The Restless Dead

Necrowriting and Disappropriation

Cristina Rivera Garza, Robin Myers

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780826501233
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Violenza nella società

Based on comparative readings of contemporary books from Latin America, Spain, and the United States, the essays in this book present a radical critique against strategies of literary appropriation that were once thought of as neutral, and even concomitant, components of the writing process. Debunking the position of the author as the center of analysis, Cristina Rivera Garza argues for the communality—a term used by anthropologist Floriberto Díaz to describe modes of life of Indigenous peoples of Oaxaca based on notions of collaborative labor—permeating all writing processes. Disappropriating is a political operation at the core of projects acknowledging, both at ethical and aesthetic levels, that writers always work with materials that are not their own. Writers borrow from the practitioners of a language, entering in a debt relationship that can only be covered by ushering the text back to the communities from which it grew. In a world rife with violence, where the experiences of many are erased by pillage and extraction, writing among and for the dead is a form of necrowriting that may well become a life-affirming act of decolonization and resistance.

Disappropriation

Writing with and for the Dead

DISAPPROPRIATELY: THREE EXAMPLES FROM CONTEMPORARY MEXICO

Originally published by Sur+, an independent press established in Oaxaca, Mexico, Antígona González, by poet Sara Uribe (Querétaro, 1978), roared into the world in 2012. This documentary poem gives words—broken, merciful, full of rage—to the low-intensity war waged in Mexico for over a decade. Fierce, urgently political, and human to the core, Uribe’s book summons the dead and invites them to sit at our tables. And it reminds us that on the day we stop sharing our memories and language with them, we ourselves will become loss, vanished signs, mere oblivion. Drawing from the words of actual victims of the armed conflict, and feeding off the many Antigones rewritten throughout an already long, venerable Latin American tradition of reading and recycling Sophocles’s original play, Antígona González—now pristinely translated by J. D. Pluecker and published by Les Figues Press in 2015—may be the poem of an entire generation. This Mexican Antigone is looking for her brother, Tadeo, in order to honor his body and his life. One vanished person among many, Tadeo eludes her grasp as she, curator of words collected by journalists and Twitter accounts alike, attempts to apprehend him. Like many history books, this slim poetry collection ends with a bibliographical note in which the author dutifully (and beautifully) acknowledges her references and provides brief explanations of how she both researched and wrote the entire piece.

Antígona González is, as Uribe states in her endnote, a conceptual piece. This, too, is a disappropriative work. Here, the voices and traces of others emerge as such, as voices and traces authored by others. The poet is not “giving voice”; she is paying close attention to existing voices. Material voices. Voices that occupy space and deserve company. Even amid unfathomable pain and hardship, these voices are unwilling to dispense with their agency, their own versions of events. When we read Antígona González, we come close to the decisions made by Uribe as a curator of someone else’s words; to her rhythms and cadences; and to the tumultuous, wounded presences of those invoked when she cites them. Reading this poem makes us participants in a larger communion. The triangle formed by author, reader, and text has been broken. We are more. We have always been more, and Uribe, as a disappropiationist poet, knows it.

Gerardo Arana (Querétaro, 1987–2012) published electrifying prose and poetry over the course of his short life. Bulgaria Mexicalli, his brilliant remix of the canonical civil poem Suave Patria, by Ramón López Velarde, and September, a poem by Bulgarian author Geo Milev, is both an update and a deterritorialization of both original works. Juxtaposing cartographies, languages, drawings, literary traditions, and historical and demographic data, Arana fundamentally transformed both poems while also allowing them to remain utterly familiar. Indeed, anyone who attended public elementary schools in Mexico (and was therefore made to learn Suave Patria by heart) will recognize some of the words and much of the weight of the original poem in Arana’s rendition. Eerily, though, a strange wind will blow in all the way from both Bulgarian landscapes and present-day Mexico, distorting syntax and diction just enough to make them new. While López Velarde, writing in 1921 in celebration of the new nation that had just emerged from the 1910 Mexican Revolution, stated:

I will say in muted epic:

the homeland is impeccable and diamantine.

Gentle Homeland: permit me to wrap you

in the deepest music of the jungle

with which you modeled me

entirely by the rhythmic blow of axes,

amid laughs and shouts of girls

and birds of the woodpecker trade.¹

Arana’s contact with both present-day Mexico and the tradition of resistance of Bulgarian poetry allowed him to write otherwise (the translation is mine):

I will tell the sardine epic:

The homeland is darkness and fog.

Grave Fatherland:

Strangled in the famished jungle.

Just before the ax-blows,

Girls shout, scared to death.

The laughing girls of 1921, shouting mischievously as the music of the jungle envelops both the poet and the poem, have become the terrorized women of the early twenty-first century. Victims of femicides and subject to myriad forms of violence perpetrated by both state and patriarchy, these women’s shouts are a far cry from the prior rejoicing at the birth of a nation. These are, unmistakably, the shouts of terror. Axes, once metaphorical, are now real. Welcome to the so-called War on Drugs.

Dispensing with bibliographies or footnotes, Arana’s dexterous use of blank space and italics, as well as his effective selection of key words from the original poems, allows the reader to experience the mediated nature of language. We might not know for certain which word belongs to whom, but we must know that they’re reaching us from far away. These words are someone else’s materials. All this, he seems to be saying, belongs somewhere else. All this, he seems to be insisting, is also mine. Profoundly personal and deeply rooted in the experience of entire nations—known or unknown to the reader—this poem may be the best remix ever attempted of Suave Patria. And this exemplary early twentieth-century Mexican poem has never been so close to political poetry from Bulgaria.

Eugenio Tisselli (Mexico City, 1972) is first an activist and then a poet. A programmer in his own right, Tisselli has used digital technology to generate pieces that question the very tools with which we come in contact with language in our contemporary world. Occupied as he became, for example, with agricultural projects that connected Tanzania and Oaxaca, Tisselli programmed software that could produce and translate poems he no longer had the time to write or any interest in writing. Uncannily reminiscent of mid-twentieth-century avant-garde poems, the series collected in El drama del lavaplatos was developed by his program in conjunction with “language seeds” fed into it by the poet himself. Co-authored in the strictest sense of the word, this poetry isn’t his—and yet it contains nothing that isn’t.

Acutely aware of the uneven geopolitical and linguistic contexts where he works, of their rigid racial and economic hierarchies, and of the violent incursions of state and capital in their midst, Tisselli’s pieces become political commentaries almost immediately. But they do more than that. An ardent supporter of open code, Tisselli has studied and participated in digital projects that allow for practices of mutual care. Take, for example, his rendition of the case of Salvatore Iaconesi—an artist, engineer, and hacker who, after receiving a cancer diagnosis, promptly hacked the information in order to make it available to worried friends, other doctors, and health practitioners. A disappropriationist at heart, Tisselli works with different platforms, languages, and genres, creating the conditions in which the materials he invokes—someone else’s materials—are both aesthetically and ethically accounted for.

Community and communality

We are assured that community will take shape, that being-in-common will happen to us. That, according to the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, is writing.² By defining it in such terms, by placing the act of writing and the experience of community into a tense and imminent relationship, always dependent on someone else (“we are assured”), Nancy joins a long conversation in a singular way. Through this conversation, readers and authors analyze and question the ties that bind them together—and therefore make them possible. Flesh and bone. Presence. In the end, as Nancy argues, “The most solitary of writers writes only for the other. (Anyone who writes for the same, for himself, or for the anonymity of the crowd is not a writer.)” He insists: “Being as being in common is (the) being (of) literature.”³

Many contemporary authors are concerned with the relationship between writing and community. In fact, this interest is not optional for authors who are most aware of the necropolitical context in which they work, and it also emerges among those attentive to the changes triggered by the digital revolution of our times. However, expressing concern is only part of the task. The challenge is to engage with the writing processes that embody this fraught relationship, or that contribute to the radical revision of our shared contexts. One thing is certain: contemporary authors no longer talk about the “committed art” versus “art for art’s sake” dichotomy that dominated—and calcified—much of this conversation throughout the twentieth century. The discussion has increasingly moved to critical considerations of the relationship between writing and community. In doing so, neither the defiant materialities of writing processes nor the making of concrete communities have remained untouched. What do we mean by community when we don’t want to leave our dead behind? Are communities based on mere affinities or similarities, or on contested production processes involving reciprocity and labor strategies that are not optional? If we say that writing is a community-making practice, does it mean, too, that writing is labor? How can we write in and through communities in a world sundered by war and changing notions of territoriality, a world in which belonging and loyalty often become spectacularly violent inscriptions onto vulnerable bodies? In what follows, I move discreetly from European-based notions of community to the Mesoamerican understanding of communality, for which shared labor, material reciprocity, and a relationship of mutual belonging with the earth are basic components of survival. I have come to believe that writing with and through others, that writing as a practice of disappropriation, is writing in communality.

The very definition of communality in relation to writing, though implicit in many discussions, requires both exploration and definition. There is indeed a line of argumentation that extends from Anderson and his Imagined Communities to Agamben and The Coming Community; from Maurice Blanchot and The Unavowable Community to Jean-Luc Nancy and The Inoperative Community. Authors engaged in this conversation have rightfully abandoned the notion of the individual and have in turn emphasized various practices of dis-identification as a basis for the production of alternative subjectivities, as Rancière argued. Here, being-in-common is a taut, dynamic, and ultimately unfinished process. Thinking about community, which means thinking about the beyond-oneself and the emergence of the between that renders us ourselves and others at the same time, is certainly among the tasks of writing. Perhaps this is its true task, if it has one. Its raison d’être, if it has only one.

This philosophical discussion of community and its relationship to writing rarely includes critical analyses of the historical and cultural processes through which concrete communities are produced. Yet this is a key concern for thinkers of communality: a concept coined and widely used by indigenous communities throughout Latin America, but especially relevant to daily life and theoretical references in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. I am bringing the Mixe conception and experience of communality into this brief review of Western European brushings with community because I want to underscore the role of labor in the production and reproduction of the sensible world, writing included. An essential link in Mesoamerican peoples’ production of communality is labor—the material creation and recreation of the world—and especially tequio, a form of free, obligatory, and collective labor that benefits the community at large. More generally, it also connects nature with human beings in contexts of mutual belonging that radically oppose notions of property and dominion (of what-is-one’s-own) in today’s global capitalism.

Something similar occurs, I argue, in certain contemporary writings that seek to participate in ending the dominion of what-is-one’s-own, using strategies of disappropriation to evade or directly impede the text from circulating (often in book form) within the economic and cultural cycles of global capitalism. These are politically relevant means of conceiving the writer’s work as such, as work. I insist: not as employment, but work. A form of labor that, having been in close contact with everyday language, sets out to produce and reproduce both signified and signifier. The idea is, then, to understand the writer’s work as a practice of being-in-common in which or through which, to borrow from Jean-Luc Nancy, the finite singularities that constitute it are exposed. Writing, in this context, is always rewriting, a going-back to what others have put into words and sentences, a practice that delays and belabors the finished version of any text. An exercise in unfinishedness. Could this be akin to the material being-in-common embedded in communality? Perhaps it is a first step. Perhaps a mere first gesture.

Being-in-common: Community and communication

Like the communality of Mesoamerican peoples, the community Nancy addresses in The Inoperative Community is not a simple accumulation of individualities (the individual, as he emphasizes from the beginning, is “merely the residue of the experience of the dissolution of community”),⁴ nor is it a historical combination of territory and culture. Community, at least in its modern definition, is “the spacing of the experience of the outside, of the outside-of-self.”⁵ Closely following Bataille, but distancing himself from the idea that community is reduced to a community of lovers, Nancy hurries to create an axis connecting community and communication (through the concept of ecstasy); from communication to sharing (through the text); and from there to the interruption of the myth that constitutes all writing. Between one thing and another operates, of course, the inoperative.

Because community is made of singularities—that is, of finite beings—Nancy rejects the possible fusion present in communion. Instead, he emphasizes the place of communication—not viewing “communication” as an intrasubjective social link (as Habermas does, for example), but as the site of “sharing.” Sharing “consists,” he says, “in the appearance of the between as such: you and I (between us)—a formula in which the and does not imply juxtaposition, but exposition.”⁶ The experience of community is thus an experience of finitude: “Finitude compears [comparaît],” writes Nancy; “that is to say it is exposed: such is the essence of community.”⁷ In other words, the communication that makes a community is its sharing: which is to say, its means of interrupting and interrupting itself, its means of suspend...