ... nomadic" (46). Joris defines "nomadism" as:
... a mode of being in geosocial space that may assume many forms, all of which nevertheless share a common dynamic. Nomadic formulations are those which value motion over fixation, variation over order; which affirm the spaces between stops rather than beelining to a promised land; which reach a resting point only to use it as a relay to a future move; which have no finality, only process; which skim the surface rather than implanting a symbolic edifice or superimposing a code or statistical grid; which "occupy space without counting it" rather than "counting space in order to occupy it" (Deleuze and Guattari); which involve "arraying oneself in an open space" rather than arranging a closed space around oneself; which smooth without striating. (40)
The term "nomad" comes from the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari; the nomad is privileged as a representation of mobility and the deterritorializing agent par excellence. Deterritorialization and its corollary, "reterritorialization," are terms proposed by Deleuze and Guattari to describe strategies for destabilizing established systems and hierarchies, the effects of which are "a reorganization of functions and a regrouping of forces" (320). These processes function by creating networks based on lateral rather than hierarchical connections; they allow for multiple, simultaneous, and conflicting possibilities by privileging connections, divergences, and intersections. De- and reterritorialization are characterized by movement and open-endedness--they are never finished, never complete, never "become," but are always "becoming." Becoming, furthermore, is always "becoming minor," a process of variation and increasing particularization.
In the context of the borderlands, it seems to me, both the promises and the pitfalls of these theories become especially salient. The relationships between center and margin, major and minor are questions of the utmost importance in Chicano (and also Native American) literatures, which are so often engaged in negotiating and destabilizing these hierarchies and systems, be they languages, nation-states, or literary canons. The emphasis on process rather than stasis is crucial in deconstructing dichotomies that tend to align the dominant Anglo-American culture with modernity or progress and a minority Chicano culture with tradition or authenticity, thus reifying cultural difference.
That said, I take issue with Joris's statement that "The basic desire of poetry is ... nomadic." Whereas I suggested in the context of Pigno's poem that "land" refers not only to a physical landscape but also to the social construction of that place, the opposite is also true--place is not only a social construction, but also a real, lived landscape. "Territory" can serve as a psychological or linguistic or cultural metaphor, but it also indicates real places caught in contests of ownership and national affiliation. The inhabitants of the borderlands, who locate themselves in the U.S. Southwest, are themselves located--by the very term "Southwest"--at the periphery of the dominant Anglo-American, English-speaking nation. For those who are already defined as minorities, on the margins, "becoming minor" would hardly seem the goal. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari have been criticized for their Eurocentric fetishization of the "minor" or marginal. (1) They also romanticize the figure of the placeless nomad and privilege the idea of "lines of flight" as ways of opening up and destabilizing closed systems--lines that form trajectories out of the network, figured as an escape with no return. An emphasis on the nomad and the process of deterritorialization often excludes its corollary, reterritorialization. As Caren Kaplan points out, "An emphasis on deterritorialization over and above reterritorialization ... both raises and suppresses the question of location" (91). Place as metaphor takes precedence over place as actuality.
Joris actually invokes the "border" as a metaphor for the experience of being constantly in motion and everywhere a stranger that is reflected in a nomad poetics; in his description, the border represents "the conditions of doubt and encounter which being foreign to a situation (which may be life itself) provokes--a condition which is simultaneously an impasse and a passage, limbo and transit zone, with checkpoints and bureaus of exchange, a meeting place and a realm of confusion" (35). The border, Joris argues, is analogous to the nomadic in its liminality, in its possibility, in its position in-between and becoming, of constant meeting and contact, of de-centering. But his border, it seems, is an airport, where the traveler can simply pass through; it is not a real lived space that for its inhabitants represents an enforced alienation, where both territory and language are contested. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua writes that the border is "una herida abierta [an open wound], where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds" (3). She continues:
Gringos in the U.S. Southwest consider the inhabitants of the borderlands transgressors, aliens--whether they possess documents or not, whether they're Chicanos, Indians or Blacks ... The only "legitimate" inhabitants are those in power, the whites and those who align themselves with whites. Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger. (3-4)
Joris seems to assume the person on the border is "foreign"; the problem for Chicanos and Native Americans in the United States, as Anzaldua points out, is that they are defined as foreigners in their own land. Joris maintains that the border is not "an edge along the fringe of experience" (35), but this is precisely how it is defined in U.S. culture and politics. Like Joris, Anzaldua does suggest that the border is a site of destabilization and therefore a site of possibility, of playing with and deterritorializing language, of multiple cultural positions and affiliations. However, this possibility must be contextualized in terms of a specific history and ongoing cultural violence. In the borderlands, the issue at stake is very often that of real places and specific territories. The borderlands are not simply a metaphor for linguistic freedom, but also a reality of dispossession and displacement. In the borderlands, therefore, an emphasis on deterritorialization, on increasing displacement, cannot be the answer.
"La Jornada" both serves to exemplify the stakes of the question of the relationship between place and poetry and provides an alternative model to that of a nomadic or increasingly dis-placed poetics--one that instead works to reterritorialize the borderlands. The poem grounds itself in the borderlands and in the specific landscape of New Mexico; this locatedness, however, does not translate into fixedness or reification. Rather, the poem's continually shifting frames of reference serve to collapse distinctions and bridge divides. While recognizing an opposition between Chicano and white worlds, it also forges connections between the two. It refers to a grand sweep of history, but this history is represented not as a linear progression, but rather as a series of juxtapositions and alternative possibilities. Furthermore, the poem works against either a hierarchical or antagonistic relationship between "major" and "minor," which become irrelevant categories in this poem that works to undo a fixed center. The poem continually opens out to become more rather than less inclusive (in terms of language, geography, culture, even poetry itself), but this openness paradoxically serves to ground the poem in the New Mexico landscape.
This paradox is made possible by the poem's particular poetic strategies in terms of form and language. Pigno also foregrounds the issues of cultural difference, history, and geography, as well as the related issue of the role of poetry itself. The "journey" the poem describes is a journey towards poetry, which is represented as a means of connection and resolution and is also intrinsically...
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