animise
&
elegy for genocide: a poem in four parts
TAYLOR BROUGH
animase
to my english speaking tongue,
anishinaabemowin is like growing wings. ugly wings, still.
new feathers, new bird,
awkward.
empire, empire, hungry thing. (r. erica doyle)
a mirror tells me to think about how i would make a word
for colonialism in anishinaabemowin.
i wonder if the word is animise,
which already feels like it is flying
off the tongue
flying
off the handle
flying
away from here
john trudell asked,
when the mirror looks at you / what does the mirror see
a cloud manitou is swirling in my stomach,
full of tricksters and their ugly, small, awkward wings.
i dream that the dragonflies are the ones the colonizers will ride
on their quest to make everyplace look like fucking iowa,
another name built of stolen teeth
in a stolen mouth
with a tongue trained to speak the wrong way.
“How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?” (Duriel E. Harris)
i learn of an ojibwe woman who held onto language
in the boarding school
by speaking to the asabikeshii and opiniimanidosh.
maybe animise means instead something more like decolonization,
which already feels like it is flying
off the tongue
flying
off the handle
flying
away from here
anishinaabemowin is like growing wings. ugly wings, still.
new feathers, new bird,
awkward.
empire, empire, hungry thing. (r. erica doyle)
a mirror tells me to think about how i would make a word
for colonialism in anishinaabemowin.
i wonder if the word is animise,
which already feels like it is flying
off the tongue
flying
off the handle
flying
away from here
john trudell asked,
when the mirror looks at you / what does the mirror see
a cloud manitou is swirling in my stomach,
full of tricksters and their ugly, small, awkward wings.
i dream that the dragonflies are the ones the colonizers will ride
on their quest to make everyplace look like fucking iowa,
another name built of stolen teeth
in a stolen mouth
with a tongue trained to speak the wrong way.
“How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?” (Duriel E. Harris)
i learn of an ojibwe woman who held onto language
in the boarding school
by speaking to the asabikeshii and opiniimanidosh.
maybe animise means instead something more like decolonization,
which already feels like it is flying
off the tongue
flying
off the handle
flying
away from here
elegy for genocide: a poem in four parts
one.
On a plane away from my home,
I notice first the cookie cutters of land,
tracts bought and sold, borders crafted carefully as line breaks,
a poem we cannot all walk along,
an immobile story,
immobile nomadism, traveling roads paved between fields of wheat--
I feel guilty even calling these the plains.
Rising above the clouds,
I become conscious of a sea of spirits reaching with our fingers
that have been broken and told not to point. Sun
setting into horizons,
settling into apocalyptic end of world—or this is what Columbus has taught me, narrated a
history into this poem
that my words did not choose.
I am too used to receiving apologies that are never enough,
constellations that will never be our own again.
Later, along dusty sunshine city streets of LA
alight with stalks of palm trees like book spines,
dried and breaking,
something points me to the colossal carnage of empire,
city blocks outlined by lines of colonial flight become material,
libidinal blueprints mapped onto an earth
that still is only claimed in mined minds, brightly defined
in panoptic space or
panoptic time,
outlined from a point of stasis, a racist evolution.
two.
It is the women who tell me:
not the desire for the father but the loss of the mother
that colors resistance,
like winding vines, like the blooms of moon flowers,
penetration of speculums, wombs infiltrated by too many thrusts of white men, painful
grasping for what lays at our hearts
that can never quite be reached,
maybe not even by us. Anymore. I think of my body like a cactus,
capable of bearing water for renewal of spirit,
for sharing of life. I think of my body
like a thunderstorm, always overflowing with spirit--
connections between sky and earth seem so easy
as long as I am the bridge.
In my white grandmother’s house
on occupied Cheyenne lands, my mother asks me if decolonization
means she has to move back to Norway.
“I don’t know, mom.”
My life becomes ritualized in smoke tendrils sweeping from sweetgrass, violent
disarticulations of my own body,
ripping myself from myself, or perhaps being ripped.
I never know if I am responsible for the ripping
or if my self is of another kind.
Maybe I was born ripped from a self I can never know.
Later, in the shower,
I notice the veins on the back of my wrist and punch the shower wall again
and again,
contemplating the mixture of my blood,
the three quarters of my body that my mother will take with her
when she stops occupying a land that she already understands as hers.
It is not the desire for the father but the loss of the mother
that colors resistance--
mine is red like the clay of our burial mounds, like the mixed blood
of my colonized body, like the respiratory system of my spirit.
I was already lost in the mapped order of my mother’s imperial womb;
at least it too, was red.
three.
This is a poem about blood. When I first began to bleed,
it was with the waxing of the moon. I began bleeding on Cheyenne tribal lands, then in the
denseness of Abenaki forests felled and settled,
ordered into streets renamed, reconfigured by Puritan captivity narratives,
churches, Christian imperialism,
surviving King Phillip’s war off of groundnuts. Then in the place
where the Cherokee and Choctaw were removed, a blistering absence. Now I bleed
on occupied Kumeyaay lands, a desert of an order of Man
where even the water tastes of civilization. I understand this
as much as I understand the massacres at Wounded Knee,
as much as I understand the stolen teeth behind the name “Chippewa”.
My nomadic ancestors walk with me
and catch my blood in mouths that cannot speak to me in English.
Our reaching is an anguished one.
The lines of my palms charted into the search for lifeways,
whose choices am I making, are they ever mine? Ours?
My sister is the walking corpse of a liberal feminist,
or maybe she is something else, something unnamed. Pocahontas, perhaps, Sacagawea,
she is a plot device. A point to an end. I wonder if any of us
are ever going to be ends in ourselves.
“We should go to Seattle,” she tells me.
I cannot remember if Seattle is occupied Umatilla lands, or Warm Springs.
Maybe neither.
four.
Holding my father’s ashes at his funeral,
I am struck by the heaviness of a burned body. He was cremated
in a dark furnace that I tried to imagine into a pyre,
a warrior’s funeral.
My line breaks become scarce, my words are already ordered
into a neoliberal grief—expressed only in the most hidden parts of ourselves—
the grieving of colonized collectivity, not for what was lost,
but what has been taken. I imagine
my father shot himself elegantly, I imagine the simplicity
of his falling onto the earth behind his garage,
an earth that he grew up knowing only halfway how to love,
an earth written over by private land ownership, by the settlement of the plains,
re-narrating our homes with blocks built and ordered by empire,
panoptic space,
panoptic time.
Gichi manido, this space is many spaces. This time is many times.
I warned you. This is not a poem we can walk along together, not even side by side.
On a plane away from my home,
I notice first the cookie cutters of land,
tracts bought and sold, borders crafted carefully as line breaks,
a poem we cannot all walk along,
an immobile story,
immobile nomadism, traveling roads paved between fields of wheat--
I feel guilty even calling these the plains.
Rising above the clouds,
I become conscious of a sea of spirits reaching with our fingers
that have been broken and told not to point. Sun
setting into horizons,
settling into apocalyptic end of world—or this is what Columbus has taught me, narrated a
history into this poem
that my words did not choose.
I am too used to receiving apologies that are never enough,
constellations that will never be our own again.
Later, along dusty sunshine city streets of LA
alight with stalks of palm trees like book spines,
dried and breaking,
something points me to the colossal carnage of empire,
city blocks outlined by lines of colonial flight become material,
libidinal blueprints mapped onto an earth
that still is only claimed in mined minds, brightly defined
in panoptic space or
panoptic time,
outlined from a point of stasis, a racist evolution.
two.
It is the women who tell me:
not the desire for the father but the loss of the mother
that colors resistance,
like winding vines, like the blooms of moon flowers,
penetration of speculums, wombs infiltrated by too many thrusts of white men, painful
grasping for what lays at our hearts
that can never quite be reached,
maybe not even by us. Anymore. I think of my body like a cactus,
capable of bearing water for renewal of spirit,
for sharing of life. I think of my body
like a thunderstorm, always overflowing with spirit--
connections between sky and earth seem so easy
as long as I am the bridge.
In my white grandmother’s house
on occupied Cheyenne lands, my mother asks me if decolonization
means she has to move back to Norway.
“I don’t know, mom.”
My life becomes ritualized in smoke tendrils sweeping from sweetgrass, violent
disarticulations of my own body,
ripping myself from myself, or perhaps being ripped.
I never know if I am responsible for the ripping
or if my self is of another kind.
Maybe I was born ripped from a self I can never know.
Later, in the shower,
I notice the veins on the back of my wrist and punch the shower wall again
and again,
contemplating the mixture of my blood,
the three quarters of my body that my mother will take with her
when she stops occupying a land that she already understands as hers.
It is not the desire for the father but the loss of the mother
that colors resistance--
mine is red like the clay of our burial mounds, like the mixed blood
of my colonized body, like the respiratory system of my spirit.
I was already lost in the mapped order of my mother’s imperial womb;
at least it too, was red.
three.
This is a poem about blood. When I first began to bleed,
it was with the waxing of the moon. I began bleeding on Cheyenne tribal lands, then in the
denseness of Abenaki forests felled and settled,
ordered into streets renamed, reconfigured by Puritan captivity narratives,
churches, Christian imperialism,
surviving King Phillip’s war off of groundnuts. Then in the place
where the Cherokee and Choctaw were removed, a blistering absence. Now I bleed
on occupied Kumeyaay lands, a desert of an order of Man
where even the water tastes of civilization. I understand this
as much as I understand the massacres at Wounded Knee,
as much as I understand the stolen teeth behind the name “Chippewa”.
My nomadic ancestors walk with me
and catch my blood in mouths that cannot speak to me in English.
Our reaching is an anguished one.
The lines of my palms charted into the search for lifeways,
whose choices am I making, are they ever mine? Ours?
My sister is the walking corpse of a liberal feminist,
or maybe she is something else, something unnamed. Pocahontas, perhaps, Sacagawea,
she is a plot device. A point to an end. I wonder if any of us
are ever going to be ends in ourselves.
“We should go to Seattle,” she tells me.
I cannot remember if Seattle is occupied Umatilla lands, or Warm Springs.
Maybe neither.
four.
Holding my father’s ashes at his funeral,
I am struck by the heaviness of a burned body. He was cremated
in a dark furnace that I tried to imagine into a pyre,
a warrior’s funeral.
My line breaks become scarce, my words are already ordered
into a neoliberal grief—expressed only in the most hidden parts of ourselves—
the grieving of colonized collectivity, not for what was lost,
but what has been taken. I imagine
my father shot himself elegantly, I imagine the simplicity
of his falling onto the earth behind his garage,
an earth that he grew up knowing only halfway how to love,
an earth written over by private land ownership, by the settlement of the plains,
re-narrating our homes with blocks built and ordered by empire,
panoptic space,
panoptic time.
Gichi manido, this space is many spaces. This time is many times.
I warned you. This is not a poem we can walk along together, not even side by side.
|
Taylor Brough (they/she) is an Anishinaabe and white poet and theorist who writes, thinks, and feels with native and black feminisms, decolonization, and abolition. They are currently a PhD student in the Communication department at UCSD
|
ON WHAT IT MEANS TO BE KALEIDOSCOPED
To me, being kaleidoscoped means being rearranged and unsettled, sometimes because of yourself or on your own terms, sometimes because the world rearranges us and displaces our pieces, the way that a kaleidoscope shifts colors and shapes into something that can't be known or anticipated in advance. |