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I’m traveling from Alaska to Baltimore this week for the Associated
Writing Programs (AWP) conference, and from there to Arizona for the first
round of some full-circle book events in my home state. I’m carrying with me
the words of friends and colleagues who are not able to travel safely in this
country right now, my grief for the lives lost to imperialist violence in this continent
and Iran and Palestine and Syria and beyond, and a renewed sense that while our
art won’t save us, we won’t save ourselves without it. I want to tell you how alive the sky felt the night the first US bombs
fell in Iran, like it was trying to tell us something. We stood in a parking
lot admiring the waxing moon, the glittering earth, breath freezing just beyond
our lips. I want to tell you how cold it’s been, below zero for weeks and
everything takes extra time, extra energy, extra work, and I’ve been sick, and it’s
been hard, but in gracious moments I respect the winter’s demand for focused
attention. These coming weeks will require a strange pivot, a different attention. If you know AWP, you know the sense of anticipatory overwhelm it might
entail, even in years with less fascism. If you don’t know it, imagine the
biggest conference you’ve ever been to, add a few thousand people, most of them
poets, most of them hungry, and maybe your favorite college professor and the
worst person you ever met at an open mic 20 years ago who is locally famous
somewhere now, and somehow you end up in the same bathroom line, everyone
carrying unreasonable numbers of books, everyone missing something they meant
to go to, all gathered under the umbrella of a problematic literary institution
people have been saying is inevitably going to collapse in the next year for
10+ years and tries to sell you the ugliest T-shirt you’ve ever seen every time,
all talking about or explicitly, infuriatingly, not talking about at all, the
room we, as the elephant, are standing in: the genocide. The threat of nuclear
war. The wildfires. That said, I’ve learned how to manage the FOMO and the snacks and the disorienting
contradictions, and find the people and conversations that serve me. Last year, AWP was held in Los Angeles. One of the most memorable panels I attended there was on “Ethically Writing the US Border.” Panelists addressed a literary legacy that romanticizes the violence of the border without interrogating its actual existence. The poet Logan Phillips said that they aim to write in a way that “doesn’t reinforce the liberal imagination of the border as an inherent reality.” I’ve thought about that a lot over the last year, as the violence of the border has become more recognizably divorced from geography as what scholar Harsha Walia describes as “externalization or outsourcing” of border infrastructure, and the border as a line on a map reinforced with increasingly absurdist architecture. A year before that, I spent some days organizing clothing in a camp visited by people crossing the Sonoran desert, a place that provides shelter and food and a place to wash your feet. “Everyone says they’re fine, but no one makes that trip without f*ing up their feet,” an experienced volunteer told me. The clothing shed was full of discarded garments that no longer served travelers and donated items they might need for days to come: clean socks, menstrual supplies, blankets, breathable fabrics. I recognized my recurring tendency to fixate on The Object at the expense of the landscape. I wanted to match every sock, repair every torn shirt. I kept one pair of pants, a wool blend that seems custom tailored, men’s style, cuffs seemingly designed to cholla balls. I can see why they were left in the shed. I’ve replaced two buttons. I get compliments when I wear them. I haven’t yet found a graceful way to efficiently pivot to how I came by them, a story that doesn’t reinforce the border’s reality but highlights what those pants remind me: it’s well-funded violent theatrics, and a costume change. May we all be such nimble travelers.
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