The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics 9781478010111, 9781478011170, 9781478012696

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THE CRY OF THE SENSES

Dissident Acts

A series edited by Macarena Gómez-­Barris and Diana Taylor

Duke University Press  Durham and London  2020

THE CRY OF THE SENSES Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics  Ren Ellis Neyra

© 2020 duke university press. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ∞ Designed by Courtney Leigh Richardson Typeset in Whitman and Helvetica Lt Std by Copperline Book Services Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ellis Neyra, Ren, [date] author. Title: The cry of the senses : listening to Latinx and Caribbean poetics / Ren Ellis Neyra. Other titles: Dissident acts. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2020. | Series: Dissident acts | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020018209 (print) | lccn 2020018210 (ebook) isbn 9781478010111 (hardcover) isbn 9781478011170 (paperback) isbn 9781478012696 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Hispanic Americans in the performing arts. | Hispanic Americans—Ethnic identity. | Queer theory. | Performing arts and literature. | Art and race. Classification: lcc pn1590.h57 e455 2020 (print) | lcc pn1590.h57 (ebook) | ddc 791.09729—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018209 lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018210 cover art: Joel Rodríguez making the sound recording Ceiba in the Vieques Sound and Ceiba, Puerto Rico (2014). Digital photograph. © Beatriz Santiago. Courtesy of the artist. Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

This book is dedicated to those who do not see themselves in the given future — who seek sensorial solidarities unknown.

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There will be mountains you won’t move . . .  — Frank Ocean, “Godspeed” (2016)

One suspects that there are several ways to snare a mockingbird . . .  — Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987)

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Contents



Preface: The Ground?  xi



Acknowledgments  xix



Introduction: Cry Bomba  1

1 “¡Anormales!”:

Unruly Audition in Performances of 1970s Salsa  27

2 “I have been forced to hear a lot”:

The faln, The Masses Are Asses, and the Sounds, Shapes, and Speeds of Puerto Rican Defiance  55

3 Sensorial Errancy in Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s Cinema  91

4 Slow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning, and Migratory Refuge  129

Coda, in Three: “fifty-­two plastic bombs exploding as one, thundered against the sky”  163

Notes  171 Bibliography  203 Index  217

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Preface  The Ground?

What unites and consolidates oppositional groups is not simply the fact of identity but the way in which they perform affect, especially in relation to an official “national affect” that is aligned with a hegemonic class. . . . Not in terms of simple being, but through the nuanced route of feeling. . . . a certain mode of “feeling brown” in a world painted white, organized by cultural mandates to “feel white.”   — José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown” (2000) Being white was never enough. Not without being black.  — Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007)

The Caribbean Americas is the ground from which this preface speaks. And my orientation to the Caribbean Americas is crucial to the difference that The Cry of the Senses holds in its synesthetic corpus, which theorizes the poetics of a violently “unincorporated territory” (the Puerto Rican archipelago in Puerto Rico’s colonial status vis-­à-­vis the US) beside the poetics of a violently “incorporated” landscape (the Sonoran Desert in the state of Arizona).1 Because poetics emerges from and thrives on plurality and division, on the senses’ and nonsense’s movements rather than on reason’s frozen “sense” of itself as central to thought and writing, its modalities are keen at thinking differences in relation. A reader might ask: Does poetics elide colonial differences? No. This is vital: To critique Western epistemic univocality, individuation, self-­possession, and violent monolingual/imperial/unimaginative expectations of meaning matching mandated utterance (all of which require regimes of representation, inclusion, and progress to control unruliness and variation of desire), why reinscribe practices that demand singularity and feign auto-­

consistency? Let us turn to poetics, which shows how to listen to difference without forcibly overcoming it. One of the conceptual challenges of listening over time to this book’s Caribbean, Latinx, and African diasporic archives has been thinking through the semiotic, aesthetic, and social positionings of brown, white, and mestizx Latina/o/x, Afro-­Latinx, black, African American, and indigenous. This book is particularly aware of the assassin-­and massacre-­state’s project of fixing black being in a hemisphere where black signifies plurality: fugitivity; death; thingness; rupture; vitality; Haitianness; refusal; uncapturability; brown; the nonbeing of being, or nothing — as in Calvin Warren’s conception of the “onticide of African being” as what produces black being and as requisite to how human being overrepresents itself; and, in another vein, the historical and social consciousness of Africans, or what Cedric Robinson calls “the embryo of the demon that would be visited on the whole enterprise of primitive accumulation.”2 It is how these significations move in semiotic, aesthetic, and social relation, beside each other, sometimes at odds with each other, and sometimes in each other that interests me. Relation’s irreducibility to a foundation or an essence, and to the assertions of facticity lodged in such claims — which can become, at turns, literalist, policing, and funereal in how they aim for resolution — compels me to listen for what Fred Moten calls “anteontological affiliation, a social and historical para-­ontology theorized in performance,” and in poetics, and for how differences of ontological ruptures cannot be entirely blurred in the name of relation.3 A poetics of besideness on maroon grounds, constituted by defiant sonic ruptures of sense, and attentive to the differences of how things get together and yet remain broken, is afoot. 4 In the fields gathered on this book’s ground, brownness, Afro-­Latinx, and blackness are among keywords in critiques of identitarian and representational limits forced upon and legislated against migrant, fugitive, and sensorially errant people, thought, and aesthetic forms. Not as an object of knowledge, but as a mode of critical feeling, arguments for brownness’s negative affects refuse to reconcile the white affects attendant to and reproductive of the visual racism at the heart of the Western episteme. Leticia Alvarado sublimates feeling brown into negative minoritarian affects and a Muñozian conception of “being-­with” (a notion that imaginatively reworks Jean-­Luc Nancy’s writings on poetics and communism) under the rubric of a “camp of queer theory.”5 Ever the anti-­literalist, Joshua Javier Guzmán calls brown an “immiscible” color — as in, not mixed; rather, it shows its streaks of irresolvable variation.6 Note the imagery at the end of Guzmán’s complex entry on “Brown” in Keywords in Latina/o Studies (2017): “Here is the drama within the color brown: it is itself a mixture of yellow, red, and black — the iridescent reminder that we are in brownness and of brownness, here and now.” Brown xii Preface

is “immiscible,” he says, on his way to situating “the failure of reconciliation to be the onto-­poetic ground in which we find our contemporary United States of America.”7 Yet I continue to circle around how brownness — which evokes fundament, mud, shit, and color — and immiscibility reside in the eye of the beholder. For in this hemisphere, of which the US is one part, the optics of brownness return to the black/white, racist epidermal schema that, among many other erroneous practices, calls brown skin colors black, and minimizes blackness to the misrecognition of skin color. Afro-­Latinx conceptions of the hemisphere, particularly what Yomaira Figueroa calls the position of “the Afro-­Atlantic hispanophone world,” refuse to reconcile the visual racism at the heart of the post-­Enlightenment schema of the world by signifying blackness’s geographic range of histories and imaginaries, and showing how African diasporic aesthetic and literary production has been erased, distorted, and peripheralized by the projects of white supremacy, coloniality, and academic disciplinarity.8 Afro-­Latinidad, as a point of view, conjoins and grounds a conception of blackness and Latinidad, jarring US-­centrist notions of blackness as singularly and primarily African American, and critically exposing US Latina/o/x studies’ varied tendencies to incorporate black thought and forms, when it does not outright reject or trivialize them, rather than positioning them as constitutive.9 Afro-­Latinidad also points to the ontological and epistemological quandaries of blackness. Black being, when imagined in the Americas since the early 1500s, simultaneously signifies ontological rupture, or, the void of foundation, and Africanicity as reasserted (and creolized) indigeneity, or marronage. There is a current — and likely transitive — tension between brownness and Afro-­Latinidad, which operates on two levels: 1. that of methods and of bibliographies of study, which generate different relationships to and valuations of the very grounds of critique, identity, and what constitutes anti-­identitarian scholarly and imaginative work; 2. that of the body, particularly when imagined in the racist epidermal schema, in that some scholars who theorize brownness in the US academy are not of African descent, and some have (sometimes inadvertently and sometimes deliberately) read the term away from Muñoz’s repetition that it is not a placeholder for identity, but a veer of affect. But this may also be because we cannot shake the signified of color where the optical and ontological are contiguous. I will not resolve any family matters in this preface. But I acknowledge them so as to redirect critique to prevalent and minoritarian valences of (white and mestizx) Latina/o/x studies that order an odd relationship to (its) blackness; sound a call for close readings of how brownness operates in relation to — and not — blackness, black thought, and black citationality; and reorient us to other valences that enjoin Preface  xiii

us to think about sensorial practices that are part of black lifeworlds — echoing Mary Pat Brady’s invocation of “other sensual knowledges of space, including those derived from auditory, tactile, and olfactory capacities.”10 There are openings imaginable, for example, when Caribbean literary studies scholar Dixa Ramírez asks, what is there “after, before, or beyond representation,” what other nonwhite epistemes and cosmogonies are imaginable, and less visible?11 Whiteness does not have spatial, temporal, cosmogonic, or imaginary primacy in this hemisphere; it trespasses with its apparatuses of property, it deranges diverse ecologies and imaginaries, and it also knows nothing of the epistemic and sensory arrangements in parts of this book. Yet, as Guzmán, in conversation with Antonio Viego, shows, “Whiteness [also] operates like Lacan’s master signifier, existing outside of any signifying chain, yet highly organizing, because it makes (racial) difference possible. This…reveals Whiteness as both terrifyingly blinding while making perception possible.”12 In a Latinx psychoanalysis, whiteness is not only phenotypic, but also the “unconscious fantasy for wholeness,” a fantasy against which brownness plays out.13 But there’s a deeper issue here, for if “language cuts up the body, and the primordial loss suffered by the subject of language is that of a ‘hypothesized fullness prior to the impact of language,’ a sense of wholeness that was taken away, blemished, or forgotten. . . . [And attuning] to Lacanian psychoanalysis in particular and a politics of loss in general allows Latino Studies to think about the profound and complex ways racialized bodies experience loss,”14 then what do we do with how language has not only “cut up” Africanicity, but also rendered particularly black women’s bodies as flesh, black as physiological, linguistic, and ontological incoherence?15 Viego’s psychoanalytic treatment of Latinx studies shows us the panic-­inducing political, semiotic, and temporal incoherence of the sign of Latinx. But that incoherence is charged with hyper-­reproductive futurity — one he jars with his reading of Spanglish and the hysteric.16 (I would say something similar of the incoherence of “brownness,” which I see, in Latinx studies, as a middle term seeking equivalence to blackness, but wishing to be a third way.) This marks a difference with the incoherence of the sign black, whose female biological organism is dispossessed of motherhood, and also of historicity and futurity, whose offspring are disposed of the sign of “family,” whose social formations disturb the white patriarch’s legitimate progeny, and who are ontologically un-­given primordiality, except as rupture. In some instances, a Latinx discourse of brownness enacts a semiotic maneuver in the important names of affect and critical negativity that minimizes blackness’s incarnation in the Americas through the negation of African being. We see a trace of my concern with this in the epigraph from Muñoz, who is influential to this book, but where in an argument for queer of color feeling displaced into the xiv Preface

sign of “brown feeling,” “simple being” is evoked as something that certain representations of identity construct. But from the perspective of the black radical tradition, as da Silva’s line reflects, there is no such thing as “simple being.” Mitsein’s requisite Dasein is black nonbeing. There is work for future investigators to do with these different starting places for relation. What I interject into this onto-­ and semiotic irresolvability is that Caribbeanness offers a third way. The sign of Caribbean—what does it mean but multiplicity and indefinability? The “Caribbean,” and “Hurricane,” Hortense Spillers writes, are the sublimated keywords of Keywords, the flesh engendered by Europe’s making of America.17 In Ronald Judy’s reading of the Spanish scholastic tradition as it was engendering the Americas for Spanish dominion, we read that “the very moment in Western history when the recognition of alternative worlds becomes possible, is the moment when that possibility is precluded by the correctness of Reason and the ignorance of the affectivity of experience.”18 Multisensorial poetic listening, the methodology of this book, critiques the regime of reason, and disperses affect into sense. Judy continues, “At its inception, modernity is caught by a malaise, whose pathology is undetermined until it reaches the point of crisis that we find ourselves in at this point, when contravening action is virtually inconsequential to the outcome. . . . The multiplicity of worlds is what modernity has sought to annihilate all along.”19 Judy’s critical explication of Francisco de Vitoria’s and Hernán Cortés’s writings shows how discursive force rendered Indians as natural slaves, as children, and as lacking a literati, and, therefore, required enslavement by Christians to humanize them. I must emphasize the not only cartographic but also cosmogonic backdrop of this “multiplicity of worlds”: the Indies, the Caribbean, the Antilles, including the troubling maroon region of Veracruz — the black and Caribbean part of Mexico. The “multiplicity of worlds” of which the Western episteme still cannot make proper sense is the place of many names and the maroon ground for this book. It is the archipelagic place from which Glissant theorized relation, from which I draw my theorization of besideness, which invites us to slow down with solidarity. If we imagine Latinx Studies in relation to ecological and sensorial losses that are not gone, but submerged, chimerical, and metamorphosed, and in ethical relation to black and Caribbean studies, then what field concerns and possibilities arise? If we imagine the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary as anti-­ ecological, imperial-­economic, spatial derangements that the Caribbean and parts of Mexico, and even the US, have in common, then how do Latinx, Caribbean, and African diasporic practices of division, or poetics, change? This book aligns with a range of nonwhite, queer refusals of US imperial, settler colonial, military invasive, majoritarian legal, nationalist affective, and ocularcentric projects. The Cry of the Senses swerves here: it does not reassert visualPreface  xv

Figure FM.1 Xandra Ibarra in Nude Laughing (2016). Quiebre Performance Festival, Rio Piedras, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Photograph by Walter Wlodarczyk.

ity, which returns us to specific conceptions in the hemisphere of racial mixture, to what Sylvia Wynter, after Frantz Fanon, calls “the sociogenic principle,” or socialized historically racist notions of regulating black people in the law and extrajuridically (think from vigilante committees to “bbq Becky”). But it also does not naively champion sound or rhythm as the anti-­ocular, or foolishly pretend to be post-­ocular. Opening terms enmeshed in visual regimes to the immiscibility of synesthesia, to detours of perception, changes our perceptions of them. My book assumes the “onto-­poetic ground” to be fugitive, and potentially weaponizable by those who Fidel Castro said are of the ground in history, living with sensory deprivation, sensory overload, and itinerant sensoria in anticolonial struggle. The Cry of the Senses listens for the sounds of synesthetic poetics that erupt from what was there before the US, and from places beyond and beside US regimes of representation — from waters, under-­waters, post-­military, and post-­ Enlightenment desert and island ecologies decentering and detouring from the supremely unstable claims of US sovereignty, which benefits from but does not singularly engender hemispheric white supremacy. I am interested in how the ground morphs in ecological and multisensorial spatio-­temporalities of relation. The introduction discusses Puerto Rico as a “hystericized” site of archipelagic, geological, extrajuridical, and psychic ataques [attacks] not only on the United xvi Preface

States and its colonial representations of the archipelago, but also on hemispheric economic paradigms that benefit from US military hegemony. The final chapter reads the Sonoran Desert in an imaginary of recent border crossing, migrant, maroon, mournful, and pleasured movement. Anticolonial sensorial solidarities flourish in the breaks between places overdetermined by a continental imagination, the geographic-­discursive bedmate of Manifest Destiny. Here, the ground gives way to water, wind, and other unsovereign elements and ideologies. As I now see it, this book emerges à l’heure entre chien et loup, at the hour between dog and wolf, of twilight — on an elemental, geological scale. Homo modernus rears its head today knowing that its time is over. Let us use whiteness’s ideological and affective confusion, its cultural illiteracy, its post-­halcyon flares of fascist self-­consolidation, to study how to blur ourselves into the landscape and make relations, not of transparency, but of opacity, abnormal pleasures, unruly and unsovereign refusals, sensorial errancy, and migratory refuge for ecstatic mourning of solidarities lost, where lost is not the same as gone. What has been lost grows otherwise. Landed narratives of self-­determined futurity are running out of earth. The earth itself seems to have fierily aligned with the position of the hysteric. Let us make a poetics that listens for the creaturely, vegetal, tidal, and maroon movements and stories stirring in the gloaming.

Preface  xvii

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Acknowledgments

Before I returned to the emergent Tr*mpian US, after my research sabbatical in Puerto Rico and Vieques in 2016 becoming 2017, I had the word “bomba” tattooed on my right hand at Senzala tattoo parlor in Old San Juan. I went with my friend and collaborator, the artist Sofía Gallisá Muriente, who was having her own Caribbean homages and Puerto Rican image-­weapons drawn. I couldn’t come back with a bomb in my hand, or doing a performance of a dirty bomb in my suitcase, like Carlos Irizarry, a story I learned from the cinema of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. But I returned with my hand as a bomba, a force to conjure the musical form and the delicious Caribbean fruit that goes by various names, fruta bomba. Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo, my love: you translated (and took) my hand, and me, when you said, “You know what I see there? When I read b-­o -­m -­b -­a ? h-­a-­i-­t -­í!” May we continue to “believe in small countries,” in “montes,” including those in the eco-­and psychic borderlands of the island you love most, and those made in our home together, which is blessed by your aesthetic, writerly, sonic, dreamy, domestic splendor and elegance. Thank you for reading cover to cover, and for your Aries-­fire critiques. Laughter, tentacular-­growths, and dancing will abound on all of our possible horizons. As will Dixa D’Oleo’s and Darío Tejeda’s garden. And bling. And kitties. Te amo. To my cat companions, Beezle and Gray Phillip, thank you for your purring, nervous-­system-­altering comforts, beauty, and antigravitational shenanigans. To Súper Chillin, part-­dog creature assemblage, who was curled into the shape of a perfect donut on my lap for the entire writing of this book: your sensorium and projected hysteria changed everything. You have the best taste in “humans,” and are absolutely right about who the demons are.

My sister, Dr. Melissa Ellis-­Yarian, always on my team, and Jon Yarian, with whom I will verbally joust until we’re compost, and Eamon, who is new to history: I love you. Thank you, Melissa, for reading the introduction and helping me to medically understand auscultation. My parents, thank you for the Mississippi Delta and southeast Florida coastal landscapes of my childhood — for your orientations to the sea, which move in my orientations to form and history. To my mom, Ana Rosa, thank you for enrolling me in creative writing classes from very early on and encouraging me to wear whatever I wanted. To my friends who have been in relation to me throughout the writing of this beast, some of whom are part of the extended underground network of US academia, some of whom are my colleagues, and, thankfully, some of whom walk other paths on this earth, my deep thanks for the laughter, wit, aesthetic superiority, and moments of mutual aid over the years: Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Mapenzi Nonó, Olga Casellas, Agustina Ferreyra, Pablo Guardiola, José López Serra, Tony Cruz Pabón, Summer Kim Lee, Nicole Smythe-­Johnson, Natalia Viera, nibia pastrana santiago, Axelle Karera, Ramón Miranda Beltrán, Seth Ferris, Cristina Tufiño, Robyn Hillman-­Harrigan, Sarah Robbins, Elizabeth Hinton, Brandon Ogbunu, Odessa Pearl, Sarah Cervenak, Mary Ebeling, Tim Portlock, Chi-­ming Yang, Erica Cho, Tsitsi Jaji, Franklin Cason Jr., Sacha Yanow, Svetlana Kitto, Jina Kim, Rachel Weber, Gabriel Maldonado Andreu, Engel Leonardo, Michael Linares, Javier Fresneda, Adrienne Reynolds, Lorraine Rodríguez, Gisela Rosario Ramos, Xandra Ibarra, Marina Reyes Franco, Arnaldo Rodríguez Bagué, Nicole Delgado, Jason Velani, Eileen Chanza Torres, Joel (Jojo) Rodríguez, Abbie Boggs, Marina Bilbija, Roman Utkin, Rashida Shaw McMahon, Kaisha Esty, Paula Park, Marguerite Nguyen, Margot Weiss, Ke¯haualani Kauanui, Douglas Martin, Jordy Rosenberg, Rebecca Adorno, Christina León, Roy Pérez, Iván Ramos, Leon Hilton, Vivian Huang, Joshua Javier Guzmán, Desirée Garcés, Catherine Damman, Anne Eller, Pepé Alvarez, Amanda Hernández, Catalina Schliebener, Jonah Groeneboer, Judith Butler, Juana María Rodriguez, Joseph Pierce, Vanessa Haney, Lisa Cohen, María del Cármen Carrión, Heather Vermeulen, Sara Marcus, Jasmine Johnson, Alexis Martínez, Mel Xiloj, RJ Messineo, Marichi Scharrón, Miguel Gutierrez, Lina Martínez, Laurie Weeks, Katherine Brewer Ball, Noémie Solomon, John Murillo, Danielle Vogel, and Eirene Visvardi. My thanks to Deb Vargas, Alexandra Vazquez, Urayoán Noel, José Quiroga, Tavia Nyong’o, Siobhan Somerville, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips for your writing, as well as for moments of mentorship and critical encouragement. A special thanks to Lindsay Davison for years of sensorial reorientation. To my beloved current and former students in relation to whom I transform, who generate so much semiotic pleasure, thank xx Acknowledgments

you, especially Juan Gallardo, Hannah Salzer, Eero Talo, Christian Black, Dani Smotrich-­Barr, Virgil B. Goodman-­Taylor, Janak Preston, Charlotte Strange, Christian Nuñez, Delia Tapia, Danielle Gamady, Dinaj Rodríguez, Isaac Butler-­ Brown, Miles McLeod, kren alshanetsky, Rick Hong Manayan, Babe Howard, Michael Gutiérrez, Gisselle Yepes, Caridad Cruz, and Katerina Ramos-­Jordan: more sentences will form. This pandemic is another temporality. We will hatch others. Thank you to all of my supportive colleagues at Wesleyan University, particularly in the English Department, as well as in American Studies, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Romance Languages, African American Studies, and the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. Special thanks to the Center for the Humanities for subvention funds, and to the Dean of the Humanities, Nicole Stanton. Underwater, cave-­deep thanks to Natasha Korda and Lisa Cohen — who have read.it.all — for your editorial acuity, pleasures taken in my baroque semantic situations, mentorship, and friendship. My thanks to Matthew Garrett, who read chapters of this book and alternately macheted and pruned. Thanks to Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo for close engagement of chapter 3. To Xandra Ibarra and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, thank you for switching positions and reading me write in relation to what you make. Thanks to Lisa Cohen and Sofía Gallisá Muriente for close engagement with chapter 2. Thanks to Juana María Rodríguez for reading an early version of this manuscript (uff — g racías). Thanks to Juan Gallardo for copyediting a late-­stage of a still too-­long manuscript. Thanks to Ira Livingston for reading the last version of this manuscript before becoming-­book, and at a vulnerable hour. Thanks to Ira, also, for having my back since 2006 and my beginnings on the path of this odd career choice. Thanks to Leticia Alvarado, one of the initially anonymous reviewers of the book manuscript, for your capacious and creative scholarship and thinking, for not mincing words, and also for giving the Other space to make their thing. My thanks to the other reader for pushing on exactly the right places to make this book move toward its best possible form. My thanks also to Gianna Mosser, formerly at Northwestern University Press, for kindly sharing one of the lengthy reader reports she’d received before I chose to go with Duke, and for the Afro-­Latinx critique therein. My thanks, also, to the independent art space Beta-­local in San Juan for its library and support of this project from early stages — more collaborations to come. The team at Duke University Press has made me grateful for each stage of this process: my thanks to Macarena Gómez-­Barris for your undisciplinary draw to and support of this project from jump, and for your writing on and in relation. My thanks to the book series coeditor, Diana Taylor. Ken Wissoker: the “film footage vs. the final cut” metaphor got me through. Thank you for your confidence in and Acknowledgments  xxi

imagination about this book. My thanks to the editorial team at Duke, especially Nina Foster, Annie Lubinsky, Joshua Tranen, and Will Rigby. To the living artists in the book — especially Walter, Xandra, Bea, Mapenzi, Gisela, Naldo, Mickey, Jojo, Eduardo — thank you for your generosity, and for letting this thing be a multisensorial vehicle of your images and word-­sounds.

xxii Acknowledgments

Plate 1. Quiebre Performance Festival poster (2016). Festival organized by artists Mickey Negrón and Arnaldo Rodríguez Bagué. Poster by artist Omar Banuchi.

Plate 2. Xandra Ibarra in Nude Laughing (2016). Quiebre Performance Festival, Río Piedras, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Photograph by Walter Wlodarczyk.

Plate 3. Xandra Ibarra in Nude Laughing (2016). Quiebre Performance Festival, Río Piedras, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Photograph by Walter Wlodarczyk.

Plate 4. Xandra Ibarra in Nude Laughing (2016). Quiebre Performance Festival, Río Piedras, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Photograph by Walter Wlodarczyk.

Plate 5. Macha Colón y los Okapí performing at Quiebre Performance Festival, Río Piedras, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2016). Photograph by Walter Wlodarczyk.

Plate 6. Macha Colón y los Okapí performing at Quiebre Performance Festival, Río Piedras, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2016). Photograph by Walter Wlodarczyk.

Plate 7. Still from Otros usos [Other Uses] (2014). Dir. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

Plate 8. Still from Otros usos [Other Uses] (2014). Dir. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

Plate 9. Still from Otros usos [Other Uses] (2014). Dir. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

Plate 10. Artist Mapenzi Nonó listening in La cabeza mató a todos [The Head Killed Them All] (2014). Dir. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

Plate 11. Prisoner’s Cinema (2014). Dir. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

Plate 12. 10 Years (2014). 35 mm military photographic print from Roosevelt Roads Naval Base, emulsified by time, humidity, and dirt. Dir. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

Plate 13. Post-­military Cinema (2014). Still from inside former movie theater at Roosevelt Roads Naval Base, light and plant shadows from outside. Dir. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

Plate 14. Ojos para mis enemigos (2014). Still from inside basketball court in Roosevelt Roads Naval Base, slowly being reclaimed by the land. Dir. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

Plate 15. Artist Marcelin Exiliere listening in Marché Salomon (2015). Dir. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

Plate 16. Oneiromancer (2017). Dir. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

Introduction  Cry Bomba

Time was. A cry?  — Robert Hayden, “Night, Death, Mississippi,” Collected Poems (1962) . . . in this universe every cry was an event.  — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1997)

Synesthesia and Poetics

Synesthesia [sún, “with” + aísthe¯sis, “sensation”] occurs when a sense impression manifests itself out of place — when you hear the smell of flash-­fried shishito peppers, or when something visual stimulates a sensation of touch in your genitals. When Chicanx writer, poet, and ceramicist Gil Cuadros’s unnamed character in the short story “Sight” sees a “hazelnut glow” around his doctor’s voice, aids is generating a synesthetic experience for the body decomposing in lived time.1 By medical definition, synesthesia is involuntary; it shares this quality with cries. Synesthesia also marks an opening of alternate pathways of sentient cognition, what Tsitsi Jaji calls an “inter-­sensory detour from one mode of perception to another,” which emphasizes synesthesia as a redirection of dispersed sense, itinerant feeling, and potential meaning.2 When viewed not as a diagnostic, but an orientation to perception, and to the histories of different sensoria in relation, synesthesia invites what Tina Campt in Listening to Images (2017) describes as the “counterintuitive,” which occurs on the level of the sentence, as when she “proposes a haptic mode of engaging the sonic frequencies of photographs . . . by setting [quiet photos] in a kind of ‘sensorial’ relief.”3 The counterintuitive sensorial

detours of Latinx, Caribbean, and African diasporic archives gathered here occur in and as a poetics. Poetics [from poien, “to make,” or poietos, “made”], as a mode of thinking and writing, cares about how synesthetically charged objects, subjects, and traditions get beside each other in space and time, or how things get together by not becoming whole. By not becoming whole, I indeed mean, not aspiring to whiteness, and I mean slowing down with various ontological ruptures and their differences. For example, the differences of the mestizx, Latinx border-­broken ontology and the African diasporic ontology broken by the slave trade. Meditating on Latinx “antinormative feelings,” José Esteban Muñoz rereads Hortense Spillers’s essay on psychoanalysis and race, “All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother” to argue that minoritarian affect does not assert a cogent identity; it “is, instead, supposed to be descriptive of the receptors we use to hear each other and the frequencies on which certain subalterns speak and are heard or, more importantly, felt.”4 He describes “brown feeling” there as a mode of listening to black and queer frequencies of desire toward the “emancipatory potentiality” in what Spillers describes as “making one’s subjectness the object of a disciplined and potentially displaceable attentiveness.”5 Later in her essay, Spillers translates this “displaceable attentiveness” as the specifically black capacity to shift perspective from the urgencies of the black “biological creature and whether or not it is safe and secure” to the “contemplative,” “transformative” “dimension of activity in the lifeworld,” in other words, to be able to think, “to concentrate on something else.”6 Muñoz’s translation of Spillers’s black psychoanalytic reorientation to the everyday and the contemplative into a queer of color and specifically brown attunement to “the public life of blackness” does evoke identity, when he writes that brownness is “not white, and it is not black either.”7 What I am interested in, as a highly perceptive and counterintuitive, which is also to say queer, nonblack, variably white, US-born subject of the signs “Cuban,” “Caribbean,” and “Latinx,” is how detours of attentiveness and listening to frequencies of relation can make “unchecked generativity.”8 Some sites of relation throw synesthetic Molotov cocktails into the war machine, troubling rather than abetting nationalist boundaries, and their reinscriptions of the post-­Enlightenment in US global-­capital hegemony.

2 Introduction

Ataques [Fits] and Laughter — The Quiebre Performance Festival, Xandra Ibarra’s Nude Laughing, and Macha Colón y los Okapí’s Sound Quiebre in Río Piedras

The crowd is sweating late-­August sweat. In the northern Caribbean’s seasons, the breach of August into September is deepest summer, when balmy becomes bluest heat, churning with the recurrent transformations and traumas of hurricanes. Hurricane season has extended and intensified with the ocean’s warming. What in recent history cycloned between August and November now begins in June and stalks into December, with prolapses in February. But this August night, the skies are clear, save for intermittent plumes of spliff-­smoke. The excessively cemented gray terre swelters. The corner bar on one end of the Plaza in downtown Río Piedras has run out of Medallas, a local Puerto Rican beer. It’s not micro-­brewed ni nada. Palatably cheap, the bottle has a blingy gold label that flashes when we chin-­ chin. My friends — fellow artists and writers — and I drink Dominican green-­bottle Presidentes instead, to defang the wide-­mawed heat that stretches late into the night as we wait for Macha Colón y los Okapí to take the stage. Macha Colón y los Okapí’s concert will become one of the climaxes of three days of performances at Quiebre [Opening, or Crack].9 Quiebre is the second international performance arts festival in San Juan, Puerto Rico (see fig. I.1). Organized by Mickey Negrón and Arnaldo Rodríguez Bagué in 2016, Quiebre harkens back to Rompeforma [Formbreaking], the dance and performance festival curated by dancers and choreographers Viveca Vazquez and Merián Soto in the 1980s.10 Some of the same artists and choreographers who have been making dance, performance, and independent music scenes in Puerto Rico since the 1970s participate in Quiebre. An array of emerging as well as established Latinx and Caribbean artists from across the Americas — Nao Bustamante, Las Nietas de Nonó, Xandra Ibarra (nèe La Chica Boom), Awilda Sterling, Carlos Martiel, DJ Trancesexual, Eduardo Alegría and Alegría Rampante, Fofé, Viveca Vazquez, and others — breathe life into history’s dead ends and participate in making ephemeral archives of future histories in and around the Paseo de Diego in Río Piedras.11 My experience of the Quiebre festival in Río Piedras is haunted by the toxic war machinery of the US military’s heavily armed presence in the Puerto Rican archipelago and, by extension, in the Caribbean archipelago, all of which anchors US hemispheric hegemony. Río Piedras is the largest municipality in Puerto Rico, and the last to be annexed and incorporated into San Juan in 1951. It is also the suburbanized and commercialized site of various structures relevant to the geographic and sensorial imaginary of this book: a former US military hospital

Introduction  3

Figure I.1 Quiebre Performance Festival (2016) organized by Mickey Negrón and Arnaldo Rodríguez Bagué. Poster design by Omar Banuchi. Used with permission of Omar Banuchi.

where “hysteria” was alternately diagnosed by US medical officers as “Puerto Rican syndrome” (discussed further below); one of the University of Puerto Rico’s campuses; and small farms, forests, and el monte [vegetal overgrowth]. The small farms, forests, and eruptive overgrowths are not only vestiges of the plantation system, but also reiterations of marronage, maroon gardens, and small-­scale unruly life formations that “sprou[t] persistently like fungi amid the rubble of hurricane disasters or abandoned plantation and industrial sites.”12 The discourse of ruins is deceptive where the irreverence of tropical growth, migrations, and vitality flourish, and where the plantation is not past — for its modernity morphs into various apparatuses (i.e., the locations of carreteras [roadways], the logics and 4 Introduction

placements of prisons, detention centers, and what remains of public housing, as well as into the pleasurable deviations from standards constitutive of Caribbean languages, including Puerto Rican Spanish and Spanglish). The University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus has a fraught rapport with the neighbors and neighborhoods around it: spatially and economically, it encroaches and appropriates without significant reinvestment. Meanwhile, many students, staff, and faculty at the public university have a long, leftist history of activism against US invasion, and against local opportunistic corruption that services that invasion — by which I mean, the historic US Naval invasion on July 25, 1898, and the ongoing, quasi-­normalized US colonial, military, economic, and tourist invasions, lived every day on the island. Blistering bombardeos [bombings] of graffiti scream against US colonialism in the Caribbean, Palestine, Guantánamo, and Oklahoma, across barrio [neighborhood] and commercial walls near the university. Invasion sprawls spatio-­temporally in the Puerto Rican archipelago: on the land, in the skies, and on the sea floor (as I discuss in chapters 2 and 3). Section 27 of the 1920 Merchant Marine Act, generally referred to as the Jones Act, provides that the US government controls all cabotage (coastwise and maritime trade) around the Puerto Rican archipelago. This is also to say that the US Department of Defense and the US Department of Transportation control a substantial part of the Caribbean’s waterways and the region’s economic relations. San Juan is a city of semi-­autonomous neighborhoods, interconnected municipalities. San Juan is not metonymically collapsible into the docks where enormous tourist ships hulk in and unleash tens of thousands of plundering bodies that iteratively perform a razing of the city, only to be reabsorbed into those buoyant Trojan horses. The cruise ships leave a trail of so-­called “black water” — expulsed from ship toilets — on their fantastically white and globally antiblack way out, contaminating and wreaking havoc on the geographical islet of Old San Juan, in the bay itself, and across the bay in Cataño. While foreign strip malls and Burger Kings made alien-­landings, and cement was poured like reverse-­water on the earth for private profit in the twentieth century, asphyxiating many forms of life in the process and molding the face of things (for now), Río Piedras sprawls with over sixteen barrios of over 300,000 people. After the devastation of Hurricane María in September 2017, and the calculable and incalculable losses of that ongoing event, and of overheated seas, coloniality, and social death, in the streets around the university and particularly the Paseo de Diego blossomed performance art, political actions, underground music scenes, queer club scenes, poetry readings, and everyday jangueos [hangouts]. But losses, the dead, and the diaspora’s cycles are deeply and daily felt. Losses and displacements of the late nineteenth and early Introduction  5

twentieth century erupt again in those of the twenty-­first, intensified by US sovereignty’s metonymic vultures: post-­disaster developers. Fits of Laughter, Ambling, and Retching in Xandra Ibarra’s Nude Laughing

On Friday at Quiebre, the second day of the three-­day festival, Oakland-­based Tejana-­Chicanx performance artist, writer, and photographer Xandra Ibarra enacts her durational performance, Nude Laughing.13 Ibarra choreographed Nude Laughing for art galleries and museums. At the time of my writing this, since 2014 Ibarra has performed six iterations of Nude Laughing, four in museum and gallery spaces of temperature-­controlled enclosure and the barbarity of civilization’s collections. I imagine Nude Laughing as a performance that communes with the dead, because I imagine museal spaces as cemeteries, chambers that materialize colonial attempts at theft of the Other’s spirit.14 When Ibarra performs Nude Laughing in a museum, I imagine, audiences behave in part because of the whispering propriety that controls affects where collected, dishonored dead things are displayed, untouchably, in glass.15 But the objects that she drags through the performance conjure other energies, for the dead do not remain silent. Ibarra’s nonwhite racialized, feminine melancholia enacts a mode of displaced attentiveness to what is lost but not gone.16 Ibarra begins the performance naked — a possessed, nonwhite return of art history’s “nude” model — walking and emitting sounds between laughter and crying out (see fig. I.2). Marked by loss and injury, she walks and alternately arcs and dips her laughter into erotic and frantic, seemingly unceasing hysterical cries.17 Though relentless-­sounding, Ibarra’s cries are precise, for she would faint if her breathing and eruptive vocalizations were not internally measured. For Quiebre, Ibarra dons the yellow high heels she has worn in other iterations of Nude Laughing and walks outside, up and down the long and wide Paseo de Diego in Río Piedras. She walks along a strip of boarded-­up and open storefronts, through a working-­class and middle-­class history of a space designed for pedestrian commercial transit, cruising walkers, and window shoppers. She wears tits over her tits, a strap-­on light-­colored bust that does not “match” her medium skin color, and nothing else between her long black hair and tacos [high heels]. She sounds out nonsense and dysphasia: mouth wide open, laughing loudly, exposed, walking up the block, surefooted, then turning, wobbling on her heels, walking back down the block, sashaying, yet teetering, laughing a practiced, erotic arc, head thrown back in a rehearsal of being or appearing pleasured, laughing strenuously, face contorted on the verge of tears, then laughing erotically, playfully again, then strained (see fig. I.3). Against the storefronts, Ibarra performs a demanding physi6 Introduction

Figures I.2 and I.3 Xandra Ibarra, Nude Laughing (2016). Screenshot. Used with permission of the artist.

cal rumination on the structural wounds of living as a nonwhite, hypersexualized, shameful sucia [dirty female]. Ibarra appears as abjection’s vocative.18 At this performance, I observe gazes and energies of stealth-­surprised mothers going shopping and inquisitive kids hanging out, but there is no gesture signifying, Look, a medium-­skin-­colored laughing nude! Rather, semi-­syncopated crowd participation and passing disturbances cross paths. Throughout the walking portion of the performance, Ibarra drags brown panty hose filled with odd, gendered ends. On her website, she describes the nylons and their contents as the “skin and skein of race,” objects vexed by skin color, and, worse, knotted to “white womanhood.”19 Ballet slippers, fake furs, plastic, pale-­skinned body parts — a solo breast and areola juts out — white pearls, and other subtly hostile, classed, feminine accoutrements wad up in the dragging. The hose stretches, fraying on the hot ground and with the weight of mashed-­up objects at the nylon’s end. After several minutes, Ibarra stops ambling and laughing, and crawls into the hose. She stretches the nylons and contorts her face’s features, no longer resembling herself, while holding a flat, affectless expression. The “skin and skein of race” contorts her into a monster. The video recording of this visceral moment of the performance is shot to track the performer’s physicalizing of the concept of the score in space. The camera does not overlay another aesthetic onto Ibarra’s, but sticks close to rendering hers. While I see the setting and the crowd in the video — I even see “myself” several times — this footage primarily moves with Ibarra’s movements. The handheld camera maintains proximity, it thinks with the artist. I feel a kinship in this contiguity and spacing, a withness that my writing seeks to enact here and throughout this book.20 Each chapter’s texture and affect therefore varies: writing with salsa’s queer movements in chapter 1 sounds different from writing with a defiant Rican female character in an absurdist play who refuses legal racist and gendered subjection in chapter 2. Writing with marks a joyful shift away from an aspect of how I was trained to write as a literary critic — on, about, if not above, the text — and offers possibilities for close-­reading sound with a bilingual orientation. This mode of listening is embodied and multisensorial: it is not experienced solely through the ears, defined as adornments to a Cartesian, disembodied, and unfeeling mind-­head, but the ears, in Spillers’s perceptual sense, as portals to something other than the “perceptual cramp” of seeking the eyeball of the Man (external to or within ourselves).21 Perceived multisensorially in the video recording, Ibarra bends inside the hose, writhes on the cement. Her body twisting in agitation draws contortions of eroticized abjection on the ground, producing a visceral sense of the harm done by the institution of white womanhood in the objects rubbing against the Puerto Rican

8 Introduction

concrete’s heat, burning the sentient surface that marks a porous threshold to Ibarra’s body, the site of her interior ruminations. Her yellow heels stand vigil beside her snaking body. She molts out a piece of fake fur, a pink slipper.22 I sense Ibarra’s movements as retching. They do not pose to appear normatively “sexy”; they do not sound a rehearsed, flirty register in the laughter that erupts from Ibarra while walking — to sound like what the (masculine) other’s “auto-­affection” wants to hear from her.23 Her performance does not move from sound to total silence, either; there’s nothing so cleanly dyadic in its poetics. Retching: the reverse movement of the esophagus and stomach occur to expulse a jammed up, choking, intensely internalized anxiety. The reverse of gustatory pleasure in Ibarra’s contracting muscle movements crushes the objects and evokes bad taste. Not the fantasy of good taste’s projection of bad taste onto the debased, but the bad taste of white domesticity’s penchant for romanticized chattel and self-­congratulatory vestiges of exploitation. How do we listen to retching? Retching evocative of mourning rubbing against pain, melancholia, and constraint? How do we listen to a bodily reflex that reminds us of the connection between the guts, lungs, throat, and psyche? That clenches together those parts, expulsing some, and gorging on others, parts that Western medicine historically has preferred to see separately, and in the case of the psyche, and especially the nonwhite racialized psyche, to see pathologically? She unknots herself — peels out of the nylons. Slowly self-­expulsed, she turns over on her belly. The camera stays very close as she wriggles, face down, her long, black hair effacing her features and visible, emotional expression. Here, around sixteen minutes and forty seconds into the video recording, the camera flips upside down. Ibarra is in extreme close-­up, because the documentarian has placed the camera-­object into the performance, close to the performer’s body. Ibarra turns over onto her back, exposing her face, but the camera is still flipped: the world remains upside-­down. Cement becomes the sky, sky grounds, as Ibarra grinds on the conjoining break of cement-­sky. Ibarra’s flushed face pushes through her black hair. A string of white pearls hangs from between her teeth. Lifting up, standing, she allows the pearls and strap-­on tits to slip. With the camera and her image still flipped upside down, and the tits in her hand, she stalks off from the crowd barefoot. The camera wobbles, lifts, flips right side up, and follows her, as does some of the crowd, down the block toward the Plaza. The performance ends. The camera turns around to film what remains of the crowd, who clap. The camera turns off. The title Nude Laughing, together with Ibarra’s enactment of eroticized, verging on frightened, laughter and crying in the walking portion of the performance,

Introduction  9

and her quiet retching against representations and metonyms of white womanhood’s fragile prostheses and financed skein, invoke a poetics of multisensorial attunement to hysteria.24 What if we were to imagine in the camera’s turning cement into sky, sky into ground, a simultaneous decomposing and recomposing, or re-­poeticizing of what goes where, an audiovisual eruption of the colonial order, otro ataque, for a moment, there and then, in 2016? And for a moment here and now? Which may become another, beyond where, and when, and what we know. Puerto Rican Ataques [Attacks] and the Hysterical Position

To lose control, as in, to exhibit visceral detachment from containment, abjectly perform laughter, shaking, and retching, and to convoke a social scene around that rehearsed loss of control, exposes how the loser-­of-­control is not submitting to the master’s terms of self-­possession — including on the levels of soma and what materially excretes therefrom. Susan Stewart marshals lyric poetry’s history of emotions in her discussion of Western taboos on the bodily excrescences, its visceral excesses, such as “menstrual blood, vomit, spittle, hair, dandruff, nail pairings, semen, excrement, [and] urine.”25 She shows how such taboos interconnect with neoclassical and modernist, aesthetic and social, prohibitions on both laughter and weeping. Citing William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753) and its interdictions against “excessive laughter,” which contorts the face and opens the mouth such that it “appears like crying,” Stewart connects Hogarth’s disturbance at the “disagreeable look” of excessive laughter (which “porters” and “clowns” do, not “well-­bred” folk) to T. S. Eliot’s prose-­poem “Hysteria” (1917).26 Eliot’s poem interests me less than how Stewart’s reading of fluids returns us to “the problem of feeling” in “the problem of the cry,” and how all of this language, like Hogarth’s invocations of “porters” and “clowns,” evokes white aesthetic determinations of emotional and sensorial order with an eye trained upon controlling nonwhite racialized peoples and expressive forms.27 Stewart writes: “The interdiction is not against laughter or weeping per se so much as the excessive and unmeasured flow of expression out of the face: unbidden tears and explosive laughter involve a loss of volition.”28 The overflowing subject performs nonperformance, in a legal sense, a nonpossession of the self (as I discuss in chapter 2).29 The loss of volition in overflowing excrescence does not submit to the law’s parameters for self-­possession; it does not tender the master’s better reason, but retches race on his paranoid boundaries. The uncontrolled laugher, like the hysteric, infects his psyche, here with an eruptive feminization of sound. Such eruptions crack open questions of pleasure and alternative agentic performances of the self: a percussive, emotive, excreting of the self as object in a world of porous objects. Porosity is not only

10 Introduction

receptive, but also transformative, offering a portal through which to pass and wander multisensorially.30 The shapes that Ibarra retches with her body at Quiebre recall stories of Jean-­ Michel Charcot — the “Master of Hysterics” — observing his patients’s histrionics. At the peak of his reputation in the late nineteenth century, Charcot gave what Lacanian psychoanalyst Patricia Gherovici calls “lecture-­demonstrations” to packed audiences of doctors, artists, and intellectuals (including Sigmund Freud) at the teaching hospital Salpêtrière in Paris on Tuesday nights. While Charcot’s take on hysteria insisted on locating it as biologically innate to the individual female body, Gherovici and Antonio Viego underscore that hysteria’s performativity points to its social life, which is also to say its racialized, geographical, and cultural bearings. The hysteric created the “talking cure,” psychoanalysis.31 The hysteric’s soma and embodied sensorial expressiveness simultaneously render, play with, and (dis)articulate “symbolic efficacy.”32 Now consider this on the level of place, and situate “Puerto Rico” semantically where you read “The hysteric’s soma . . .” in the last sentence. Puerto Rico disarticulates US hegemony in the Caribbean Americas. In the early 1950s, as Río Piedras was being incorporated into San Juan, as the US war machine, post – World War II and post – Bretton Woods, was also heavily investing in enforcing the narrative of “economic development,” warring with Korea,33 and disguising its colonialism, the diagnosis of “Puerto Rican syndrome” emerged.34 War wreaks psychic and somatic havoc on those whose lives it touches.35 It demands that bodies be mutilated for national conscience and for the maintenance of colonial categories of being. Anticolonial vocabularies emerge among the mangled, and include, as Frantz Fanon was writing in the early 1950s in Algeria, permutations of colonial medicalized terms for racialized psychiatric disturbances.36 Many of the Puerto Ricans enlisted to fight for the US military in the mid-­twentieth century came from working-­class backgrounds, and found a brief stay from poverty and policed class limits in the promise of a career and class mobility through military service to their island’s colonial, invading power.37 US medical doctors frequently observed ataques de nervios [attacks of nerves] and convulsive fits in Puerto Rican soldiers, sometimes followed by no memory of the event (as event). In her study of the diagnosis of “Puerto Rican syndrome” (2003), Gherovici writes that by 1953, the Veterans Administration Medical Center in San Juan was serving a war veteran population of around 95,000 Puerto Ricans.38 This medical center still stands today, located in Río Piedras, not far from the university and the Paseo de Diego, the site of Ibarra’s performance. Gherovici describes doctors observing patients who displayed:

Introduction  11

paroxysms of anxiety, rage, psychotic symptoms, and unpremeditated suicidal attempts, followed with depression and often amnesia about the spectacular crises. Thinking they had discovered a manifestation uniquely Puerto Rican, the armed forces psychiatrists labeled the startling set of symptoms “Puerto Rican syndrome.” This set of symptoms meriting the invention of a new diagnosis, is identical to the most famous form of hysteria that some hundred years earlier helped Freud invent a revolutionary cure — psychoanalysis — and showed him the path to the unconscious. This is a strange coincidence.39 Medical officers acknowledged that the imminence of Puerto Rican soldiers being discharged from service prompted ataques. Notes about the soldiers attempting to “profit” from their symptoms inadvertently acknowledge that the aggression used by the US military to train these soldiers (and from which the US war machine profited) was internalized and being used by Puerto Ricans against themselves.40 There was also simultaneous recognition among US and Puerto Rican physicians that these ataques made cultural sense, as fleeting excesses of feeling about oppressive conditions and poverty, which is bad for psychosomatic stability and incites eruptions. The ataques augured a return to impoverished conditions sustained by the invading power temporarily employing the soldiers as metonymic war machines and then discharging them into a colonial structure. The doctors working for the US military did not read these symptoms to critique colonial invasion, however, but to project them onto a culture as pathological. This medical-­colonial project, of course, is not new: African being as black and black as pathology grounds how “Puerto Rican syndrome” sounds. US medical officers renamed these ataques “hyperkinetic seizures” and “Puerto Rican syndrome.” Gherovici’s intervention is made in a Lacanian vein: she reads ataques, like hysteria, and their vexed medical archive in Puerto Rico, as having cultural and social meaning. She does not read them to reveal something about an individual patient’s pathology, but for the context in which they, with others, were living, and refusing to live. Gherovici argues that in the case of “Puerto Rican syndrome,” a diagnosis premised on an inaugural, oft-­cited, yet unpublished study called ‘“Ataques,’ Hyperkinetic Type: The So-­Called Puerto Rican Syndrome” (1954), there are various reasons why US medical officers would not issue a diagnosis of hysteria for the paroxysms they observed in Puerto Ricans, including a historical attachment to gendering hysteria as feminine and all soldiers as masculine. The refused diagnosis marks a semantic suppression of hysteria that services the foreign power’s perception of the other as objective fact and casts the anticolonial culture as a pathological syndrome. Scientific objectivity asserts it12 Introduction

self here as a form of nationalism. Gherovici writes: “a diagnostic category may appear as an objective description of a clinical fact that only affects those who experience health problems,” according to the master narrative. But “the clinician is not only implicated in understanding and engaging the patient; because the clinician provides an account of the disease, he or she is not just an observer but also a participant.”41 Gherovici shows that US medical officers deliberately distanced themselves from Puerto Ricans — nonwhite racialized subjects from a place the US had recently colonized — and from their “symptoms,” while, it appears, Puerto Rican medical officers identified with the scientific nationalism of foreign US officers, and suppressed their knowledge of ataques as cultural expressions of feeling about oppression in reports destined for a scientifically white nationalist archive. Gherovici thus conceives of medical treatment as unfolding within a dynamic of participant-­observer, a dynamic invoked by both cultural anthropology and performance studies. It is one dynamic that inflects in this book’s reworking of close-­ reading as multisensorial poetic listening and writing with texts, art, ecological formations, and other cultural objects. In Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (2007), psychoanalytic and Latinx studies scholar Antonio Viego draws on Lacan’s analysis of hysteria in the latter 1970s as part of social life in his own critical, poetic provocations around Spanglish.42 Viego enjoins the field and practice of Latino studies to cease discursive aspirations to and performances of “happiness,” wholeness (i.e., whiteness), productivity, and re-­productivity: “Latino studies must teach the university not Latino cultural difference, per se, but rather how to speak, read, and write in Spanglish, the hysteric’s mother tongue.”43 With his reading of Spanglish, my auscultating method of poetic listening emphasizes anticolonial and anti-­antiblack sensorial and sonic possibilities. Poetic listening is an attentive and sensitive mode of bilingual listening that hears carefully Glissant’s calls for a poetics of impurity: “The era of proud languages in their purity must end for man: the adventure of languages (of diffracted but recomposed poetics of the world) begins.”44 For man, or man (which must end), and for me, for us, for we who are formed by bilingualism and multilingualism not only as ways of speaking, but also as ways of listening and feeling. As in Ibarra’s convergence in Nude Laughing of laughing, crying, and retching, which offers a nonwhite poetics in performance and a performance of nonwhite poetics. My chiasmus at the end of the last sentence redraws the X of Latinx as an X eliciting queerness, blackness, and many indigenous languages’ -­X ’s, which Spanish colonialism and its afterlives cannot shhhhh, cannot disappear. I imagine the young Puerto Ricans serving in the US military, its warring and self-­absolving ideology, as enacting abject, disruptive, and muscled attacks of hysteria. I have not read records of an “organized attempt” at uprising by soldiers Introduction  13

trying to transition from scenes of battle into scenes of hospitalization, which we must imagine as fraught. If we auscultate this archive of madness, listening for riotous possibilities in Puerto Rican scenes of subjection, then the movement of attacks from the colonizer’s battle into the colonizer’s hospital is a flailing, failing, contracting, retching form of disturbance and refusal of the enforced order, including the order that expects the colonized to be sick, on its terms, and to need colonization to teach them the master’s prescribed modes of getting better from, and not “healing,” of, their abject existence.45 Thus, Gherovici phrases the scenario in Lacan’s terms: the Puerto Rican soldiers “try to escape and at the same time expose an impossible situation. Ultimately, the symptoms look like a return in inverted form of the message received by soldiers during their training. Both a failed revolt of soldiers forced to fight for a country that is not theirs and a declaration of defeat, the symptom spells out a realization, or an unconscious stirring, that there is no other way out.”46 This unconscious “failed revolt” of hyperkinetic seizures is generative. To remix it in Judith Butler’s terms in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997): these hyperkinetic subjects’ raucous subjection moves within the very structure of their eruptible subjugation. Rather than hearing defeat per se, I listen to the recording of these soldiers’ and veterans’ movements as discharging the terms of coerced agreement from within. Hysteria appears out of place in Puerto Rico, in nonwhite racialized, working-­class men. Hysteria appears in Rican Spanglish’s enactments of somatic excess of linguistic standard orders. And in kinesthetic attacks on US scientific nationalism in Río Piedras, hysteria summons our attunement to synesthetic riotousness in Latinx and Caribbean poetics. Sounds out of Place, Laughter, and Macha Colón y los Okapí

After hot August days of attending live performances at Quiebre and writing, working on drafts of this book’s chapters, I want to feel para-­verbal. I want to enter another scene of audition, a surround of dancing, and be sung to in the night, by a sonically explosive creature, una macha, by la Macha Colón (Gisela Rosario). Rosario, an Afro-­Caribbean musician, performer, and filmmaker, calls the performance persona Macha Colón a Caribbean hybrid of Divine, Blondie, and Celia Cruz. Macha is also a feminization of macho, and Cólon invokes Cristobal, the syphilitic Genoese, colonizing cartographer defiant of Catholic scholasticism, its map of the earth’s waters, and massacring indigenous life forms — Antillean and African. This surname she performatively shatters with her sonic eruptions. With the Quiebre crowd, I wait and face the stage, chatting and dancing to music drifting over from a truck parked nearby. The fluorescent glow of Helad-

14 Introduction

ería Georgetti, the famous ice cream parlor on the other side of the Plaza, calls to me with its homemade coconut, parcha [passion fruit], papaya, and mango creams, and its shots of ac. Georgetti’s stands near the dance and cultural space Casa Ruth Hernández, at which Gisela Rosario, Mapenzi Chibale (née Michel) Nonó — who performs with her sister Mulowayi Iyaye (née Lydela) as Las Nietas de Nonó [Nonó’s Grandaughters], and appears in a film discussed in chapter 3 — choreographers and dancers nibia pastrana santiago, and Awilda Rodríguez, among other Puerto Rican performance and dance artists, organized communal events and hosted international artists in residency. (I note this practice in the past tense, for since Hurricane María in September 2017, the municipality of San Juan has defunded and closed Casa Ruth Hernández. The building is extant; the cultural organizing does not gather there now.) We hold our spot near the stage to be as close to Macha and the band as possible, for our own pleasure, and also for her to see her friends’ faces near the stage for this packed performance. Erupting from within and behind the crowd is a chant, “¡Siempre estoy pompiá’ por la revolución!” Disoriented as to where the sound is coming from, I turn to find the chant: it booms from way back in the crowd, opposite the stage, opposing my expectations, at the other end of the Plaza’s long rectangle. A line of black, white, and inscrutable Caribbean, genderqueer bodies wearing animal masks move together toward the stage, one of them hitting a cowbell in a son rhythm. They continue chanting: “¡Siempre estoy pompiá’ por la revolución!” “¡Siempre estoy pompiá’ por la revolución!” And the crowd joins in: “¡Siempre estoy pompiá’ por la revolución!” Pompiá’ is Spanglish and a distinctly self-­delighted Puerto Ricanism that signifies pumped up, hyped, rrready (with a rolled -­r a la Bad Bunny’s rrrrra! ad lib). Macha’s animal-­masked friends’ prelude to her concert translates as “I’m always hyped for revolution.” Or “I’m always up to get down. Flip this shit!” I hear Macha’s laughter from off-­stage before I see her — wearing a green-­ tubed, auto-­illuminating, tentacular, Medusa headpiece, gloves and leggings covered in plastic eyeballs, a green asymmetrical top, and green monster feet (see fig. I.4).47 Propelled by her animal friends’ chant, she takes the stage from behind, from the crowd. From her gut, her laughter makes a ripping, femme-­y sound that you feel in your insides, that you want to keep hearing, and makes you laugh. Like Cardi B’s laughter on a trap track, or your grandma’s from the church pew when she hears a double entendre in the sermon, or a little kid after they’ve pooped their diaper, and they’re old enough to know you’ve gotta clean it up (joke’s on you), there’s something infectiously pleasurable about this unexpected, sensorial emergence.

Introduction  15

Figure I.4 Macha Colón y los Okapí at Quiebre Performance Festival (2016). Photograph by Walter Wlodarczyk.

Laughter, especially when it appears oddly timed, allows our embarrassment or repressed childishness to resurge for a hot minute, and release, too. Sounds that do not constitute proper speech tickle us, and tickle out unexpected effects, the effects of what is stuck in us but requires irrepressible stimulation — the sonic — to loosen it/us up. My experience of Quiebre in the “Free Associated State” of Puerto Rico, Ibarra’s performance of hysterical laughter and retching, the eruption of queer chanting, and Macha’s laughter before she addresses the audience and sings the lyrics of her songs, many of which are filled with depressive and euphoric feelings, provoke a reimagining of the cry beyond the epistemology that I have spent years studying, from Aristotle, to Rousseau, to Derrida, to Moten. Listening in a para-­verbal state, not as the knower but as one among many wanting to feel sensorial solidarity beside others, has changed how I tell the story of the cry.

Auscultate: Marronage’s Cry

The Cry of the Senses is a method book. Its archive is built around the paradigm of the cry. And the cry — as paradigm, that is, as mode of inquiry — is a sonic disturbance of Enlightenment, Romantic, and plantation orders of the senses. This book enacts how it wants to be read and felt — sonically and synesthetically — with 16 Introduction

the archive it has built and for which it advocates. Multisensorial poetic listening and sonically oriented close-­readings yield synesthetic reattunement and generate swerving creative-­critical movement. The copulations of possibility in the aforesaid adverbial and gerundive arrangements offer emotional refuges to imaginatively avow submerged sensorial solidarities inter alia that elude violent, mono-­ human, liberal, economic sovereignty.48 Martiniquais poet, novelist, and philosopher of ethnography Édouard Glissant’s poetics offers such semantic and imaginative refuges. In Betsy Wing’s translation into English of Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1997), readers encounter the verb “auscultating” as a way to approach the twisted “memory or guts inside” the plantation’s archives of madness and filiation.49 Auscultation is a medical term borrowed from the Latin auscultare, or inclining the ear toward the sounds of another’s body. Auscultar in Catalan and ausculter in French retain the sounds of escuchar and écouter, but the auscultating ear (auris) is doing more with listening than hearing.50 With stethoscopes, for example, physicians listen through the acoustic device to the lungs, intestines, and heart, percussive organs that offer rhythms and arrythms of breath, blood circulation, and digestion. Their listening-­ as-­touching hears and senses the sounds of the other’s body. They’re listening for a correspondence with what they expect to hear from a healthy enough organ — for a rhyme, of sorts — but they’re also listening-­touching the feeling of the sounds expressing themselves at that moment by that body. The French doctor, and intense Catholic, René Laennec is credited with inventing the stethoscope in 1816, in part because he did not want to lay his head against a woman’s breast to hear her heartbeat (Mssr. Laennec inclined toward wooden trumpets). Auscultation is a mode of listening with/on the verge of, yet not, touching another body. As a process of listening for what is expected, and for surprise, for the palpitating terms offered by a body in performance, or in a text, not only under visual scrutiny but sonorous engagement, auscultation reorients us to listening for those aporetically slanted sounds that disrupt a structure from the inside. It is a mode of intramural and relational listening. Listening with the sounds of another body’s interior responses to external stimuli may manifest unexpected results (not merely illness), and may shift how we think of what relationality means to listening, and vice versa. Ibarra’s body, retching, in esophageal contraction, intestinal ellipse, or arterial squeeze, knots with shapes of abjection, which is not the same as being stuck. Her body emotes and moves with her voice’s errance. I listen to Ibarra’s repetitions of flirtatious then frantic cries and hysterical laughter as racially performative, drawing on her Tejana, desert-­dry, United States – Mexico border, psychosomatic, melancholic, historical formation. I listen to Macha Cólon’s queer, space-­breaking vocatives as bomb-­dropping gritos [cries] from a place that Introduction  17

rejects the given terms of US politics, not because it “cannot decide” what to be, but because it enacts the hysteric’s position — expressing different sounds and terms on which to be heard. As a political sound put to the narrative service of nineteenth century nation-­ building, and especially in the Spanish Caribbean Americas, the cry has been positioned in narrative retrospect to mark the beginnings of revolutions — namely, el grito de Lares in the story of Puerto Rican independence; el grito de Dolores in the story of Mexican independence; el grito de Yara in the story of Cuban independence; los gritos de Capotillo and de independencia in stories of the Dominican Republic’s independence. However, the cry’s eruption in music, in sex, at birth, and as weeping llanto, alternately marks the embodied, nonwhite racialized, provocative, daily, pained limits of language and feeling, as well as political shifts. Whereas in Spanish, el grito is defined as a vehement expression of general, even organized, sentiment, in French, le cri registers as inarticulate sound that emerges from spontaneous feelings of vigor. There is an unruliness to the French cri to which this book is attuned. Cries, old and new, blow through this book, some with the force of hurricanes, others with the force of intimate whispers. Glissant’s poetics of the “cry of the Plantation” is a provocation for my method of multisensorial listening in The Cry of the Senses. As systematized in Poetics of Relation, the “cry of the plantation” is a crucible of voice, sound, and word that erupts into murderous modernity. It courses through an aesthetics and poetics of the Caribbean Americas forged amidst and in relation to plantation life, and continues sounding out long after the legal end of slavery in what Saidiya Hartman theorizes as the ongoing afterlife of slavery.51 The roiling, abyssal belly of the slave ship,52 multiple musical forms budding from plantation regions — Glissant notes biguine, jazz, calypso, salsa, reggae — and a silence of night surrounding the slaves’ barracks, resonate in that cry’s poetics.53 This book takes up and plays with, rather than resolving or rationalizing, Western philosophy’s rendering of cries as vibrating — pathologically, irrationally, savagely, and hysterically — in the crack forced between (black) animality and (white) humanity. This book is not about the humanity of the cry.54 It writes rather with the pleasurable and troubling thoughts and feelings that cries convoke. Glissant writes about other cries, such as the “cry of poetry,” which he metaphorizes and pluralizes as moving like “open boats”: “we sail them for everyone.”55 An everyone misread by many white theorists as white, Glissant’s “everyone” is an Afro-descendant and plural one of those historically denied their oneness, and denied opacity. Earlier in Glissant’s poetics, a throaty, maroon cry emerges from collective audition and proprioception.56 I hear invocations of the throat not as part of an individual experience of speech or kinesis, but as part of a collective proprio18 Introduction

ception in relation to the sounds of marronage. In the passage below, translated by Nathanaël, the cry disappears into the figure of the maroon, who is constitutively plural, constitutively not individual, and who appears not as a noun but in and as movement across Martinican cliffs and les mornes [hills]: What then is language? This cry that I elected? Not only the cry, but absence beating in the cry. For if you grant me through the throat Such or Such, to con-­ vince me that I must surrender, I in turn disgorge for you the song of the one who for the night’s duration rose along the cliff of acacias, tracked from the primordial forest and from forest to forest above the sea and the oblique bridges pushing towards this morne, and who had only known so to speak the slope the incline the loose bridge the rolling abyss the pitching morne and who, dry toes in the mud, all night, the first, rose in the thickness of the morne, and there launched his cry that was immediately lost in the immensity of this miniscule space, swallowed, dwindled, eroded by the workshops, the cane fields, the violated splendor of the Unique Season (the cry), at each crossroads each day reduced in the trivial conquest in which the other laced us, emptied to the availability of so many good talents that we became (when in the lair of cane the breath of slave ships turns sour), cry to the world launched from the highest morne and un-­ heard by the world, submerged there in the sweetish wave where the sea bogs men down;  —  And it is to this absence this silence and this involution that I bind in my throat my language, which thus begins with a lack: And my language, rigid and dark or alive or strained is that lack first, then the will to slough the cry into speech before the sea. (What does language matter, when we must of the cry and speech measure there its implantation. In every authorized lan-­ guage, you will build your language.) Introduction  19

. . . every nation yesterday was still perfecting itself in the unique and often exclusive, aggressive projection of its parlance. But I am not heir to that unicity, having not even to react against it . . . I haven’t to prove my loyalty, nor continuity, but to jar it in my direction: it is my way of recognizing it.57 “[W]e became . . . cry to the world”: against the antiblack world, Glissant writes with a literary imagination of a poetics of the sounds and movements of a plurality, of Martiniquais maroons whose cries echo between les mornes and ocean, ocean and another island, disconnected from and bound to other islands. Engulfed, involuted, the fugitive collective cry is not a problem for Glissant, nor must it be recovered, nor justified, nor imagined as inferior to speech. In the throat of the body bound to a collective poetic sense of movement and audition, in a place that is a plurality, an island in a chain of islands, a cry — not of one national project or humanist articulation’s violent battle with an inarticulacy that stands in for nonwhite racialized bodies in a racist-­humanist version of the world, a cry jarring, quivering, and moving with Caribbean land-­and seascapes. Cries disarticulate the joints in sound that constitute articulation, that is, they expose the nonsense in sense. Nonwhite cries in particular seem to pose a philosophical problem like that of improvisation. Improvisation poses “the problem of feeling” for thought, as Fred Moten puts it in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003). In the Break shows where blackness, a feminized blackness, disrupts Western philosophical aversions to feeling, flowing, and improvising. The sounds of blackness disturb a certain (whitened) audition because they do not mime back what mastery wants to hear from the Other, for mastery conceives of itself as the source of vocalizable reason. It cannot imagine black sounds made beyond it, or that its audition and vocalizations trespass on and poach therefrom. Sounds of feeling, improvisation, and flow trouble what Jacques Derrida calls the “audiophonic system” of the One (of colonial mastery),58 a system that requires what Moten calls “philosophy’s color line.”59 Derrida remarked on improvisation as something he would do, verged on doing, to think the unthinkable of speech, its darkness, or what he called its “black magic,” in seeking to diverge from the oppressive preparedness (in part designed to conceal the racist tracks) of Western philosophy.60 And, I add, Derrida posed “the problem of the cry” in post-­Enlightenment notions of language, race, and life as a limit.61 This book attentively listens to what Moten calls “the problem of feeling” as the problem in Derrida’s postulated “problem of the cry,” but in other words: I argue that the so-­called cry problem reveals Western philosophy’s problem with feeling, and with feelings’ sounds and sensory effects. By attending to the elusive materialities of cries, ad libs, riotous disruptions of apocalyptic joy, performative refusals 20 Introduction

of forced compliance, onomatopoeiae, silence, ideological hiccups, and to Spanglish as what Viego calls “the hysteric’s mother tongue”62 — all sonic eruptions of sensing — this book does not humanize them, it does not singularly systematize them, but instead veers their shape-­shifting provocations away from the humanist project and its “audiophonic system” of capture. On the album Tanquecito de amor [Reservoir of Love] (2011), when Gisela Rosario/ Macha Colón cries out the track’s titular refrain “¡Maaaaalditaaa sea!” (which signifies some mixture of “Goddammit!” “What a nightmare!” and “Fuck this!”), she issues a belly-­deep and sky-­ripping structural, political frustration. “¡Qué mierda, qué mierda, qué mierda!” [What shit! What shit! What shit!] she repeats right after the wail of “¡Maldita sea!” saying she can’t go anywhere because she’s depressed by fast food chains of American English, hippy-­hipster pop-­ups burning incense in gentrified swaths of neighborhoods where people used to live, and the students rioting at the University of Puerto Rico against raised tuitions that amounts to more political feelings of frustration. Her bratty, broken, and critical outbursts about the gut-­wrenching, visceral feeling of ongoing US colonial invasion reference what she hears around her: there is an ear in her throat, another iteration of collective audition. Her cry is a curse on US sovereignty, a call for its Caribbean deposition. Glissant’s cri, its collective maroon sense of movement, beside Rosario/Macha’s laughter and kinetic, sonic outbursts of “¡Ayyyyy! ¡Maldita sea!” beside Ibarra’s moaning and retching, enact affective, moving, and different interplays crucial to this book’s interpolation of itself into, and out of, Latinx studies — historically troubled, as it is, by (its) blackness and relationality.63 In rendering the cry as not one, not a singular force or entity, but as migratory, abnormal, multisensorial, plural, and dispersed, the cry’s bomba, or its potential to explode, regenerates. The Cry of the Senses deploys multisensorial poetic listening to attune us to the ethical and imaginary possibilities of besideness and sensorially errant solidarity in the Caribbean Americas.64 Besideness does not seek positivist inclusion into violent civic narratives of being and nonbeing: it does not wish to sound like whiteness in order to be, which requires blackness not to be — to be nothingness. Rather, a multisensorial, ecological field of besideness65 slows approaches to difference, and its waywardness with the binary of being/nonbeing allows scholars, artists, and writers living in various anticolonial states of historical and sensorial awareness of US violent sovereignty to attend to hegemonically overdetermined sites and their geographies of embodiment. Sensorially errant solidarity emerges from an archipelagic perspective on the hemisphere. It imaginatively subsumes US geographic cum white supremacist claims to hegemonic, self-­made boundaries and the capacity to trespass where and when US sovereignty determines. Introduction  21

A Spanglish Ear for Bombas [Bombs]

From my vantage in the Caribbean Americas, a task for the Spanglish, bilingual ear (in Latinx studies, and in other fields) is to reimagine bilingualism as a multisensorial and “hysterical” poetic power. As such, bilingualism refuses narratives of positivism, assimilation, freedom, and white representation as primary preoccupations, and swerves as an imaginary of migrant, fugitive, and errant listening and feeling. It must hysterically decenter US hemispheric illusions of grandeur. It must think from other speeds of place and relation. It must counterattack in sensorial solidarity with the anticolonial forms, shapes, and imaginaries it studies. The Cry of the Senses is written with a Spanglish ear that listens deliberately for where and when disidentifying US Latinx and Caribbean figures go off — it listens for bombas, as in booms of sonic feeling.66 Bomba as in bass-­drops, vibrations that make you want to shake and wind your ass, as well as harshly explosive, sensorial reminders of gravity’s downward pull. In this book, the word bomba moves along several valences. Bomba evokes the Puerto Rican musical form, where dancers determine, with and against drummers, the length and intensities of the dance. This iteration of bomba in Puerto Rico is narrated as emerging from the plantation. But I hasten to add that, as Sara Johnson shows in The Fear of French Negroes (2012), bomba comes to Puerto Rico and comes to constitute a musical sense of Ricanness in the archipelago and the diaspora not from some abstracted, monolithic notion of “Africa,” nor from the plantation structure in Puerto Rico as a regionally and economically isolated phenomenon (an impossibility), but from the slave trade and Haiti in the eighteenth century. That is, bomba travels to Puerto Rico from San Domingue on the verge of revolutionary Haiti. Which is also to say, bomba signifies black aesthetics, intra-­Caribbeanness, and Haitianness. Bomba, in this book, also signifies the over 120 bombas planted by the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (faln) and exploded in Chicago and New York in the 1970s and early ’80s on and against US violent sovereignty. I will not give the term bomba to the nuclear missile that was found in the Vieques Sound, at the bottom of the sea, in breach of the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco, an object that continues to elude the US Navy’s capacity to report the details of its weapons trading and transport. Dive around the island, and the coral reveals what the sovereign state will not: the damage done by toxic drainage from weapons storage and by sonic booms from munitions explosions, which also have caused cancer and “vibracoustic disease” in the bodies of Vieques and Culebra residents — a thickening of the body’s tissues in response to noise and sound frequencies impossible for the human body to bear. I hear Glissant’s maroon cri echo across the amphitheater of the archipelago, where crying bomba is also crying loss, mourning in retrospect, mourning in advance, and refusing imperial terms of life and death as totality. 22 Introduction

This book’s poetics grows from an engagement with the present emerging out of the long 1970s as a shifting ground that marks the rise of US academic Latino studies, as well as poetic, political, and musical movements and collaborations. The Nuyorican Poets Café, Arte Público Press, the Chicana/o/x muralists, Asco, the Young Lords, the faln, the Macheteros, and the salsa of the Fania All-­Stars all constitute attempts to forge radical articulations of Afro-­Latinx, white Latinx, and variably nonwhite subjectivities, aesthetics, and sounds. Over time, the academy has valued sociological formulations, attachments to assimilation, and realist representations of a coherent Latino identity — many instances of which are anti-­ aesthetic, antifemme, antitrans, antiqueer, antiblack, and anti-­indigenous.67 Difficult and violent stories of intracommunal hang-­ups are under-­told, which only solidifies obstacles to living with difference, and has shaped how we have anthologized and performatively reiterated what Latina/o/x studies seems to be. When sensorially detoured into a range of affects and modes of attentiveness, “Latinx” can do something else besides oppose white majoritarian traps. Latinx poetry, performance, and music in the 1970s incited sensorial and affective attachments that can be listened to as exceeding the demands of reproductive, mimetic identity formations, as well as normative political and economic agendas. In the introduction to the 1975 collection Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings, Miguel Algarín writes that “[t]he poems in this anthology . . . are delivered in . . . a bomba rhythm with many changing pitches delivered with a bold stress. The pitches vary but the stress is always bomba and the vocabulary is English and Spanish mixed into a new language.”68 Algarín invokes bomba as rhythm and stress in a book that collected Rican words and feelings in lyric poetic form. Here, bomba explodes with plurality, and renders a maroon code that the state cannot crack.69

Chapter Summaries

The body of The Cry of the Senses does not render a set of tropes or keywords to intervene in a field. In its very modality, The Cry of the Senses is a paradigmatic disturbance built around the cry. The reader can metonymically hear the paradigm of the cry in a set of organizing conceptual terms that emerge across the book: riotousness, abnormal pleasures, and nonsense erupt in chapter 1; unruly and unsovereign nonparticipation and absurd hyper-­participation manifest in chapter 2; sensorial errancy moves in chapter 3; ecstatic mourning in sites of migratory and maroon refuge reveal and hide themselves in chapter 4; in the coda, bombs go off. Chapter 1 — “ ‘¡Anormales!’: Unruly Audition in Performances of 1970s Salsa” —  theorizes the method of multisensorial poetic listening as a variation on close Introduction  23

reading. It tells the story of an audience riot that brought the Fania All-­Stars’ 1973 salsa performance at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx to an end. This chapter claims such listeners’ audition as unruly, and traces the riotous pleasures of salsa’s audiences in relation to the lyrics and videos of Héctor Lavoe’s performances and the musicians signed to Fania in the mid-­1970s, including a video recording of the music festival Zaire ’74 in Kinshasa — a scene of sensorial solidarity in performance. Chapter 2 — ‘“I have been forced to hear a lot’: The faln, The Masses Are Asses, and the Sounds, Shapes, and Speeds of Puerto Rican Defiance” — relays two Rican embodied refusals of US sovereignty and their performances of unsovereignty: the court transcripts of the May 1980 trial of faln member Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres (who allegedly bombed the Mobil Oil Building in 1977) in Manhattan; and the written text of Pedro Pietri’s play, The Masses Are Asses, first mounted in 1974 in Manhattan, then reworked and completed in 1984. Those years comprise the time frame of the faln’s relational, leftist activity against claims of US sovereignty, and it marks the time of the emergence in US law of the category of “seditious conspiracy.” The state tortured Beltrán Torres in an “experimental” prison, and incarcerated her for twenty-­nine years of a life sentence. Reading Beltrán Torres’s use of language in court as refusal, nonparticipation, and nonperformance changed how I read the character called Lady in The Masses Are Asses, and her performances of hyper-­participation in her captor’s role-­playing desires. By moving her bowels — against the injunctions of her man-­captor to not fart or shit — Lady troubles the shapes, sounds, and speeds of a defiant break with subjugation. Chapter 3 — “Sensorial Errancy in Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s Cinema” — thinks with the sonic excesses of the errant visual movements of Puerto Rican filmmaker Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s cinema. The filmmaker’s uses of the camera as object, as well as her film subjects’ performative circumlocutions and nonverbal, physical rituals, open into meditations on the magic of sensorial errancy in her films set in the rainforest, former US Naval bases, small urban farms, and beaches of the Puerto Rican archipelago. The history of “sensory deprivation” inflicted by the US prison system on alleged members of the faln, as well as the “sensorial overload” inflicted on the peoples of the Puerto Rican archipelago, especially in Vieques and Culebra, by the US Navy’s decades of “weapons testing,” circulate in this chapter’s engagements of aesthetic experimentations with sensorial errancy. This chapter walks readers through the Puerto Rican archipelago’s “post-­military,” “chimerical ecology” where Santiago Muñoz transforms the camera into a sonic, multisensory, and magical portal that breaks a flat plane of vision, and hexes the war machine. Chapter 4 — “Slow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning, and Migratory Refuge” —  focuses on the sensuous poetics of gay, Chicanx poet Eduardo Corral’s first book, Slow Lightning (2012). It listens poetically across the conjunction that Corral’s 24 Introduction

synesthetic and visceral poems draw between Mexican and Central American migrancy, historical and hemispheric black fugitivity, aids, cruising, black American poetics, nonwhite queer poetics, and the desert ecology of Sonora and Arizona, which become specific landscapes of death, rot, loss, and mourning in Slow Lightning. This chapter argues for making migratory refuges that move with variously fractured ontologies and histories not toward freedom, but to recover a lost and sensed connection, a mode of sensorial solidarity that opens a range of possibilities for living broken together and mourning ecstatically. The coda sets off the explosive sounds of an oneiromantic, Caribbean Americas fantasy deposition of the US sovereign. It arranges passages of an armed takeover of Manhattan by African American and Afro-­Caribbean characters in the novel Afro-­6 (1969) and the explosive dreams and speculative sounds in two of Santiago Muñoz’s films that reimagine, on domestic and barred-­domestic levels, bombings of sovereignty.

Introduction  25

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“¡Anormales!”  Unruly Audition in Performances of 1970s Salsa

1

¡Cuidao’ que por allí vienen los anormales, y con estreitjackets! [Look out! Here come the abnormals, and with straitjackets!]  — Héctor Lavoe, “Mi Gente” [My People] (1975) Como Héctor el Father hoy yo salgo por la calle con to’s mis anormales. [Like Héctor the Father, today I’m taking to the streets with my abnormals.]  — Bad Bunny, “Soy Peor” [I Am Worse] (2016)

On Method, and Queer Attachments to Salsa

My head is bowed: I’m staring down between my legs at a red vinyl chair while my barber in Puerto Rico, the artist Omar Obdulio, is cutting my hair in his shop in Santurce, San Juan. I’m listening through the buzz of clippers and the grain of portable speakers to a Spotify stream of a 1975 studio recording of Héctor Lavoe singing “Mi Gente” [My People]. This recording is on La Voz [The Voice], his debut solo album, made with the ensemble Las Estrellas de Fania [The Fania All-­Stars]. The All-­Stars changed sonic shapes from the 1970s into the 1980s, with a turnover of musicians because of contract disagreements, members going in and out of drug rehab, or breaking off to form other bands. But the shape of the band’s sound on this recording in the mid-­1970s is peak. Willie Colón’s trombone and its interplay with Lavoe’s voice are especially striking in this version of “Mi Gente.” I have a hard time holding still in general, and not gesticulating when talking, which doesn’t disappear during haircuts. And I have a harder time not moving my body under the address of Caribbean musical forms. But I snuff the urge that my feet and ass feel, as there’s a razor moving a nick away on my neck — correcting

Figure 1.1 Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, circa 1975. Wikimedia Commons.

my fade down to the skin. I ask Obdulio if he’s seen the picture of Lavoe and Colón posing as newlyweds, or lovers, or, anyways, in an interlock of playful intimacy (see fig. 1.1). He has not, but invokes the gangster poses in which the two often presented themselves for cameras. I tell him that I imagine Lavoe and Colón had a queer friendship. Dressing to mirror each other, doing drugs together, playing on stage through sweaty, lengthy, improvised descargas and call-­and-­response — in these sonic and physical gestures, I sense something tender and anormal [abnormal] about their performances of masculine intimacy. I sense an intimacy that I want to claim between them and their audiences, as I want to reclaim what hegemonic usages of sign of “Latino” often disavow: relation’s and solidarity’s unruliness. My current hair fetish with a shorn-­boy look has lately become an expanded Caribbean practice, kept tight between my barber in Bed-­Stuy, Brooklyn, and Obdulio in Santurce, while I am living in San Juan on my first semester-­long sabbatical. Obdulio’s barbershop is also an art gallery, 2Bleó, across the Avenida de Diego from the contemporary art spaces Espacio 1414, La Impresora, and maof — spaces of exhibition and work.1 I am groomed a short bike ride from beloved salseros Ismael Rivera’s and Rafael Cortijo’s stomping grounds in Villa Palmeras, a stone’s throw away from one of my favorite restaurants in San Juan, a Dominican spot called Café Rubén’s, which has a vital jukebox and live merengue and bachata nights, and near three outdoor bars where plena, salsa, and bomba boom in live 28  Chapter One

performance: Watusi, Bonanza, and La Placita. Santurce is a historically ambient, intra-­Caribbean, musical neighborhood. Descend into the music: salsa summons you here. Formatively Caribbean, West African, and Lower East Side Neoyorquinx, salsa beaches the Caribbean Sea against horns of brass. Sonically, salsa imparadises loss and excision. A fusion form that varies its structural and lyrical combinations of guaracha, mambo, plena, bolero, and merengue, and whose spine is son montuno, salsa turns call and response into an insistence on bodily movement. Urban music that is constitutively tropical, that exceeds clear categorization, forged by displaced Caribbean bodies on what Pedro Pietri called the “nervous breakdown streets” of New York, 1970s salsa’s instrumentation and lyrics carry the crevasses, rivers, mountains, and coasts of archipelagic, plantation memory, and insurgent desires, into the smash of packed subway cars.2 As you fall in to being swept up, attend to your joints. Feel yourself becoming attuned to your position in relation to those of others: as listener, sentient participant, and recipient who feels openings for movement’s study. The shape of sound that engulfs you calls on spirits and ancestors; invites dancers to move their feet, wind their hips, and shake their asses; and lures cruising looks from perhaps unfamiliar eyes whose histories arrange their bodies to sense something else from its blasts. Multisensorial poetic listening acclimates us to salsa’s “translocality” and transtemporality, the past’s displaced presence where the lyrically recollected violence of sugarcane fields cuts across the trombone’s translation of a car horn’s rip of mechanized, frustrated street sound.3 Salsa needs public dancers’ bodies and attentive responses to calls as much as it does the singer and the band. The lyrics call to you, the listener, or an apostrophic placeholder summons you, using the familiar tú form of intimate address: salsa sings for your pleasure. Which may be too much. What will you do with feeling too much? With feeling on the verge of losing control? Multisensorial poetic listening to salsa puts on display my queer and anachronistic attachment to an unruly musical form and its audience’s expressions of uncontainable feelings. In my rearrangement of the audio-­visual archive of loose joints that invite us to reimagine the Fania All-­Stars’ musical performances, I conjure sonically oriented audition as spatial and stimulating, and poetic listening as a multisensorial response and an effect that can theorize with a performance’s, text’s, or artwork’s terms and scene of stimulation.4 I want to situate multisensorial poetic listening in relation to other theories and practices of listening, and to the genre of salsa, before I say more in the next two sections about Lavoe’s lyricality and ad libs, the All-­Stars’, and their audiences’ scenes of unruly audition, particularly at concerts in the Bronx, San Juan, and Kinshasa.5 “¡Anormales!”: Unruly Audition  29

Salsa’s lyrics most often sing of heartbreak, political uprisings, lots of sex, and elements of the form itself, which are good at mixing broken phenomena with its telltale son beat and insistence on tumbao [ass-­bound rhythm]. Salsa performances and salsa listeners stimulate unruly audition; I theorize multisensorial poetic listening as a way of doing something with that stimulation, and as a method that reimagines Latinx as a riotous movement. By “audition” I gather both the late sixteenth-­century sense of the psychosomatic power of listening to music as well as a contemporary sense of the term: a rehearsal, a tryout, a sounding out of what more sounding out may sound like. Audition involves more than the ear: it is bodily, potentially synesthetic, happens from the inside, and moves across the body, vibrating across containment’s porosity into connection with others.6 I am mixing together two meanings of audition — the psychosomatic power of listening and rehearsal — to get at listening to salsa as a repetitive and physical practice that doesn’t lead anywhere but to sensing its sonic layers, subtle elements, odd flourishes, and irreverent mixtures. Formal expectations are not all that determine how music is listened and danced to, especially when a musical form’s audiences express uncontainable, abnormal feelings. I am not a passive listener. And I do not sense many salserxs as straight as macharrán [solipsistically masculine] history tells me to — in part because of rumors of bisexuality, and in part because I sense and listen to their performed dynamics, rituals, and sounds as abnormal. I take pleasure in my own activeness and openness to sensual activation as an embodied listener. Historically, canonical music theory has not been invested in the imagined effeminate position of listeners and listening.7 Frances Aparicio laid basso ostinato to approach the audio-­visual, ludic archive of salsa and salsa’s listeners thus: “To judge salsa music only from the point of view of gender politics, that is, to reject it as música machista (sexist music) is to ignore the complex semiotic directions that any musical text may travel and thus embody. It also assumes that Latinas are passive listeners or compliant consumers of music, an Adornian-­constructed audience.”8 By listening not only to performances of the music, but also to the performativity of salsa listeners, I assert my abnormal attachment to a positionality beyond control. In ¡Salsa, sabor, y control!: sociología de la música “tropical” [Salsa, Taste, and Control!: The Sociology of “Tropical” Music] (1998), Angel G. Quintero Rivera elaborates on the sabor part of his title as one of salsa listeners’ desires: “El ‘público’ en la música ‘tropical’ es rara vez pasivo . . . demandando intensidad o ¡sabor! y, sobre todo, bailando” [the “public” of “tropical” music is rarely passive . . . demanding intensity, ¡sabor!, and, above all, dancing].9 Intensity copulates with, or doubles as, sabor. In a Caribbean mode, translating sabor sounds like flavor. In salsa lyrics, the expression “sin sabores” is cried out to signify tasteless, literally “without 30  Chapter One

taste” in English, and it sounds like those who can’t get down.10 Salsa motivates scenes of stimulated audition and presumes that listeners will do something with their arousal and feelings. What I would interpolate into this expectation of a musical form that constructs space for improvisation and feeling, for descarga [unloading], is a riff on Quintero Rivera’s title: salsa, sabor, y des-­control, unruliness. I do not cruise YouTube videos of the musicians who played for Fania in the 1970s for “liberatory” or “correct” cultural interpretations,11 or for them to behave as proper and anxious political-­musical agentic objects,12 or because I am bound to repeat the label’s exploitations of Afro-­Caribbean artists and aesthetic forms.13 Instead, unruly audition demands that I engage their dynamics and mis-­directives for disturbances of the market expectations of their bodies — for semiotic excess, sweat, smell, and gesture, and for accidents of meaning that emerge through intimate wordplay and nonsense. I refuse the “violent epistemological enforcement” of the reproduction of heterosexuality and will not reproduce the mythic sounds of salsa’s heterosexuality as originary and consistent.14 On the contrary, in the musicians’ and singers’ orgiastic descargas [fugues/discharges] adorned by open-­breasted blouses, all that silk, sequins, polyester, long nails, skinny thighs in crushed velvet, fleshy booties in bell bottoms, and high-­heeled patent leather shoes, I claim a queer masculine attachment to salsa and its abnormalities. Disco is afoot, after all — how straight is anyone on the permeable music and art scenes in 1970s New York, when musicians are also being paid in cocaine and heroin on scales hitherto unknown, and the fluorescence holds a deep darkness? Today, we skim music almost constantly through YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, and Pandora; so many musical strokes vibrate in us, awaiting stimulation. If you live in a crowded neighborhood, you hear others’ music off and on all day and night. As I write, my African diasporic neighbors are creating a sexy and voluminous track layered with dancehall, reggaetón, electronic, Western classical, Brazilian funk, and black US American trap. While I channel elements of Ralph Ellison’s essay “Living with Music” (1964), I prefer to skip the whole battle of amps and live with audio-­ambience as pleasure, in part because that pleasure is synesthetic. But I would make the distinction that I am not listening attentively to the music wafting in from outside because I am writing as physically as I can with another audio-­visual archive. Catching wafts of sounds that converge my inside with what’s outside gets at how I imagine the potential synesthetic stimulation of a scene of sound. Synesthesia occurs when a sense impression manifests out of place; itinerant sensations from intermittent social listening become part of my orientation. How and where on my body I feel the blares of melody and break-­beats that burst in and take off just as quickly through a passing car’s open window tells me something about desire, what’s up in the world, in the everyday. “¡Anormales!”: Unruly Audition  31

Relation is somewhere in that traffic and proximity. But I cannot respond to all stimulation. Open to feeling distracted, Licia Fiol-­Matta theorizes a mode of “wavering” listening, which makes more of the music “conjointly” with what singers call out.15 She describes her listening approach as moving “resolutely away from Latin America as paradise and Latin Americans as natural-­born performers for someone else’s pleasure and profit.”16 Yet, she does “not expel the visual” from her archive. She continues: “I do not make claims for the sonorous over the visual. I place them side by side as part objects, elements of a sensorium, while centering the sounded voice. I listen ‘distractedly.’ ”17 To listen distractedly is another way of listening for disturbance, if not as disturbance. I situate Fiol-­Matta’s method that “listen[s] distractedly” beside mine that listens multisensorially. Poetic listening is closer to obsessive, repetitive listening, but, like Fiol-­Matta’s sense of conjunction, involves withness and besideness, including an attentiveness to visuality’s resonance. My invocation of besideness, and my translation of that to a sensorium, carries us from the visual to the spatial, and from the spatial to the ambient — we need space and ambience to listen, and to think about how we listen together ethically. In my usage of besideness, I am aware of how a range of Latinx studies, Black studies, and Caribbean studies scholars, including Claudia Milian, Roy Pérez, Tina Campt, Tao Leigh Goffe, and Édouard Glissant have theorized “the continuative,” “the proximate,” “the adjacent,” “the intimate,” and “Relation,” respectively, to explain historically and geographically complex ranges of interracial, queer of color, and intercommunal modes of movement that sustain the non­collapse of differences in racialized subject formations.18 Rather than approaching a Latinx aesthetic object, text, performance, and body with a mimetic protocol that functions in service of legitimation, and projects things onto it, an ecology of besideness offers multiple moods, positions, and arrangements not only for enacting political movements, but also ethical practices of listening to and near one another. Multisensorial poetic listening is a sonic variation on close reading. It does not eclipse the visual attachments of close reading as one way of responding to the synesthetic stimulation of a text or aesthetic form. But the visual is not enough where the elements of percussion gather: fire, wood, wind, water, metal, and skins. Drums anchor salsa, hold a center for circles of movement to spin out, stretch, wander, and make a return en clave [in step, beat-­bound].19 These sonic sabores are excessive, and excess is a hallmark of salsa. Fania launched the All-­Stars as a “sure thing” financially, to capitalize on the musicians’ individual stardom. The label’s narrative of itself is so self-­serving that in fania.com’s notes to the two albums that emerged from the All-­Stars’ 1973 con32  Chapter One

cert at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, which I discuss in the next section, the fact that a concert-­stopping audience uprising occurred on that occasion is only fleetingly noted. Rather, salsa listeners’ insurgence, like their presence, is owned as Masucci’s success: “That night, Jerry Masucci, the ultimate gambler, was the last man laughing as his most bizarre gambit to date became a total success — his Fania All-­Stars poured 40,000 fans into the Yankee Stadium for an unforgettable night of superb music.”20 Claiming the other’s insurgency for the one’s entertainment is part of a violently, economically assimilative, white drive. But we can stay en clave with the music and deviate from that narrative’s correspondence of audience fungibility to the money man’s good gamble — and, moreover, take pleasure in detaching from it, and in attaching to the thickness of salsa’s anormalidad. José Quiroga describes how salsa “is predicated on something that turns liquid — a mess, a condimented thickness — a can of Goya tomato sauce, so thick the spoon will not move on the pot. Salsear as a verb involves at some point forgetting what you did — not in the sense of losing control but in a form of dancing that is all about mediated control.”21 However, I am relishing in what exceeds “mediated control,” what breaks the “rule” of “the step,” what disturbs the temporality of marketed relevance. Remixes and replays of salsa favorites pump today on radio stations like New York’s La Mega for what Dolores Inés Casillas calls “legally vulnerable listeners.”22 Listening to salsa long after at its “market climax,” in the nonwhite queer scenes I frequent to dance, salsa comes in as a remixed layer on a track, as a sample or transition; the sonic 1970s or 1980s burst in and change the flows between Rihanna, Aventura, and Cardi B, other anormales con sabor [abnormals with taste for flavor]. In his writing on the gustatory aesthetic pleasures of black performance, Fred Moten bodies-­up to Adorno’s critique of popular music by showing how Adorno’s aesthetic judgment of the taste of pop listeners was nothing more than gastroeconomic.23 When Moten describes the “taste and smell,” the “anima and aroma” of resistance in black performance and music, I also hear him saying salsa. I hear in his language regarding “the ongoing reproduction of that which disrupts reproduction from within the very process of reproduction of the conditions of capitalist production the sound of interpolative noncorrespondence to time and tone,” a poetic opening to other African diasporic and polyrhythmic forms, such as bomba, jazz, biguine, trap, and salsa.24 Musical forms of marronage reveal a performative noncorrespondence with tone (as in, synchrony, succession, and rhythmic equality).25 That performative noncorrespondence is sensible, too, in salsa audiences’ glut of taste that exceeds their bodies being “poured into” seats by liquid capital, and by their excessive attachment to the form even when it is not charting. “¡Anormales!”: Unruly Audition  33

What pops off here involves a slow flow of sensuous attentiveness that operates through receptiveness and repeatedly hitting “Play.” In the spirit of Alexandra Vazquez’s practice of “listening in detail,” I, too, offer an “experience with rather than an account of” unruly pluralities.26 Vazquez writes about how she listens to the aural invitations made by Afro-­Cuban pianist and singer Bola de Nieve’s details of “supple directives,” and how her listening gives over to explosive, playful syntax around Afro-­Cuban composer and singer Pérez Prado’s “itinerant outbursts,” his grunts, noises that cannot go by one name for they “intervene . . . in his own commodification and circulation.”27 I am likewise attentive to elusively performed mis-­directives, as well as the range of what audiences bring to a soundscape, video recording, dance floor, or live performance. Sensuously, improvisationally, and with an ear for bilingual play, multisensorial poetic listening adjusts our sensoria to feel for audio-­visual shapes of insurrection that critique and oppose the promise of freedom, the American dream as the other’s, discourses of upward mobility, legibility, the seeming straightforwardness of complicity, and stylistic conformity. But critiquing and opposing normativities is not all that they do. Multisensorial poetic listening also attunes us to how raucous audio-­visual shapes aggravate the progressive, linear idea of a historical leap from the insurrectionist to the revolutionary, from escape to arrival, from the small-­scale to large. It is attentive to how unruliness can take on various racially performative shapes and scales.28 A performative, critical-­sensual, visceral-­formalist listening method deemphasizes a hyper-­optical sense of the visual cut off from other senses. This shift aims to reorient us as readers to our sense of the visual among and subject to detour by other senses in how we engage texts, music, sounds, and aesthetic objects. It flows with Moten’s sensorial multiplication: when listening “goes bone-­deep into the sunken ark of bones . . . it is something other than itself . . . it’s the sense that it excludes; it’s the ensemble of the senses.”29 To wit: multisensorial poetic listening offers ensemblic, errant, and anticolonial sensorial reorientation.

The Demented Bust Out

It is diasporic Caribbean common knowledge that the Fania All-­Stars performed a concert at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, New York on August 24, 1973. A two-­ volume album of live recordings was released in 1975, Fania All-­Stars Live at Yankee Stadium.30 The documentary film Salsa, which visually anchors itself in the performance at Yankee Stadium, was released in 1976. An absence resounds across the audio-­visual recordings of this event: the memory that the All-­Stars’ performance

34  Chapter One

began, lasted one set, and then ended in a riot of its audience, which consisted of an estimated 35,000 to 45,000 people.31 Dissonance emerges across narratives about that night, in YouTube comments on bootleg posts of the film Salsa, and in published media. Billboard magazine writer Jim Melanson’s summary of the concert makes no mention of the audience bringing the All-­Stars’ set to heel. Raucousness gets dubbed with “success” in his title: “Fania Concert is Success as An All-­Star Delight.”32 With purchase in Fania’s financial achievements and the narrative of tropical music’s enchantments, the writing reconstructs the night’s performances as stirring but under control. The Billboard piece’s narrative order makes it sound like the opening acts were Típica 73 and Seguida and semantically positions El Gran Combo after the All-­Stars, but El Gran Combo was one of the concert openers. It moves Cameroonian musician Manu Dibango’s set that night into closer semantic and spatial proximity to the audience’s “spill from the stands onto the field,” and then the sentences quickly move to underscore that, to Fania’s credit, the concert was a “solid night of entertainment.”33 Like Marisol Negrón, I hear a semantic investment in the commodification of Latinx and Caribbean salsa musicians, as well as in the commodification of salsa audiences as exuberant yet fungible consumers, whose affects can be molded, controlled. However, I also hear unruly subjects busting out — of constraint, commodification, and representation. Fania label promoter and lawyer Jerry Masucci had made a deal with the city and the Yankees that the baseball field would not be damaged, that the audience would comply with the rules of the scene, and that the photographer and friend of pianist Larry Harlow, Leon Gast, would shoot footage for a documentary film during the concert’s planned two sets. But you can’t contract responses to stimulation. That audience got up and danced. Indeed, the end of the structurally strange documentary Salsa, Gast’s second film project for Fania, depicts the beginnings of the surge of audience onto the stage, and the closing credits (which hold inconsistencies consistent with the label’s sketchiness) are set not to music but to the audience’s ongoing roar. Will González’s story of the concert for espn (2008), retold as the old Yankee Stadium was shutting its doors in the Bronx, interviews the Fania-­contracted, white US American pianist and composer Harlow. Harlow discloses how scared he became as the audience surged, and he unintentionally invokes the simultaneity of losses and affective excess that disrupt commodification from within the processes of commodification when he says, “The concert almost sank Fania Records.”34 That audience overflowing their seats almost sank Fania. Legendary percussionist and composer Mongo Santamaría gigged with Fania at the time. Like Mongo Santamaría, experimental jazz drummer Billy Cobham sat

“¡Anormales!”: Unruly Audition  35

in both for the concert at Yankee Stadium and what the Fania label narrates as its “reprise,” the All-­Stars’ concert at Roberto Clemente Stadium in San Juan, Puerto Rico, a few months later, and we see both musicians in the video footage that became Salsa. The film’s editing is odd: it consists of footage from the performance at Roberto Clemente Stadium in San Juan months later—because there was not enough footage for a film from the Yankee Stadium concert of insurgent audience —  but it does not narrate that jump. The Fania label narrates the concert in San Juan as a “reprise” to the Bronx concert a few months earlier (and they don’t mention that the band went on to perform in Ponce after San Juan). The hulking, shoulder-­ bound, 16mm cameras used on the stages at Yankee and Clemente stadiums keep most frames tight, so that were it not for the band’s different outfits, a viewer could watch the film and miss that they’re watching two concerts spliced together. The splicing of Roberto Clemente Stadium into Yankee Stadium stretches out the Bronx concert and shrinks the San Juan concert, enacting a collapse of Puerto Rico into the Bronx that serves Fania’s official narrative desires of situating the musicians’ authenticity of sound in New York’s mean streets. As I track audio-­visual documentation of the All-­Stars’ performances, I see this street-­authenticating impulse elsewhere: Gast also directed the 1972 documentary film Our Latin Thing (Nuestra Cosa), made from footage of the All-­Stars’ famous performance at the Cheetah nightclub in New York City in 1971. It is another live recording, and a two-­volume set was produced from that concert. The Cheetah gig marked a breakthrough for the All-­Stars as a group in New York and Latin America. From the film’s first frames of nonwhite children running in the Lower East Side, it grounds that breakthrough in the “barrio,” which Negrón and Quiroga argue was crucial to the narrative of the All-­Stars’ sound being rooted in an authentic projection of the streets, as well as in a constricted notion of hetero-­masculinity.35 In Nuestra Cosa, then, we see a white projection of “Our Latin Thing” onto mixed-­race musicians. It is their hands and desire on the studio dials. And it is precisely white projection that we can imaginatively break with. In Salsa, quasi-­ethnomusicological sequences crop the concert footage, with a young Geraldo Rivera didactically droning on about “African roots.” Rivera turns to Manu Dibango to comment on salsa’s intra-­Caribbean drum rhythms in relation to West African drum rhythms, and a long sequence of Dibango performing “Soul Makossa” (1972) in San Juan becomes the middle of the documentary film. While it feels forced in the editing, I sense that the musicians were taking a position against Hollywood’s Latin stereotypes, and with African musical forms, and in the present. Salsa echoes Our Latin Thing’s fetishistic Fania construction of a singular urban “bad boy” trope. But I want to focus our attention elsewhere: the final pans of Salsa reveal people’s fists raised in Black Power salute alongside other 36  Chapter One

hands waving Puerto Rican flags at Yankee Stadium. Since Roberto Clemente Stadium has been spliced into this film footage of the Bronx concert, I imagine a mode of anticolonial, Caribbean Americas, sensorial solidarity that exceeds the intentions of the film. We might also imagine these fists raised in solidarity with the faln. I refuse the roar of salsa’s listeners and dancers as a record label’s success. I sense in their politicized physical gestures riotous, phonically pleasured, sensorial solidarity. On that August night in the Bronx, Mongo battled with conguero and composer Ray Barretto (aka el hombre de la mano duro [the hard-­handed man]) on “Congo Bongo,” and Lavoe sang vocals. According to Harlow, who composed the song, it was “Congo Bongo” that stimulated explosive emotion in the Yankees Stadium audience.36 Harlow’s piano was also filled with fireworks to be set off at the concert finale. But those fireworks didn’t go off — the audience did. So, the song and the battling performance of the song are only part of the story. There remain the audience’s abnormal feelings for salsa. And there remain my attachments to that audience, which disrupted outside investments in a narrative of successful Latino incorporation. Their joyous, de-­individuated, and complex stimulation did not comply with the civic script. Let’s call this riot an unplanned romp of hyper-­disidentification as a term marking an unruly, transformative movement of sonically oriented feeling (which has not ended) showing itself happen. With hyper-­disidentification, I am playing on Muñoz’s strategy and process of “disidentification,” and its affective underpinning in melancholia.37 The surging audience’s hyped misuse of the sound equipment is not a rejection of the music or musicians, or the position of audience, but turned the Bronx stadium into a “disidentifactory locus.” It reveals an excessive attachment to the pleasure generated by the music, by being together and sweating in a crowd, and that pleasure’s constitutive refusal of the sad script of comporting as good Latina/o/xs, a script that demands a forgetting of cultural and affective particularities and a detachment from the diasporic dead. The audience’s hyper-­disidentification describes a moment when Latinx incoherence summons something not assimilated, off-­kilter, simultaneously pleasurably and melancholically anormal. I claim something excessive, decadent, and cariñoso [tender] in the expansive, temporally unbound “sonic imaginary” of salsa listeners and dancers.38 I’m after abnormal feelings — my semantic tendencies swerve toward convergences of aesthetic pleasures. In the next two sections, I listen for unruly audition in other All-­Stars performances and recordings between 1972 and 1976, particularly Lavoe’s lyrical improvisations in versions of the song “Mi Gente” [My People], and the video recording of a live performance of the song “Ponte Duro” [Turn Up, or “¡Anormales!”: Unruly Audition  37

Get Hard] at the Zaire ’74 music festival in Kinshasa. In how this study enacts the methodology of multisensorial poetic listening to then describe the queer and improvisational gestures made between nonwhite and white Caribbean and Latinx salsa musicians and audiences, it deviates from cis-­masculinist takes on the performative and gendery masculinities and femininities of salsa. It registers the artists’ aesthetics and sounds as iterations of the abnormal feelings that ruptured the performance in the Bronx and sounded sensorial solidarity in Kinshasa.

“Mi Gente” [My People] and a Taste for Uprising

Salsa demands specific steps that must be danced with confident style and variation, hence Quiroga’s invocation of both losing it and maintaining “mediated control” that, perhaps, produces more physical adventures off the dance floor. Juana María Rodríguez theorizes and narrates sensual pleasure in small-­scale arrangements of control, self-­authorization, and performed power dynamics between gendery dancing bodies. But is that control not also pleasurable because you risk losing it? Going too high? Falling out? I would also say that salsa’s prescriptions of movement are precisely open to deviation. It must be noted that much 1970s salsa verged on jazz, bending time, stretching arrangements for eight, ten, fourteen minutes. This veering temporality pushes dancers from salsa steps to trance to descarga to disorder, or to the wall — or to the bar.39 That late-­summer Friday night in the Bronx in 1973, dancers surged and the audience became a crowd. Unable, or unwilling, to contain their joy in step, the audience’s onrush precipitated a different ending from the lucrative one the hype men imagined. As the crowd grew, the musicians fled. Gente took the stage and started pounding the piano and making the mic pop with vigorous misuse. Investments were lost; the mid-­season baseball field was damaged; and the sound equipment was busted. This information exceeds Gast’s Salsa documentary, which ends where the plot twist of rupture begins. While Fania contends that “Congo Bongo” ignited the concert-­ending riot, I linger with the audience’s taste for uprising in sonically close reading the lyrics of a song named for audience, “Mi Gente” [My People].40 “Mi Gente” has untranslatable and inexplicable elements, and it dubs an identitarian, nationalist, or cultural group name (be that Nuyorican, Puerto Rican, Latinoamericanx, Caribeñx) with the term anormal — an irresolvable nonequivalence. On Lavoe’s 1975 studio recording of “Mi Gente” for La Voz, something strange and pleasurable happens before the break into verses. Before the proper vocals, and well before the tongue twisters that bubble out of the extended play of the

38  Chapter One

song’s climax and ending, there is an excessive utterance, a cry: “¡Cuidao’ que por allí vienen los anormales! ¡Uu jaja! ¡Y con estreitjackets!” [Look out, here come the abnormals! Uu wa ha ha! And in straitjackets!] Transcription and translation are funky here: they emphasize syllabic approximation of what I hear rather than definitive containment of meaning, a syntax that matches the bodies it holds: a plurality breaking out of constraint. They resignify the hysteria projected onto them by the United States’ developments of straightening and whitening, and turn projected pathologies into musical, intracommunal play.41 I have been told by several salsa lovers that in both the recorded and live versions, Lavoe’s calling out lxs anormales is meant for his bandmates, who are so good they’re bad. Their skills reconstitute them as paranormal life, out of this motherfuckin’ world.42 But that is far from anormal’s signifying limit. Anormal holds love by another name — queer, something else. This something else is not only cried out that one time, before Lavoe begins “Mi Gente” in 1975. Rather, it is an interpolation that he tucks in between moments of improvisation on stage, that he scream-­sings out in between verses: the utterance-­cry-­address-­description of lxs anormales is itself unbound as it is repeated, repeatable, and ready for movement. The cry of lxs anormales is not a cappella, it erupts instruments: the congas, bongos, and piano initiate the ritual, and within three seconds, already bend it with flourishes. Five seconds into the opening passages, the signature Fania horn section blares, shooting holes through the drums’ line, with the clutch trombones spreading their thick thighs of brassy weight around the arrangement. Riding in on the drums and horns that set off the arrangement is Lavoe’s incandescent voice. He shines out a sequence of lyrical acts: instructive invitation; possession; the briefest touching description; and then a declaration of feeling. ¡Oigan mi gente! Lo más grande de este mundo Siempre me hacen sentir Un orgullo profundo. [Listen, my people! The best in this world, You/They always make me feel Deep pride.] Los llamé, No me preguntaron donde. Orgullo tengo de ustedes. Mi gente siempre responde. “¡Anormales!”: Unruly Audition  39

[I called them, And they didn’t ask, Where to? What pride I have in y’all. My people always respond.]43 The opening cry is literally for the imagined bodies of mi gente to listen: Oigan [Y’all listen]. I feel myself among those called to listen, and I get hung up in the fragment, Siempre me hacen sentir: y’all always make me feel — or is it they always make me feel? The address gives over to a grammar that could be second-­or third-­ person plural, an utterance directed toward a group of people or redirected and said about them, a gesture of representation. I interrupt the coming of the predicate filled with pride to suspend us in a grammatical ambiguity and break of feeling. Hearing “me hacen sentir” as “y’all make me feel” moves on a valence of direct and intimate address from el poeta [the poet] to mi gente [my people]. However, hearing “me hacen sentir” as “they make me feel” slides onto another valence where the singer’s relay to “mi gente” arrives by way of an apostrophic, third other in this discursive space — perhaps not only “mi gente” are listening, or perhaps “mi gente” are not all here yet. If we hang with the translation of they, then we can hear Lavoe, “el poeta del barrio” [the barrio’s poet], boasting to the world of “mi gente,” of how well they listen, and how fucking good this makes the singer feel: “Los llamé, no me preguntaron dónde / Orgullo tengo de ustedes / Mi gente siempre responde. / Vinieron todos para oírme y guarachar / Pero como soy (de) ustedes / yo le invitaré a cantar.” [I called them, and they didn’t ask, Where to? / What pride I feel for y’all / That my people always respond. / Everyone showed up to hear me and enjoy themselves. / But since I am (of) y’all / I invite you to sing.] Whether positioned as directly receptive object or as a delayed, possible, and loved object that eventually hears the cry to listen, the lyrics enact an attachment that is cariñoso [tender] to “mi gente” as a listening and feeling multiplicity. Significantly, the lyrics don’t give another noun for “mi gente.” Not Nuyorican, Caribeñx, Latinx, and so on, which would not have been unusual given the prevalence of “roll-­calling” in this form, or, invoking the imagined countries of the displaced that gather as a salsa audience. The lyrics shadow a we that does not arrive, grammatically or nominally. I offer this reading: a notion of “Mi Gente” through affect and sensorial orientation, which can include cultural senses of connection, but does not presume those are coherent or singular in one moment, much less the same over time. A we does not form in this song, but a possible plurality extends out of the song’s temporality into a future. There’s a wordplay in various versions of the lyrics of “Mi Gente” that goes: “Se soltaron los dementes” [The demented busted out]. This lyrical improvisation 40  Chapter One

summons unruliness in the metaphor of “los dementes,” and in their movement, “se soltaron,” which can be heard as busted out or rose up. Below, I translate a verse that emerges early in the song and a sequence of improvisations that comes later and includes the “dementes” lines in a long crescendo, which varies slightly from live performance to live performance to recording. This iteration is notably close to how Lavoe sang “Mi Gente” in the massive three-­day music festival in Kinshasa in 1974 in anticipation of the Ali – Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match (which I discuss below). But there’s more improvisation and ad-­libbing in this 1975 studio-recorded version than in the one we hear recorded on stage in Kinshasa and (likely) at Roberto Clemente Stadium in 1973 (even though packaged as Lavoe’s and the All-­Stars’ performance at Yankee Stadium): Conmigo sí, van a bailar Yo le invitaré a cantar Conmigo síííí ’eeeepaaaaa . . . [With me, yes, you’re going to dance And I will invite you to sing With me, yes, eeeepaaaaa . . .] ¡Se soltaron los caballos! A la la la la la la Se soltaron los dementes. ¿¡pa ’ónde van!? A la la la la la la No se oye nada Pero qué más duro, ¿qué pasa? La la la la la la la ¡Que se oiga! La la la la la la la ’Ñooooo [The horses broke loose! A la la la la la la The demented busted out/rose up. Where they goin’? A la la la la la la Can you hear it? Do it harder/louder, what’s the problem? La la la la la la la Hear this! La la la la la la la ’Ñooooo]44 “¡Anormales!”: Unruly Audition  41

“Se soltaron los caballos” is an ad lib in various Fania performances; Cheo Feliciano can be heard singing it elsewhere. But “Se soltaron los dementes. ¿¡Pa ’ónde van!?” is not sung in the Bronx iteration. This metaphor imagines a demented body of folks breaking out of an asylum and running loose, and I hear it as a Caribbean cry that performatively reclaims abnormality. With these lyrics in mind, I find it peculiar that the story of the rioting audience taking the stage is under-­told in salsa and Latina/o histories. Rather, Ed Morales positions the Bronx performance of “Mi Gente” as an ontological cry summoning specifically Nuyoricans into affirmative existence in New York, as a body in relation to but apart from Puerto Rico, and as metonym for Latinas/os in that moment.45 Morales narrates movingly an imagined rhapsody for the diasporic Rican audience of Lavoe’s performance of “Mi Gente” at Yankee Stadium. But his description imagines “Mi Gente” vis-­à-­vis the concert at Yankee Stadium apart from the contextual nuance contributed by the sound and video recordings. And he does not note the shift from audience rhapsody to overtaking the stage that ended the concert. The breakdown between the story told of the Yankees stadium concert, both as “identity affirmation” and the label’s success, and the audience’s eruption, not out of displeasure but out of an excess of taste for uprising, brings me to imagine Latinx as a rioting movement — as surplus of representative categorization.46 Re­ imagining Latinx not only as a force of categorical incoherence, a sign that makes identitarian reinscription impossible, but also as riotous movement, in excess of affirmative, representative categorization used by neoliberal capital, economic morality, and a historically whitened conception of US citizenship that forces disavowals of sensorial solidarity, allows us to begin to reclaim what is lost to, and remains despite, the injunctions of avowals of whiteness. Where an insurgent wave of feeling and sensorial stimulation goes — what bodies do with the feelings that erupt from how they listen — cannot be controlled.

The Singer as Poet: An Ensemblic Detour on the Violence of the Solo

Lavoe has been memorialized as both “El cantante de los cantantes” [The singer above all singers] and “el poeta del barrio” [the barrio’s poet]. I prefer the socializing effect of the latter nomme de chant over the solo-­izing danger laced in the former. I want to reimagine in relation to a raucously loving audience, an audience that sings an excess of sabor for uprising, how the singer Lavoe has been solo-­ized by music history and the market. Lavoe’s Puerto-­ and Nuyo-­Rican sounds and his highly adorned Caribbean, masculine style — his gold-­rimmed glasses, pinky 42  Chapter One

rings, blown-­out hair, tight and bright silk tops on tighter polyester bottoms —  were touched and shaped by others, by santería, the orishas, his bandmates, and his fans. His performance surname, Lavoe, is a particularly Puerto Rican linguistic act on the words La Voz, meaning The Voice, where the zed is swallowed by an open-­ mouthed O to make Lavoe. Sounding self-­delightedly Puerto Rican was one of Lavoe’s gifts, and this word-­and accent-­playful delight moves throughout his lyrics’ obsession with the dynamic of singer, band, fans, dancers, the gods, and history. Imaginarily emplace his body with ears of sonic gold and lungs of air that channel Caribbean winds, from where Haitian and Dominican intra-­Caribbean migrations to Puerto Rico have at least two centuries of history: Ponce. Lavoe (née Héctor Juan Pérez Martínez) was the child of musicians. His mother died when he was a kid. Later in life, his teenage son died playing with an armed gun. Joy, tragedy, extraordinary success, ocean-­deep darkness, drugs, plena, and bomba moved in him, and in the salsa that he sang. Myth tells us that the risk the singer runs is an offense that would strip them of their song or, perhaps graver still, their voice. There can be an underside to singing, a phrase that I hope brings to mind both copyright law and mythopoetics. At play in how the singer sings for, of, and to is nothing less than the gods’ pleasure and a people’s duration, which always holds a place underfoot. In the social dynamic of the singers and musicians performing with Fania in the 1970s, santería has an important but undernarrated place, which I see as akin to the discursive covering-­over of the riot of audience ending an All-­Stars concert in the Bronx: these are specific Afro-Caribbean, historical elements of disidentification, élan, unruliness, and a cosmogonic conception of space and time that frighten those of rational Man.47 Singers sing of places that they love, and that have cut them. They sing of having been displaced, they sing as metonyms of mass movements, and they sing of relational love having undergone a rupture — attachments vexed. Salsa singers move in high-­stakes dynamics with multiple entities, bodies, and temporalities, pulled by forces of this world and far beyond it. And all songs come to an end, as no one knows better than a singer. Lavoe’s laments of fame in “La Fama” [Fame] situate him in the company, for example, of downtown, Warholian conversations about US popular cultural and capitalist constructions of fame and its attendant, repetitive, killer upkeep. His sonic laments draw attention to the shared risks of “going solo,” which he did, as did other singers and musicians that comprised the All-­Stars in the 1970s and 1980s. One risk intensified for black performers in being singularized by the liberal, capitalist market, for the entertainment of white homo oeconomicus, is death. “¡Anormales!”: Unruly Audition  43

In situating Lavoe in relation to his audiences (plural), to Ponce, to his bandmates, to the intimacy and emotion between performers in live performance, I write to de-­singularize him and render his sonic afterlife ensemblic. This study’s disposition about the forces that romantically solo-­ize those formed by ensemblic play is that they destroy collective vitality. Salsa, in particular, installs romances, one of which is with the singer’s voice. But listen to how romance always has sharp edges, and in salsa of the 1970s, lyrics relay historical bindings to settler colonial invasions of indigenous lands, the many apparatuses that made, marshaled, and perpetuated the slave trade, the circum-­Atlantic plantation system, as well as the reiterated desire for revolt, for libertad o guerra [if not freedom, then war].48 Men weep in public when singing salsa, punch-­drunk on the pleasurably burning punishments of a lover-­muse. But I read into these lines of masculine gendered weeping an acknowledgment of an impossibly hard masculinity. Inflecting my writing about nonblack Lavoe and the potential risk of the solo life for black performers is Langston Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues” (1926). “The Weary Blues” is about listening to black musical performance. The poem begins with sound play: “Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, / Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, / I heard a Negro play.”49 The sound play reveals how the poem is a memory of listening to a live performance, which gives over to the lyric speaker’s dark fantasy, something he can’t know from hearing or seeing, but imagines. The singer leaves his instrument still vibrating with recent touch, leaves the stage’s promise of immediate gratification from a rapt audience, and goes home to sleep. Head heavy as a stone ’cause his heart is even heavier, like a man’s close to death, the blues singer lays it all down in that second layer of the performer’s night, between the set and twilight, that no-­place in which James Baldwin’s character Rufus is forever caught — purgatorio is another name for Another Country. But the blues singer and pianist of “The Weary Blues” will wake to his weariness again, and play the cycle all over; the blues recurrently plays the skipping promise of The End. And those repetitions circulate in its social life. Moving bodies and historical feelings get jammed up against each other in salsa, in how things get narrated. It is the singer’s voice, how it makes listeners bend to their blow, that often determines how the surrender to sound will feel. But what I am saying isn’t about solo power, the commodifiable uniqueness of a voice’s grain, and the violent heroic projections written into such scripts of the Other’s musical genius. Listeners as well as the market dubbed Lavoe “el poeta del barrio” in conjunction with the material circumstances in which he was singing. It must be said, also, that the Caribbean and Latin America can be far more generous with who wears the laurels of “poet” than the US. The Brazilian footballer Garrincha, for example, was called a poet. On his wonky legs, he dribbled and drew lines 44  Chapter One

around opponents and punched clutch goals. The bachata kings Aventura call themselves “poetas del amor” [the poets of love]. These usages invoke an old idea in various cultures: the poet is someone who lives in a trance relation to their art, and they radiate that as seduction of an audience. As the body who is closest to the risk of the muse’s takeover, the poet does something so beautifully that they are beloved for doing the thing with such charm. They may convey danger to a body politic, of getting lost in thrall. If we think of Vodoun’s poiesis, the one in thrall is not a danger to the body politic. A vessel of metamorphosis and relation, the Caribbean singer may instead figure as cipher for and effect of other possibilities between bodies so accustomed to everyday forms of control by neoliberal capital’s employment of the police state. Lavoe’s eulogy conveys attempted suicide on his launch into solo stardom, drug addiction, aids, and the exhaustion of his body wracked by a very public and “successful” performance life. In his aesthetic afterlife, we can do “immersive lingering” and sense for the relational potential in the songs he sings of his gente, to time, for the gods — ósea [or rather], for his gente, of salsa as musical form, to the gods; ósea, for la historia, of Puerto Rico, to his gente.50 In all of these arrangements, I want the reader to hear how Lavoe, un anormal, sings for (of and to) lxs anormales. These details of abnormal and ensemblic orientation lead me back to how to think about a cry to a people, a cry of and for feeling. To remix a question posed by Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, would “a cry independent of the population it appeals to or takes as its witness” fall something like a tree in an uninhabited forest?51 How do we think about a singer’s voice where there are not trained ears to hear, feel, and join in with their cries? Where there is not audition to make something of a cry to a people, the cry would complete its organic course into silence without finding plurality in other voices of bodies. But I’d tickle this more, and say that music, poetry, performance, and certain narrative modes press listeners/readers to contemplate whether such a situation could compel a cry to form at all, as a cry is metonymic of a people — eruptively historical and emplaced. To flip the expected logic of representation, whoever they are, those meant to receive this cry demanding that they listen, goes beyond what we think we know about who exactly is being called. We have a historical sense of who “el poeta del barrio” cries out to in the middle of the 1970s on stages in the Bronx, San Juan, and Kinshasa: Afro-Ricans, Nuyoricans, Caribeñxs, African Americans, Latinxs, Congolese, yes, as well as depressives, the horny, those who want to move to being moved, those who want to forget what is outside of the arena of feeling for an hour. . . . As one called by this cry to listen many years later, I sense it as moving across time and space, because I want openness from “¡Anormales!”: Unruly Audition  45

the invitation to listen for feeling. I want a sonic and sensuous ecological field of abnormal auditory potentiality to keep opening up. The position from which “Mi Gente’s” singer casts the Oigan [Y’all listen] address is a proliferate cut — the I is on and of the move: the African diaspora, the Puerto Rican diaspora, 1970s neoliberal capitalism’s circulation of Latin stars, spectacular figures who remind us of the many that this sound grows from. A proliferating cut makes many aquís [heres], and many feeling listeners of who can enact unruly audition, possible. The Nuyorican poet, playwright, and performance artist Pedro Pietri’s poetics often does not nominalize a cultural identity group, or, it construes a plurality of figures and objects that set off the sounds and dictions of Latinx and Puerto Rican affective and sensorial attachments and orientations in excess of identitarian representation. Cockroaches, in-­debt tricksters, language improvisers, moody and jumpy characters who sound but are not always named as X abound in Pietri’s poetics. His poetics performs excess of representation in the exact moment that political and academic identitarian essentialisms mobilized to demand more, and more visible, institutional representation — which inflects a reading of the poem “Puerto Rican Obituary” as an obituary for the positivist, political hopes of US minoritarian visual representation: Is a long ride from Spanish Harlem to long island cemetery where they were buried First the train and then the bus and the cold cuts for lunch and the flowers that will be stolen when visiting hours are over Is very expensive Is very expensive But they understand Their parents understood Is a long non-­profit ride from Spanish Harlem to long island cemetery Juan Miguel Milagros 46  Chapter One

Olga Manuel All died yesterday today and will die again tomorrow Dreaming Dreaming about queens Clean-­cut lily-­white neighborhood Puerto Ricanless scene Thirty-­thousand-­dollar home The first spics on the block Proud to belong to a community of gringos who want them lynched Proud to be a long distance away from the sacred phrase: Que Pasa These dreams These empty dreams52 The poem is an anticolonial imaginary of death in life. It disavows neoliberal achievement, and avows a melancholic, desirous sensorium. The poem does not leave the reader on a street of gringos who want to lynch dark-­skinned Ricans. The fantasy of white as ideal, whole, as desirable economic-­domestic order of property and spatial relations, as what will rectify lack, doesn’t endure all the way to the end of the poem — white desire doesn’t make it. Rather, the poem ends with a fantasy that in its capaciousness summons the lyrics and ad libs of “Mi Gente,” where white supremacist bibles have been used as toilet paper and Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga, and Manuel are in touch with “the summer of their senses,” “their own imaginations,” and “doing their own thing” in an imaginary Aquí [Here].53 Juan Miguel Milagros Olga Manuel will right now be doing their own thing where beautiful people sing and dance and work together where the wind is a stranger to miserable weather conditions where you do not need a dictionary “¡Anormales!”: Unruly Audition  47

to communicate with your people Aqui Se Habla Espanol all the time Aqui you salute your flag first Aqui there are no dial soap commercials Aqui everybody smells good Aqui tv dinners do not have a future Aqui the men and women admire desire and never get tired of each other Aqui Que Pasa Power is what’s happening Aqui to be called negrito means to be called love 54 Aquí to be called anormal, and to listen poetically to that call, arranges another place for desire and relation. Anormal makes love by another name. How we listen to and position ourselves in relation to 1970s salsa’s genre-­ mixing imaginary continues to hold unruly, swerving possibilities beyond the foreclosures of visual representation. Anormales as a sign moves today. The hardcore Puerto Rican traperos Fuete Billete invoke anormales on their 2013 track “Bien Guillao” [All That]. While his aesthetic and masculinity are not compelling to me, the Puerto Rican rapero Residente, formerly of Calle 13, invokes anormalidad as a multicultural sign of inclusion. His recent song “Somos Anormales” [We Are Abnormals] (2017) argues for ugliness, blemishes, irregularities, and deformity as (banally) good. The Rican trapero Bad Bunny invokes anormales in various lyrics, including the one in the epigraph from the track “Soy Peor” [I’m Worse] (2016).55 “Soy Peor” is both an exemplary rendering of the affective darkness of Latinx trap as a genre, which refuses the false promises of getting better on the terms offered by the state and normative sexuality, and a track that has studied the darker ballads of salsa’s archives, such as “Triste y vacío” [Sad and Empty], “Que Lío” [What a Mess], and “Periódico de Ayer” [Yesterday’s Paper]. These corta venas [vein-­slitting] songs call to the irredeemably “dark” dembow and trap aesthetic of “Soy Peor.”56 Bad Bunny’s queer, post-­Drake, highly decorated, abnormal masculinity is all about feeling loss concurrently with explicit, unabashed sexual desire, and listening to nonwhite and queer femmes. A sonic and affective off-­ kilter-­ness, in which I hear queerness, floats freely among the anormal ensemble.57

48  Chapter One

“Get Hard!”: Bliss in Kinshasa, or, They’re Not Not Doing It

Unruly audition can take forms other than riot; it also expands affective, sonic, and sensorial solidarity in a moment of imagined postcolonial possibility. Let us move now to Kinshasa, Congo (then Zaire), in 1974, where, before an audience of 80,000 people, the All-­Stars performed their sabores. Over three days in September, the musicians played in relation to Celia Cruz, Miriam Makeba, James Brown, Bill Withers, Big Black, the Spinners, B.B. King, and other African, African diasporic, Caribbean, mixed-­genre artists in Zaire ’74, a concert headlining the October Rumble in the Jungle fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman (an estimated one billion people watched the fight). Of course, the Fania label narrated this event as a transnational business success between Don King, Jerry Masucci, and the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. But we swerve from this success narrative and listen instead for the imagined phonic substance made between musicians and another salsa audience. Gast, alongside cinema verité filmmaker and cinematographer Albert Maysles, shot footage for film of the performances, which was released in 1986 under the title Fania in Africa.58 From repeatedly watching the YouTube iteration of Fania in Africa, I sense how the musicians’ dynamics inflect queer relation — in particular, in their near-­ten-­minute performance of the song, “Ponte Duro.”59 “Ponte Duro” can be translated as “Turn Up,” and, playfully, as “Harden Up,” “Man Up,” or “Get Hard.” The performance of this song is positioned late in the set as the climax. The timbalero [timbal player/drummer] Nicky Marrero and conguero [conga drum player] Ray Barretto play out battles of improvisation. Roberto Roena, percussionist and bongo player, precedes the battle, comes forward on the proscenium in a shiny, white and blue silk jumpsuit that sports his initials across the back, spins circles, and dances steps that break the floor. Roena is puro flow, lifting and locking his shoulders in karate, tough guy moves. From the waist up, his moves pose as pumped-­up and butch. From the waist down, he gives something else to work with. A line from Muñoz’s reading with the legendary dancer and pose artist Kevin Aviance cuts across how I sense Roena’s movements: “But imagine how hard it must be to try to look and act so butch all the time.”60 Muñoz describes how Aviance’s performance of gendery gestures in queer, downtown New York nightclubs reveals, rather than hides, the masc-­enforcing conditions that compel muscle-­ queens to pump their bodies into a hypermasculine ideal. The ideal must hide the conditions of becoming, in this case, from swishy to hard-­cut. Muñoz’s writing with Aviance’s poses detours from the doom of the singularized ideal.61 The theorist positions his “approach to” Aviance by looking at a performance while also looking at how other gays physically do it, in a crowd, as audience. Muñoz’s “¡Anormales!”: Unruly Audition  49

“approach to” Aviance also recalls his childhood self as “a spy in the house of gender normativity.”62 He learned practices of “butching ­up,” into and out of which he would slip, his body aware that this had something to do with surviving not only the street’s masculine hails, but also the normative constraints of domestic, familial spaces.63 And the slipping in and out, he tells readers, had “serious effects.” Both the “serious effects” and the play of slipping in and out of gendery gestures, and in relation to others in the world, move in Muñoz’s theory of queer as a horizon. I, another Cuban spy in houses of gender normativity, sense the break in Roena’s movements, the buff thrusts as well as the curvy undulations, the legs making turns smoother than breakdancing on ice. To my senses, Roena’s movements do things feminine and masculine. This simultaneity does things for the audience, of which listening viewers of the video are a fragmented part, and for the stage flanked by an all-­male band. Roena dances for himself, he dances for the men around him, and he dances for me, and my approach finds abnormal pleasure in his moves. From behind, Marrero makes the timbales talk, loudly — they can only exclaim. Marrero is so slick about it, and at a couple points lifts the stick in his right hand over his beautiful coif of black hair as though it were a comb, sliding it back over his crown, holding the beat with the stick in his left hand as he air-­grooms himself. Marrero’s leopard-­patterned, button-­down shirt with a gold collar is tied up at the waist over his pant line, revealing some belly skin and the beautiful descent of black pubic hair. From beyond the visual frame erupts “¡Anormal!” Off to the side of the drummers are the singers, and Lavoe is among them. Though he is not visible, I hear his distinctive cry swerve across the stage: “¡Ataca, demente!” [Attack, demented one!]. The camera fixates on Barretto, seated in the middle of the stage, behind his arrangement of red congas, and dressed in all red — red silk jacket and red bell-­ bottomed pants open over white patent-­leather shoes. His jacket is undone all the way, revealing his bare chest. As he begins his flow, we hear Lavoe’s cries, doing a form of listening that is not silent but approaching the other, egging on Barretto, and those within audible reach of his calls, for his pleasure. Barretto is a tall, thick guy, long arms, yet the way he works the heads and wood doesn’t dwarf the drums, but makes them seem even bigger than they are. He beats and strokes out rhythms with his palms, works himself into a euphoric state that nearly rivals the energy of Johnny Pacheco; Pacheco, the Dominican band leader, stays hype, and he also is time’s embodiment. Toward what becomes the end of Barretto’s improvisation, his hunky form rises and he lifts one of the red congas between his two hands and throws down the whole drum onto the stage. Its base thunders, wood 50  Chapter One

on wood. The drum becomes a mallet: the entire stage is Barretto’s cuero [drumhead], and everyone on it vibrates to his body’s ganas [desires]. Barretto and Pacheco face each other with the conga between them, jumping con gusto and their mouths wide open. Pacheco lifts his left leg up, wide, in a move that I associate with rumba, and opens himself to Barretto. Barretto thrusts his body into that opening. He lifts and slams the conga, and dances with it, circles around it, treats it like a body he wants to fuck, or a fire that holds a secret portal to the underworld, into which he dives. These movements conjure lo anormal, decadence, the gustatory, even a dementia. Pacheco’s thighs open his body to Barretto’s assertion. They both bounce up and down, blissfully. The look of ecstasy on Barretto’s face finds some remnant of control as he returns to his seat and the arrangement’s imagined end. They’re not necessarily doing it, doing sex, per se. But they’re not not doing it. The blissed gesticulations between Barretto and Pacheco, the descargas shuffling between “mediated control” and “losing it,” and the vibrations sounded out in the cries from Lavoe to Barretto that exceed them and touch us, set off pleasure in animality, and a sense of extraterrestriality — as in, our super-­boundedness to this terre. These super bounds take off from the here and now, which may also manifest as unruliness, losing it, and being beside ourselves. That feeling is underscored by Lavoe’s cry of “¡Anormal!” as a hyper-­disidentifying taste for more that could be too much, or could be what losses’ ruptures need to make more life.

Outro — Sound Sense

Obdulio gently but quickly brushes the hairs off of the back of my razor-­bladed, smooth neck. I request that he palm Pinaud’s aftershave along my hairline — I want the burn that completes this ceremony. As I get up from the red vinyl chair, on my way to meet friends at La Junta, I finally notice that Obdulio is wearing a T-­shirt with a caricature of Marc Anthony’s face on it. Spread around the print of his face are the words, No Bad Salsa. I laugh about the shirt’s shade, yet we are both clearly open to certain forms of musical degradation, as he and I were listening to “Mi Gente” and many other songs during my barbering, as mp3 files via mediocre speakers. As I get my money together to pay him, we talk about that famous head shot of Lavoe on the cover of the 1976 album De ti depende [It Depends on You], leaning forward on his hand donned with a gold pinkie ring. His feathered hair and anise-­tinted glasses are on-­point. We trade details of adoration: his for Lavoe’s and trombonist Willie Colón’s gangsta fetish; mine for Lavoe’s playfulness around the sound of sounding Boricua; mine for his flashy, wide lapel suits and button-­ down shirts opened for the gaze to dive low and lusty, which evoke the stylistic “¡Anormales!”: Unruly Audition  51

gayness of Caribbean masculinity for me; his for that bad-­ass cover to the album Cosa Nuestra [Our Thing], where Colón stands at a New York City dock zipping-­up a rifle case, a shape that also redraws a trombone case — some cabrón [fool] sleeps with the fishes, blown down by the beat. In how I listen, to the music and to the stories told by Puerto Rican artists about Fania’s sounds, artists who are on-­the-­low music freaks, by which I mean, historians of another stripe, I am enjoying and complicating my abnormal attachments to salsa, to Puerto Rico, and to the Caribbean as a region from which I reimagine the hemisphere, and fantasize about US hegemony’s subsumption into the Puerto Rican Plate, into the massive cracks at the bottom of the Caribbean seafloor. Visual artist and codirector of the San Juan independent art space Beta-­ Local, Pablo Guardiola, talks to me as we sit together one afternoon discussing the impossible task, which I’m trying to do anyway, of transcribing the ad libs and tongue twisters in the lyrics of “Mi Gente.” Guardiola tells me how the Fania musicians were paid in drugs instead of dollars for their performances. Sound artist and musician Joel Rodríguez, from Ponce, tells me how Lavoe refused to assimilate to the Fania record label’s proposed sound, and insisted on sounding like plena and bomba singers in his delivery. This insistence of Lavoe’s is audible to me particularly in the word plays at the end of “Mi Gente.” Visual artist Tony Cruz, who has a deep vinyl and record jacket archive, talks to me late one night at a friend’s house party, while we drink rum and listen to music so carefully that we can’t also dance to it, about how important the black singer of Mayagüez, Mon Rivera, was for Lavoe. Lavoe quotes Mon flirtatiously in “Mi Gente” in the tongue twisters, which I transcribe — as accurately and loosely as I can: ¿Ay, pero pa dónde tú vas? La la la la la la la Doña Pancha, Doña Pancha La la la la la la la Doña Pancha plancha con cuatro planchas, mamá. La la la la la la la plancha plancha con cuatro planchitas con cuatro planchitas planchaba, mamá La la la la la la la Recordando a Mon Rivera, mamá La la la la la la la Karakatiski . . . Karakatiski La la la la la la la Karakatiski . . . 52  Chapter One

La la la la la la la Otra vez, de veras con gusto, ¡¿Con sabor, qué pasa?! La la la la la la la ¡A gritar a todo el mundo . . . aquí! ... Oooootra, que rico Nos la comimos Nos la comimos, Willie [Gritos] Aaayyyyy Aaaayyy Unhh [a la Pérez Prado] Unhh Paren eso, paren eso Aa, muy fuerte . . . [Ahh, but where you going? La la la la la la la Doña Pancha, Doña Pancha La la la la la la la Doña Pancha irons with four irons, mama. La la la la la la la Irons and irons with four little irons With four irons she ironed, mama Remembering Mon Rivera, mama La la la la la la la Karakatiski . . . Karakatiski La la la la la la la Karakatiski . . . La la la la la la la One more, this time with pleasure. With sabor, what’s the problem!? La la la la la la la To cry to the whole world, from here! .... Anoooother, how tasty! We ate it. We ate it, Willie! [Cries Whistles] “¡Anormales!”: Unruly Audition  53

Aaayyyyy Aaaayyy Unhh (grunt, a la Pérez Prado) Unhh Stop it, stop that now Umm, how strong . . .] In this raucous cascade of nonsense, cultural jokes, rhymes, as well as references to musical precursors, the ensemble serves up a tasty dish of sound and then eats it up, savoring their own flavor. Pérez Prado, the King of Mambo, is audible in the grunt, the Unhh!, that I hear as a citation. “Karakatiski” is an invocation of Mon Rivera and his song by that name. Video artist, co­director of Beta-­Local, and ardent salsa dancer Sofía Gallisá Muriente tells me how Lavoe improvises on otherwise rehearsed, well-­trod paths of verbally excessive nonsense — he picks up breadcrumbs left by others, orienting the future of his sound. I relay these meandering anecdotes to you, reader, to also remark on my performance of knowledge here: it is far from complete, and not only academic. It has everything to do with living to listen for sound sense, nonsense, deviations on the cosmogonic order of violent, rational Man. Multisensorial poetic listening emerges from social interactions, conversations, dancing, being with others who know, feel, and hear nuances and details that escape my sensorium and history, but that I am open to receiving, reciting, and leaving for others. If we imagine Lavoe’s trabalenguas [tongue twisters] as a culturally specific bounty of syllables, which offer more than translatable meaning, as sound sense, and sin sabores as those who don’t know how to taste the sound, then the embodiment that vibes most with trabalenguas’ sound sense may be a riot of anormales con sabor that sends the very musicians who make the music running off stage, running out of their contract. Riotous sensorial movements generate anticolonial counterattacks of inter-­and intramural pleasures.

54  Chapter One

“I have been forced to hear a lot” The FALN, The Masses Are Asses, and the Sounds,

2

Shapes, and Speeds of Puerto Rican Defiance

. . . we wonder at the seeming docility of the subject . . .  — Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987) . . . how it is unmade, how it explodes, disseminates — by what coded paths it goes off.  — Roland Barthes, “The Struggle with the Angel” (1978)

Puerto Rican Defiance and Explosions

Puerto Rican acts of defiance throughout the twentieth century shook the United States’ debt-­financed and military-­armed hold on the Puerto Rican archipelago.1 Bombs set by Ricans have gone off on US claims of sovereignty. Bombs detonated in capitalist commercial, police, and juridical structures veer, morph, and continue exploding critical repercussions across the apparatuses that bolster the US’s invasive hemispheric property claims. Bombs’ thunder resounds in the sonic and synesthetic shapes of defiance made by Puerto Rican women actants. With the shapes and sounds of defiance enacted by a member of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña [Armed Forces of Puerto Rican National Liberation] (henceforth, the faln) and the character Lady in Pedro Pietri’s play The Masses Are Asses, I reimagine the ethical, affective, and sensorial consequences of protracted US military invasion in the Puerto Rican and Caribbean archipelagos. Puerto Rican women actants have erupted subjectivity as audio-­visual, performative, and multisensorial defiance. Sonically and graphically, various actants —  people, creatures, and objects that set things off — defy the formation of the Enlightenment individual and post-­Enlightenment legal history’s burden of proving

self-­possession. They also defy the US’s wedding of sovereign self-­legitimacy and violence. Defiance — desafiar [to defy] — happens at different velocities. Desafiar holds within it direct and combative confrontation with an enemy’s desires, varied modes and genres of undoing and unmaking, as well as processes of decomposition. Defiance’s different speeds make different shapes for insurgency. Those shapes include those that form in-­between nonparticipation and hyper-­participation, or repeated refusal and distorted complicity. The Puerto Rican insurgent Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres made sonic shapes of nonparticipation while sitting beside herself on trial for bombing a building of US commerce. The character Lady in The Masses Are Asses makes sonic shapes of hyper-­participation while bent over in eruptive, excretory relief near her bowel-­regulating man-­captor. The historical and fictional actants and objects gathered here are Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres, the Puerto-­ and Chicago-­Rican radical and former member of the Marxist-­Leninist, anticolonial faln; a loudspeaker in a room adjacent to a federal courtroom; the character Lady, written as visually ethno-­racially ambiguous, in Puerto-­ and Nuyo-­Rican poet, writer, and performance artist Pietri’s play The Masses Are Asses; a concealed tape recorder in the play; US laws on “seditious conspiracy” and terrorism; and bombs. This varied list of objects and anti-­subjects compels thinking about forms of nonwhite racialized defiant women in situations that covet their consent with the law’s negation of their inherent capacity to authorize themselves — erotically, politically, and relationally. It is important to hear at a high volume that the Puerto Rican anti-­subjectivity imagined here is explosive. This explosiveness occurs in situations of legible outright refusal as much as it does in situations of performed complicity that re-­encodes refusal. Before the law, Puerto Rican women’s subjectivity appears unrestrained, irrational, linguistically vexing, and forceful. How they have deployed their explosiveness is of historical importance, in part, because the United States has narrated Puerto Rico as passive, feminized, and receptive to the US’s historical incursions. It is also important because of how nationalist discourses of the Caribbean and Latin America have misread Puerto Rican radical aesthetic, social, and sensorial strategies. An invaded archipelago and an invaded collective psyche do not spell out victimhood, dependency, and benign passivity. Collective, accumulated historical losses and sensorial rearrangements manifest creative strategies of defiance —  of undoing, spelling, and decomposing the violent sovereign’s ties — in the shapes of performatives of nonparticipation and performatives of warped hyper-­ participation. The anti-­subjects operating here do not sustain the narrative line of insurgent defiance to a masculinist, climactic revolutionary outcome—a singularly self-­determined end. Those expectations are off, or, better said, bad objects of 56  Chapter Two

study reveal a range of strategies of defiance. They go off on the sovereign limits of subjectivity and sense. Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman have written on and across the narrative limits of historical archives regarding the position of “the captive,” specifically the indigenous-­African-­woman-­becoming-­black-­female-­captive of the “middle passage.”2 In “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), Hartman semantically performs the limits of possible narrative representation of the lives of captives out of the master’s archives in which she, as a subject, is melancholically enmeshed in the present, a feeling she dubs “the afterlife of property.”3 Hartman chisels into relief the prevalence of romance in narratives that do everything to write away varied historical forms of African diasporic female insurgency in the archives, in the hold of the slave ship, and in a range of domestic and institutional spaces of so-­ called American life. I return often to “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987) to reread the syntax and build of Spillers’s deft, splaying study of traces of enslaved Africans’ opacity in slavers’ archives. Among the entangled forces that constructed and protected (ongoing) centuries of “inveterate obscene blindness” on European and American ships to the “ ‘cargo’ that bled . . . among immovable objects,” Spillers locates an iterative and perceptual incapacity to sense in proximity to black female slaves’ positions, affects, and movements outside of the rapist romance that held, and holds, (something of) them captive.4 Since the eighteenth century, US law has perpetuated the narrative, affective, and sensorial incapacities legible in slavers’ archives of laboratory prose, just as it has romanticized sadism as nationalism and violent self-­legitimation as reason. This historical narrative of affective and sensorial incapacity remakes itself through time: US law did not know how to imagine the range of subversive potential of anticolonial nonwhite and nonblack radical women in the 1970s (or at any other time, frankly), who confound the law. In its historical connections to English common law’s protections of white domesticity, white women as white men’s symbolic domestic increase, white men’s money as laboring for that increase, and mattering more than the labor and lives of nonwhites, US law does not interpret partus sequitir ventrem to mean that which comes from the (black) womb is as imaginatively defiant as black motherhood. It seems, however, sourcing from the archives of violence against black female flesh that it sanctions as its sovereignty’s origins, that the paranoid 1970s US juridical order did know how to take Puerto Rican women insurgents captive and torture them, and publicly not acknowledge that torture.5 It knows how to break what it cannot fathom, how to subject those from the torrid zone to fallenness from being. In the spirit of Spillers’s line of thought about black female insurgents, “that insurrection might have involved, from time to time, rather FALN, Masses Are Asses, Defiant Women  57

more subtle means than mutiny on the [ship] ‘Felicity,’ for instance,” I listen and sense for explosive as well as nuanced sonic, performative, and multisensorial shapes of Rican women’s defiance.6 Sound is not ideologically neutral. The white US settler-­colonial state racializes, classes, and renders punishable bodies and neighborhoods that constitute noise and public disturbance.7 It uses sonic and discursive technologies to enact sensorial subjection on Puerto Ricans in the archipelago and in the diaspora. Sound manifests in the shapes made in captivity, and from bodies that exceed the state’s self-­sovereign and antiblack epistemic logics. Exploding bombs and breaking wind on US ideology and its technologies of sonic and sensorial subjection swerve us away from questions of a one-­to-­one relation between the signs of subject and identity. This chapter does not rehash the history of the subject/identity dyad. Rather, it moves across a literary text written for staged performance and a legal transcript of a trial, across language performed in court as nonparticipation with US law and literary language that dramatizes recognizable shapes and speeds of refusals of patriarchy, particularly among variably nonwhite women’s bodies enacting their power from the positionality of anti-­ subjects. Bluntly said: they do not try to achieve incorporation into white civic life. And the risk that they run in their performative unincorporation is higher than that of assimilation. US claims of sovereignty in the Caribbean are a form of trespassing.8 Defiance of trespassing occurs in the performative and political zones of the legal, aesthetic, affective, and sensorial. In the legal and aesthetic zones, scripts of normative citizenship project the demand of what cultural and literary critic Rey Chow calls “coercive mimeticism” onto minoritarian subjects. I must note that “minoritarian” is one sign by which I imagine Puerto Ricans, but I also imagine them, in the archipelago and in the Caribbean and diasporas beyond, as Caribbeaners not only bound to the regime of US registers. Compliance with constraint and normalizing invasion is what the US wants to see performed back, coercively mimed by Puerto Ricans. The US trades economic bonds in its image and narrative of the archipelago’s population as politically confused — forever vexed between statehood and autonomous nationhood — and bound to keep checking the box of “None of the Above” where the invader’s political options presume that they are extant givens, much less that they are his to give. The US uses the archipelago as a political, economic, and scientific “Free Associated State” for toxic experimentations, and as a hemispheric naval foothold. Those displaced out of the archipelago’s “Free Associated State” into the legitimated states, the US narrates as politically and socially negligible actors. This categorical mess exceeds mimeticism. Coerced consent is also part of the picture. 58  Chapter Two

So as to smash the Puerto Rican archipelago and its waters into the conception of a single island, the US government also uses the category of “unincorporated territory.” It uses this term for other lands that cannot invoke recorded histories of indigenous sovereignty prior to colonial invasion. “Unincorporated territory” clearly expresses the master’s perspective: to his mind, the other wants his reason for being. The heavily armed and self-­legitimating enemy of variable forms of life takes others captive in the perverse promise of perpetually suspended freedom. To believe and perform the script of US sovereignty is the state’s injunction that then casts enactments of other ideas of space and being not just as disruptive of the oppressive and extractive tourist economy but as criminal, extreme, crazed, and temporally suspended.9 A nuanced and attentive sensorium can approach some of the sonic, performative, and multisensorial shapes of defiance made by Puerto Rican ways of living, thinking, and feeling that swerve on and distort sovereign narratives of individuation and coerced consent.

The Caribbean’s Unsovereign Deposition of US Sovereignty

What happens over time to the trespasser? How do his unwelcome, self-­sanctioning, arrow-­like forces of incursion undo him, the one who narrates himself in history as the “virile member,” who claims that his fuck comes first, who displaces a people’s history into a story of his violation as origin? I do not see his sovereign self-­control as he does in his self-­possessed narrative. And I currently suspend the achievement of sovereignty as the necessarily radical goal. I witness with a distorted sensorium how US courts’ trials of radical Caribbean women insurgents rehearse its geographic and psychic deposition. Part of this deposition involves troubling the subject as a linguistic occasion for the individual to rearticulate the sovereign’s coherence. In The Psychic Life of Power (1997), Judith Butler locates a trope in the subject’s self-­individuating articulations, an iterative turn repeating its position across Western philosophy: the (white racialized) body bent in subjection, in defilement, in downturned need of absolution10 —  bent with bad conscience, negative narcissism, and disgust for his body, of which the nonwhite racialized other’s body reminds him. A bent shape recurs in my reading of The Masses Are Asses, where a kind of lording-­bondage dynamic plays out between the two characters, called Lady and Gentleman, and, arguably, within each of them. There, however, the curved pose made by the character Lady is attendant to literally shitting on a scene of absurd, gendered captivity. Rather than read the bent Puerto Rican, Caribbean woman’s body as successfully subjected, I sense an anti-­subjective shape of unsovereignty that reveals the US’s — the trespasser, captor, and perverse daddy — bad consciousness. FALN, Masses Are Asses, Defiant Women  59

Of the US’s bad consciousness and its offer specifically to Caribbean Ricans of sub-­or para-­equality in the farcical terms of statehood or a diasporic citizenship of a “Free Associated State,” Juana María Rodríguez poses this question: “If Puerto Rico is getting fucked [up the ass] in the sexual metaphor that has been used to define its relationship to the United States, how has the United States been fucked in return?”11 Rodríguez asks this question in her study of Puerto Rican reverend and political activist Margarita Sanchez de León, who turned herself in to the Sexual Crimes Division of the Puerto Rican Justice Department for having breached the “sodomy laws” extant in 1997.12 De León was involved in activism to legalize same-­ sex marriage in Puerto Rico. While de León was giving testimony about sexual autonomy before the House of Representatives, Rep. Edwin Mundo interrupted and threatened her, stating that if she were a lesbian, then she could be arrested according to the “sodomy laws,” so he did not want to hear more of what she had to say. For Mundo, an invested reinforcer of US invasion, she was out of order. A few days later, she surrendered herself for sexual crimes. She did not clarify to cops how exactly she had engaged in acts that, in the law’s inconclusive language, could have involved getting fucked up the ass, fucking someone up the ass, or doing something sexual with a puta or puto [sex worker] or a sucia [ho], or anybody not sanctioned as sexually normal who arouses the sign of “crimes against nature.” The district attorney did not press charges for various reasons, among them that he did not see a lesbian as having a “virile member,” which may also be heard as a sovereign member. By methodologically situating notions of queer sexual sovereignty along specific legal and activist lines in relation to indigenous studies laws and imaginaries of sovereignty, Rodríguez shows the knots of coloniality, patriarchy, harm, humor, and what M. Jacqui Alexander calls “erotic autonomy”13 in this version of Puerto Rico’s political story.14 In conversation with the work of J. Ke¯haulani Kauanui, Rodríguez argues that Puerto Rico, unlike Hawai’i, for example, does not have legal claims of prior native sovereignty, and the island is not under one definition of military occupation. The US invaded in 1898 amid century-­long, intra-­Caribbean, regional movements against Spanish colonialism, and its project of massacre and intra-­Caribbean dispersal of indigenous people during centuries of mining, land expropriation, and plantation slavery. However, from my perspective, the foreign tourists who trash the place, the disaster capitalists who have increased in invasive numbers after Hurricane María, incentivized by US tax codes/money laundering, and the US’s economic austerity measures that keep Puerto Rico in debt are all mutually enforced by the US’s historical, and ongoing, military invasion of the archipelago, and its use of the islands specifically for “weapons testing” and for strategic ports from which to 60  Chapter Two

invade other parts of the Caribbean and Latin America. Tourists are parts of the apparatus of the invasive sovereign’s individuating species. No, there is not (yet) a singular occupying population of which to rid the islands. There are not indigenous, legal sovereignty claims at play in Puerto Rico’s geopolitical future. But these differences precisely delineate Puerto Rico’s unsovereign power. Puerto Rico’s legal relationship to the US is a farcical trap. Colonial voting as liberatory is a sadistic trap. And those who bombed the forcemeat stuffing of sovereignty out of US imperialism also explode the claims of “legitimate exercises in legitimacy.”15 Like Billy-­Ray Belcourt, in his proposal of an “Indigenous Studies beside Itself,” I find the word sovereignty charismatic, potentially all-­consuming, and eclipsing of the poetic possibilities of what he calls sexual “non-­sovereignty.”16 Puerto Rico’s unsovereign positionality forces the Caribbean’s deposition of the United States. And Rican anti-­subjectivity is part of its unsovereign unruliness.

Synesthetic Anti-­subjectivity

Sonic subjectivity holds within it shapes of anti-­subjectivity — which are not subjectivity’s exact opposite, but synesthetic deviations from the notion that subjectivity must necessarily cohere into one verifiable, much less individuated, position. I locate an entrée into thinking about how visual subjection generates sonic attachments and an explosiveness of subjectivity, which is important to what I call anti-­subjectivity, in reading Alexander Weheliye’s writings on “sonic subjectivization.”17 Weheliye’s conceptualization of “sonic subjectivity” is by definition explosive. It emerges from the late nineteenth-­century, post-­“Emancipation” rupture of the sound source from relayed sound, its performance and reception, and, even more specifically, the breach between the performer’s face and the listener’s body as eardrum that the phonograph and modern sound technologies forged through black popular music and its vast world of listeners. The theorist does not bemoan that breach. Rather, riffing on Édouard Glissant’s conception of opacity and Ralph Ellison’s protagonist’s desire for audio-­excess in Invisible Man, Weheliye offers an Afro-­diasporic mode of thinking subjectivity sonically from the irreducibility of music and sound, which are unbound from intelligibility, meaning, and linguistic coherence, or, the articulate regime of self-­possession. Afro-­modernity’s “sonic subject” listens at “the spatiotemporal crossroads” of cultural technologies’ “lower frequencies” that rub between a singer’s voice-­face and listener’s ear-­body.18 I emphasize the convergence of the listener’s body-­as-­ ear(drum) in my reading of Weheliye’s reading of the protagonist in Invisible Man to draw attention here to what that metonymy does synesthetically, and to remind us that while Invisible Man’s protagonist lives between invisibility and a “hole” FALN, Masses Are Asses, Defiant Women  61

lined with all of those lights, he is also an intense poetic listener. The protagonist yearns to blast one recording of Louis Armstrong singing “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” on five different phonographs in his lit-­up basement hole. For, as Ellison’s prologue tells us, “when I have music I want to feel its vibration with my whole body.”19 The protagonist desires not different versions, or remixes, of the song’s meditations on hyper-­visibility but rather multiple sites of vibrating pressure of the difference laid down in that one cut playing on all his parts. This imagery is sexual (i.e., the subject’s body vibrates and wants more vibration, multiple heads blasting in a hole) and formally diasporic. Rather than reading an absolute binary between the visual and the aural in the US’s spatialization of its racist epidermal schema, Weheliye posits that “visual subjection begets sonic subjectivation.”20 In my reimagining of sonic, performative, and multisensorial shapes of defiance in Latinx and Caribbean cultural and aesthetic work, I pose a mutation of Weheliye’s thoughts on visual-­sonic begetting as a set of questions: What should we make of an imperial, aspirationally monolingual American English and its attendant racist, colonial, and exceptionalist ideology as a soundtrack of violence used specifically against Puerto Ricans since the late nineteenth century, in the archipelago and in the states? What of Puerto Rican performative defiance of self-­possession on the levels of sound and the senses? What of audio-­visual subjectivizations that do not render coherent subject positions? What of Rican defiance marked by US law with seditious conspiratorial intentionality, even as the state moved to violently diffuse that radical danger and possibility since the 1930s? The senses are not bound to articulations of individuation that crowd out the collective synesthetic possibility of an unsovereign imaginary. The collective Rican sensorium and psyche — invaded by US imperial ideological violence, military “weapons testing,” laws against anticolonial aesthetic expressions, and outright torture — manifest their desires by modes other than speaking, being represented, and rearticulating the presumptions of reasonable, sovereign self-­possession as what makes the other human for the master/Man. I align with Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres and Lady in The Masses Are Asses in an ensemble of bad objects. A genderqueer child of a Cuban mother who grew up in the US South, who does not call themself Cuban American because of its relentlessly conservative and private proprietary motivations, with deep social, linguistic, emotional, musical, and aesthetic attachments to Puerto Rico, among other parts of the Caribbean, I do not write with national feelings, but something else. Nationalist consciousness was one way to get to affective defiance and spatio-­ temporal deviations on the US’s trespasses in the Caribbean and Latin America. I live and write in intimate, periperformative relation to Puerto Rican national62  Chapter Two

ist feelings and histories, as well as anarchic articulations of anticolonial defiance. But nationalism is not the operative consciousness here, in part because I don’t have a dog in the fight of narrative purity that national consciousness often demands, and in part because patriarchy and misogyny shadow nationalism’s narratives, including revolutionary ones.21 My attachment to the faln acknowledges the aspects of their ideology that move through national consciousness. Part of their political narrative, as with other radical anticolonial organizations in the 1970s, indeed deployed a nationalist tropology. And yet nothing requiring language can keep it so tight; many other elements circulate in their system of meanings. Rather, I take the position that we can narrate attachments to places inhabited and imagined plurally and through more than national grips on affect. I hold this position out of my notion of defiance as complex and multisensorial —  including that enacted by a woman who later broke from the radical group, after being tortured in US custody, who is not a hero but a person who enacted one possible position in an impossible situation, and by the character Lady, who does not cleanly break “free” from para-­domestic captivity. Cultivating complex affective and sensorial attachments to and desires for a place of gathering some historical extension of ourselves that does not only return to what Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery” but veers toward where that “has ended” would mean that we are imagining in excess of patriarchal and violent sovereign shapes of meaning.22 As I think in relation to Puerto Rico today, after Hurricane María, a colonial-­ ecological disaster, I find myself thinking of decomposition and unanticipated forms of regrowth as part of the tropical landscape’s vengeance on colonization. Different velocities of decomposition rupture the US’s colonial hold on Puerto Rico. Decomposition gives us a temporally bendable and potentially generative metaphor to live in relation to the currently hyper-­visible havoc that landscapes everyday life on the islands after the hurricanes of 2017. There are etymological connections between the words decomposition, defiance, and desafinado — or, to be off, out of tune — across English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese.23 We could even say that defiance enacts combative, accelerated decomposition of an imposed relationship, such as that of forced allegiance. The US administers democracy as neoliberalized capitalism at gunpoint and calls that generosity. An enemy that demands its violence as friendship, the US shepherded debt into Puerto Rico through Wall Street junk bond schemes in the early twenty-­first century, and renamed it the crisis of the island’s dependency. In addition, since (before) 1898, the US has narrated its warring invasion of the Puerto Rican archipelago, and, by extension, the Caribbean archipelago, as a pageant of pseudo-­quasi-­divine higher purpose. Affectively categorical yet deeply arbitrary measurements of the other’s sanity, consonance, and readiness to “self-­govern” — aka the master’s units — narrate FALN, Masses Are Asses, Defiant Women  63

(to himself) colonialism’s horrors as civilizational beneficence. Rican artists and activists have lived and enacted thinking and feeling otherwise than the imposed narratives by means of open defiance, an urgent decomposition of ties, and by other means, smaller ones, daily cultural ones, such as performing being sensorially desafinada/o/x, or, off, where off signifies a refusal of given political models. The trial and captivity of Puerto Rican women insurgents are part of a chaotic process of deposing the US in the Caribbean. In their respective scripts of (anti) captivity, both Beltrán Torres and Lady are treated as irrational, off, and hysterical by men who imagine themselves to be in control of the narrative and the scene of encounter —the Judge in the courtroom and “Gentleman” in the play, respectively. Neither breaks away to greener, radical grass; both make defiant and complicit contortions in states of capture that could never amount to freedom.

Mnemonics of Capture, Excretory Relief, Matrilineal Disturbance

Colonial life’s camouflaged status quo generates a poetics. The complex layers of farce in Puerto Rico’s legal and psychic status compress and distort in Pedro Pietri’s absurdist theater’s poetics of obscenity. The absurd and the obscene dramatize and thereby help us sense the strangeness of the colonial status quo. The Masses Are Asses unfolds in a South Bronx tenement toilet. The basic plot: two characters, called Lady and Gentleman, engage each other inside the toilet room (poorly) designed to service an entire floor of a tenement building in the South Bronx. Gentleman insists that Lady comport with the fantasy that they are on a vacation in Paris. Lady must play along with her captor/seeming-­husband, including obeying his embargo on flushing, as it will give away to their neighbors that they have not gone on vacation but are there, squatting in the hallway toilet that they live in like an apartment because they have been evicted. It is late in the play that the text makes it clear that mounds stick in the commode, whereupon, as a reader, one must wonder both about the potential usage of smell in a staging of the play and consider how the imagined waves of materially unresolved stench affect the characters’ lines of thought. Pietri’s use of language, plot, space, and time is an absurd dramatization of a scene of capture, in part, because it retraces the farcical qualities of the US’s legal relationship to Puerto Rico. And the plot has a sense of humor, operating in different moments as a squatting scenario, a fantasy scenario, as well as an abusive hostage scenario, where Gentleman holds Lady discursively and physically captive in the toilet room. The play is riddled with a score of sounds that waft in from outside, and erupt from inside. The fantasy/captivity/squat renders the toilet a kind of sound chamber that auditions passing disturbances on the street in which the 64  Chapter Two

characters neither directly join nor intervene.24 But they can hear, and do listen. The characters sit with abjection — and there is, at times, pleasure in it. There is no astringent mediator for their scenario — there is only playing pretend. Gentleman tends to determine the rules of the game, and he claims every action — playing rich, playing poor, playing hurt, playing violent — as pretending. But the question of a “nonpatriarchalized” female body inevitably and obscenely poses itself, and does things to distort masculinist scripts of regulation. The Masses Are Asses was first mounted in 1974 in Manhattan, and the script was published ten years later, in 1984, after Pietri workshopped and changed aspects of the absurdist play and had it translated into Spanish for a performance in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This is more or less the time frame of the faln’s 120 bombings. It is also the time frame of the intensification of the United States’ criminalization and punishment of Puerto Rican women radicals. Jan Susler writes that the late 1970s and early ’80s “witnessed a greater number of women in federal prison for politically motivated acts related to the Puerto Rican independence movement and the Black liberation and anti-­imperialist struggles.”25 The play emerged in a time of explosive subjectivity and experimentation with how to hold women who break (with) patriarchal captivity. Some forms of break include selective participation that exceeds patriarchy’s system and metrics of meanings regarding what constitutes comportment and individuation. The Masses Are Asses, in its very title, and in its fleshy, visceral wordplay, challenges the concept of “stable individuality.” It is when the masses get possessed by the illusion of individual responsibility and ownership that they separate from their asses, their desires, and the histories of themselves. The written text asks readers/audiences to sit for a long one-­act play with two poor characters, marked linguistically, affectively, and culturally, but, curiously, not properly nominally or visually ethno-­racially in the stage directions. The notes before the play begins state: The Masses Are Asses is a one-­act play that takes place in a fancy restaurant or an empty apartment. The time is sometime last week. The title of this play is original regardless of how many times the title has been used before. Any resemblance to the masses living or dead is purely coincidental. Characters: Lady 30 or 93. Gentleman 93 or 30.26 The notes assign gendered nominals as names denoting binary respectability and class status, Lady and Gentleman. But throughout the play, their gestures and sensitivities render awareness that they cannot ever perform successfully enough to have rid themselves of the kind of behavior that the normative, dominant, white supremacist sphere expects nonwhite and antinormative (un)subjects FALN, Masses Are Asses, Defiant Women  65

to un-­be (i.e., degenerate). They can perform aspiration, wanting to have what whitened, Enlightened, violently sanctioned subjects in history have shored up by centuries of dispossessing others of common and cultural resources. But they cannot live sufficient lifetimes themselves to have so much as to be what that aspiration values. There’s no exit, but there are different ways of doing life in these bounds. Because Pietri is Ponceño by way of New York City, do we read the characters as Ricans? The characters do not assume identities in the shape of a noun, but they sometimes sound like what we may think Bronx Ricans in 1974 may have sounded like (whatever exactly that means). Or because the play spatializes the South Bronx, do we imagine the characters as otherwise West Indian or African American? Because the play metonymizes living conditions in the South Bronx with a toilet, do we house in the text’s imaginary an equivalence between quality of life and the unruly capacity of imagination? I suspend us in varied impulses and modes of readerly and performative (dis)identification.27 Lady and Gentleman know how to ruminate on and dish the mnemonics of class and race. I sense the characters and their unruly ear for subjection as affectively ludic and performatively incoherent, an incoherence that evokes both Latinidad and blackness, particularly through metaphor. Lady invokes welfare, generational poverty, and a matrilineal genealogy in her lines, and both characters perform a capacity to switch between imitating the sounds of the socio-­ pathologically “rich” and the sounds of “pathologized” “loitering” “poor.” Lady sounds nothing like agreeing to Gentleman’s performance of self-­sovereignty, even if she does not rise to the specific clamor of recognizable revolutionary refusal of conditions. The play sounds out rehearsals of defiance of capitalist traps in part by reiterating the absurdity of the normative scripts that make traps sound like living. The play opens with Gentleman and Lady performing “snobbish throat clearing” for several intervals of noted seconds (thirteen seconds, fourteen seconds, etc.) while a telephone rings off-­and-­on underneath whatever kinds of grunts have class. They’re late to dinner, rushing, but as soon as they sit down at the table, they begin exchanging a set of compliments back and forth. gentleman: I just want to observe you. lady: Why, thank you very much. gentleman: You look flabbergasting everlasting. lady: You look everlastinger flabbagastinger. gentleman: You always look astounding. lady: You always look astoundinger.28 66  Chapter Two

Gentleman rehearses seeing Lady as a specimen. Lady retorts in twisted comparatives and superlatives. The bizarre compliments continue and soon Gentleman reveals, “I have been secretly taping all the compliments we exchanged.” He plays back to Lady and himself parts of their exchange from the tape recorder, a series of exaggerated toasts in which I hear abjection: “You look official. You look legitimate. You look important. You look interesting. You look uptodate. You look futuristic. You look futuristicker.”29 Pretending to be rich and assimilated, Gentleman and Lady go on a Parisian vacation and dine at the restaurant, La Plume de Ma Tante, a name that may be heard as the Taint’s Feather, the Taint’s Pen, or the Killer’s Feather, if we hear Ma Tante as matante. But they have also locked themselves into an enclosure. And they refuse to reopen the toilet door — no matter whether neighbors knock to use the shared toilet, no matter that the landlord has already come with eviction papers, no matter that it sounds like a woman on the street outside of the building is being raped and calling for help, no matter that it sounds like a woman is being robbed of her wedding ring and will be killed.30 The question arises if these are all sounds from the outside or if Lady makes them to break the character that Gentleman demands she play, to alleviate her conscience, and perhaps to call attention to her situation. For example, in the text, it sounds like a woman outside is being robbed and then the Lady goes into a role-­play of a woman being robbed, speaking over what she hears, in the same way that the characters clear their throats loudly over the ringing phone that intermittently punctures their exchanges. The text sonically troubles the breach of inside and outside. But the toilet room smells so shitty that the robbers, who emerge at one point (to rob a toilet?), go away. By the end of The Masses Are Asses, the apartment building is burning from a stove-­ top fire of burned beans, but the smoke helps mask the odor of the inodoro [toilet] whose fragrant intensification, in my experience of the written text, marks the accumulation of narrative time. There is the matter of what they are doing to themselves in not flushing, and of what the Gentleman does to others in insisting on not flushing, and how to imagine a range of significations of both? Are they a kind of stink bomb on the inside of this poor structure? Producers of smell and shit, they churn in the bowels of capitalism, they expose the noxiousness of US wealth nondistribution. Their pile of shit wafts a noxious critique that floats south to the accumulations and controls of “futures” on Wall Street, and northeast, to the sprawling, paved expanse of Robert Moses’s Cross-­Bronx Expressway that splits the Bronx, trafficked white commuters’ white flight to the suburbs, and turned exploitative visitations into careers in the city. Gentleman directs and captures on tape moments in his and Lady’s forced conversations, and when Lady breaks character, when she doesn’t repeat back to him FALN, Masses Are Asses, Defiant Women  67

what she is expected to say, he punishes her. He carries patriarchal, violent force into their performance of fantasy. And while Lady is defiant, she does not “break free” of her situation in a straightforward way. She hits Gentleman in the face at one point, but finds a way to make sense of the act within the refined character he wants from her. In how she plays along, exaggeratedly, sometimes for too long, she frustrates Gentleman, and sometimes aggravates the reader who otherwise may just want to see her walk out of that situation, into some elsewhere. But it is precisely the performative range of engagements that I refuse to perceive as merely acting out symptoms, that I wrestle with, enjoy, and wonder about. Bodies bent by the optics of submission degrade and elate themselves through sounding out scripts of having and losing. These two characters listen to their captured voices again and again — Gentleman voluntarily and Lady increasingly by force as the play goes on, as it becomes evident that she is a complex psychic hostage. Gentleman’s tape recorder plays back the visual order of subjection and compels Lady’s audio-­visual and sensorial distortions of subjectivation. The play reveals that the tape recorder glitches right before another sonic appearance, that of an armed insurrection of what Gentlemen calls, interchangeably, a group of “terrorists” and “radicals” — the “A.B.C.D.E.F.G.H.I.” The group as sound, and as the sound of the integers of language, manifests on the street outside, calling for uprising. The tape recorder’s glitch repeats the same thing over and over again and, frustrated, Gentleman turns the machine off. When it cuts off, they hear gunshots outside. They hunch down beneath an unsteady, small table, and Gentleman launches into a diatribe, translating what it is that the Lady must hear and understand about the shots fired. gentleman: That must by the A.B.C.D.E.F.G.H.I. terrorist group. lady: [surprised] In Paris? gentleman: Yes, they are an international Terrorist Group. lady: What does A.B.C.D.E.F.G.H.I. stand for? gentleman: Let’s make sure the coast is clear before I divulge that information to you. They look in every direction to make sure the coast is clear. lady: The coast is clear. What does it stand for? gentleman: Armed Brave Comrades Determined Efficient 68  Chapter Two

Fighters Gonna Humiliate Imperialism! lady: Such utter nonsense. Don’t they ever learn that the ruling class shall continue to rule regardless of who declares war against us. Our Armies and Navies and Air Forces are as you will say before and after dinner: In . . . In . . . In . . . gentleman: invincible! And the sooner those animals can learn that, the sooner those savages can start planning for the future of their existence. We, the now and forever and ever Ruling Classes possess the most advanced sophisticated deadly lethal weapons to wipe out whatever inferiorly armed opposition group of idealistic scatterbrains challenges our godly belief in global domination by any ungodly means necessary! lady: Such utter nonsense, these violent means of theirs to bring about change. Spare change to the city morgue is all their uncivilized tactics are going to bring those unsanitary radicals. They should take a bath and a haircut and shave, so some decent democratic employment agency can find them a full-­time patriotic job, my god!31 Lady delivers the expected lines in this exchange, miming back to Gentleman what he wants to hear her say: opposing the state through violence is nonsensical and will only result in death; democracy and capitalism amount to the same thing; resistance is simultaneously banal and idealistic; imperial power is the godliness of ungodly, violent means of authority; and one should hope for exploitative employment, not freedom. But the invocation of the sign of “terrorism” fissures the play’s boundaries and the meanings that Gentleman can capture and control. Gentleman and Lady show themselves to understand the “jive talk” of good-­ bad, neoliberal US American subjects in this well-­memorized rhetoric. While pretending to be rich, they go on to call the “terrorist” group “animals,” “savages,” and “unsanitary radicals.” The tape recorder as a mnemonic and surveillance device pairs well with this specific string of categorical epithets: trapped in the terms of feeling like disgusting objects, the characters need to render an Other as more disgusting and less human to hold themselves together. “The poor people are just going to have to stay poor,” Gentleman reasons, “because rich folks like us have all legitimate intentions of maintaining our prestigious and advantageous standard of living. . . . [God] made some of us rich and most of them poor. God knows socialism is an unworkable system.” He then yells, “Long live Monarchy! Long live our Mansion! Long live our limousine!” And Lady FALN, Masses Are Asses, Defiant Women  69

adds, “Long live our Maid, Butler, and Chauffeur!”32 These lines and the objects listed in them emphasize how assimilation is a discursive and psychic project, a set of prepared mnemonics to be repeated over and over again to perform a vexed comportment. They sound absurd, but in the absurdity and repetition is the potential “for deforming the promise” of a violent sovereign’s freedom. “The Masses are Asses!” cries the Gentleman in the next line, “The Masses has always rhymed with asses!” “And gasses. Get it?” the Lady continues the rhyme, “Masses Asses Gasses!” “The gasses that come out of the masses asses smell like molasses,” cheesily raps the Gentleman.33 Their repetitive, vulgar word play that mocks the Marxist finds a counterpoint in Moten’s notion that “your ass is in what you sing.” For Moten, there is “[no] need to dismiss the sound that emerges from the mouth as the mark of a separation. . . . It was always the whole body that emitted sound: instrument and fingers, bend. Your ass is in what you sing. Dedicated to the movement of hips, dedicated by that movement. . . .”34 On the one hand, repressing their bowel movements separates the characters from their own asses. On the other hand, their repetitions and wordplay also bring them closer to their asses, by which I mean their senses, their feelings as potential problems for reason’s militant sounds and mnemonics. “Arm struggle [sic] . . . ha ha ha . . . it makes as much sense as believing god doesn’t exist,” Lady remarks.35 Indeed. Shortly after this nonsensical exchange, which comes after their first invocation of the A.B.C.D.E.F.G.H.I., Lady says that she doesn’t want to drink too much of the fine champagne with which they continue toasting their word plays because she doesn’t want to get “stoned.” Gentleman chastens her and says that only poor people get stoned. Rich people get “Tipsy!” “Stoned is a ghetto adjective.” Just a few lines later, “A loud explosion is heard, knocking them both off their seats. The lights blink on and off rapidly. Police sirens are heard for 30 seconds.” Gentleman responds to the sonic blast, “The A.B.C.D.E.F.G.H.I. is upgrading their terrorist tactics from bullets to bombs. . . .”36 To my ear, this line juts out of the fictional text and evokes the historical actions of the faln. Gentleman continues: “If only they stop being so violent and educate themselves they will learn that history repeats itself. In all the glorious wars mankind has experienced, the masses have never once been victorious. All rebellions and insurrections have been crushed, directly or indirectly, and that is the way the world is going to be always.” Gentleman seems to have learned historicist acedia from a rhetorical master-­teacher. He then claims that the few countries that appear socialist are “subsidized by almighty capitalist regimes.”37 But within a few pages, the characters riff another script, one which brings the matrilineal to the fore. Gentleman now plays “a full-­time pathological street 70  Chapter Two

loiterer with an incorrigible drinking problem” and Lady plays “a welfare recipient,” which she says will be a “less exhausting” role. They code-­switch to “Okay baby,” “far out,” and “Out of sight!” as they change their walks, emulating “a stroll in the ghetto while like we rap.”38 Gentleman asks Lady, “Hey baby, like was your mama also on welfare and food stamps?” To which she replies, “Yeah man. Like not only was my mama on welfare but my mama’s mama’s mama and her mama and her mama’s mama’s mama was also on welfare.”39 Through the farce, we hear the edges of a nonwhite racialized genealogy making matrilineal claims. No patronymic is named. No patronymic claims Lady.40 If, as Spillers argues, that “from one point of view” a “patriarchilized female gender” is “the only female gender there is,” then Lady’s matrilineal performance of self troubles her femaleness, her potential whiteness, which troubles her capacity to be a well-­comported individual.41 Her matrilineal utterance’s repetition that exceeds the countable metrics of linear time evoke and mock the 1965 “Moynihan Report,” a mockery she makes not from a proper domestic space but from a toilet inhabited because she has been evicted (on a historical level) from the domestic. Lady’s and Gentleman’s disposition about the A.B.C.D.E.F.G.H.I. also changes in this switch from “rich” to “ghetto,” and as they overhear more shots fired in the street. Gentleman says, “Wow, bang, bang . . . insurrection . . . give me five for the A.B.C.D.E.F.G.H.I and pass me the bottle of wine if you don’t mind.” Lady drinks from the bottle, crying, “Long live those Guys of the A.B.C.D.E.F.G.H.I. The A.B.C.D.E.F.G.H.I. will never die!”42 But their moods soon shift again, as they critique the A.B.C.D.E.F.G.H.I.’s political methods, stating that their shootings and bombings could inadvertently kill civilians like them. They start to waltz to the sound of the phone once again ringing off the hook, but decide that it would be more poor of them to grind. They grind for a while, but Gentleman eventually wearies of this pretense and wants to return to that of being rich. Lady does not comply: she begins to critique Gentleman for his aspirations and lies, to her and to himself. She refuses to code-­switch back to speaking as a rich person, whereupon Gentleman verbally harasses her and threatens physical violence. It is at this point that Lady makes a shape that breaks the script. For, during all of this time, Lady has needed to shit. It is now that readers learn that the toilet has not been flushed in weeks. Lady farts loudly multiple times and says that she cannot continue to stop her bowel movements. Gentleman yells at her and insists her raucous flatulence will, in seconds, undermine the integrity of the fantasy he has worked for years to orchestrate. “I prohibit you from moving your bowels again until we return from our vacation!” Gentleman cries out, and demands one more week of farce, and of anal retention. But Lady lifts her skirt, sits down, and takes a shit. FALN, Masses Are Asses, Defiant Women  71

After shitting, Lady wipes her ass and goes to pull the toilet chain when Gentleman knocks her off the toilet.43 As they tussle, a blonde wig, that hitherto has been given no textual commentary, flies off of her head. Lady is glad to be rid of it, having never wanted to play a blonde. She does not vacate the toilet-­para-­ domestic, and she does return to the rich mnemonic, but for the rest of the text, Lady will have made a post-­excretory relief position of defiance. On the last page, she again plays along with the absurd set of compliments, speech acts that had always messed with linguistic categorization: “Gentleman: ‘You look unpretentious.’ Lady: ‘You look industrious.’ Gentleman: ‘You look so advantageous.’ Lady: ‘You look fantastic,’” and so on. Through hyper-­participation, Lady breaks with a white patriarchal fantasy of self-­possession and enlivens the strange bind of animate objecthood, visual subjection, sonic subjectivation, and unsovereign, un-­ patronymic unruliness. The smell of shit stalks the script of the American Dream. And although Gentleman insists that his narratives can override the senses, shit cuts the air like glass.

Breaking Wind Where Not Breaking Free, or, The Shape of Vexed Participation’s Psychic Life

Gentleman cautions Lady, when she farts loudly, to release flatulence like an aristocrat. But eventually, she bends down, shits, tries to flush, and he attacks her. This returns me to the hunched shape of bad conscience, and Butler’s study, in The Psychic Life of Power, of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness in conjunction with the US military granting permission to homosexuality that does not intend to act homosexually. Butler critiques articulations of desire that hold explicit and self-­ harming suppressions of that desire, and also something else in them. Meditating on Hegel’s and Western philosophy’s anal anxiety, the wretched consciousness of the one who invents a mediator to save him from the painful ritual of being in a body, and of having to take a shit daily, and touch himself thereafter, Butler reads Hegel’s loathing of the excretory parts of being, of “junk,” and of possible pleasure found in precisely the porous sites of the body in an alignment with a certain form of homophobia. I also locate antiblackness therein. Western thought’s refusal to think about shitting and crying is a ritual enactment of violence against the “animal functions” of the human. Butler writes, “it is here, in the effort to differentiate from its excretory functions, indeed from its excretory identity, that consciousness relies on a mediator, what Hegel will call ‘the priest.’ ”44 Gentleman will not flush; shit has stacked for weeks in the commode;

72  Chapter Two

he will not part with either pretending to be something and somewhere else or with the shit that marks his presence as abject and toxic. Yet, in Hegel’s logic, drawn from the inevitability of his body shitting, Butler writes, “Everything that the abject consciousness offers, that is, all of its externalizations, including desire, work, and excrement, are to be construed as offerings, as paying penance . . .”45 Gentleman resides with decomposing excrement. He resides in a “noxious . . . site of injury.”46 In all of his violent shenanigans, in his performed conscience that knows it is pretending, that claims to be pretending but not achieving an Enlightened, reasonable subject position, I read Gentleman as a bad, masculine remainder of the Western episteme’s bad conscience. He is incapable of reimagining his injury so as to make life more liveable for others. Whether at odds with the text or not (it is hard to say given its absurdities), I read Gentleman’s character in critique of a kind of masculine activist and revolutionary who enacts patriarchal, predatory garbage that is bad for the well-­being of others. Gentleman forces mnemonics of comportment and makes noxious bowel-­regulating demands that do not take the well-­being of others into account. Lady’s hunched position and anal dilation, her shape and eruptions therefrom that defy Gentleman’s attempts to regulate her bowels’ movements, redraw her presence — her participation — as taking an anti-­subjective position. She gives herself relief and resignifies the shape of the one bent in subjective formation. In other words, her bent shape reveals not her bad consciousness but Gentleman’s. She performs as genealogically nonwhite racialized reminder of embodiment, and of embodiment’s flesh, that he abnegates. Butler writes that holding the circular self-­collapsing posture of suppression, “however compelled, will be subject to infelicity, to speaking otherwise, to reciting only half the sentence, deforming the promise, reformulating the confession as defiance, remaining silent.”47 In reading this creative and performative list of present progressive defiant mutations of bent collapse, I hear Spillers’s question of how to listen for black, and specifically black femaleness’s, insurgency in archives of captivity. I hear Lady’s performatives of defiance in warped recitals of rituals of subjection. This complex combination of movements, remains, and remaining scans to me as a possible, however tenuous, undoing of self-­possession. Lady’s moment of relief, of breaking wind and shitting where she does not break free, offers something that is neither about a regulation that would purge the anti-­subject of its degeneration, nor about a desire for regulation precisely for abject pleasure. It is something else. After the shitting scene, and after her invocation of welfare and a matrilineal genealogy, Lady ruptures Gentleman’s pretense another way. She gives a history of

FALN, Masses Are Asses, Defiant Women  73

how they met, which also becomes her employment and unemployment history. Lady catalogues her respective time in the private and public sector: five years as a waitress in a cafeteria at a bus terminal; three years as a “department store cashier,” a position at which, she says, she obtained “full honors”; a stint at the Department of Social Services as a “chiclet chewing filter tip smoking receptionist.” This hearkening back to the transition from underpaid, private laborer to former government clerk prompts the following outburst: if only you knew how embarrassed i feel every time i have to face my ex co-­w orkers at the department of social services every time i have an appointment with my welfare investigator to keep the welfare checks coming into our miser able lives that smell worse than shit!!! 48 She keeps checks coming to spare Gentleman the embarrassment of having to work jobs around other poor people. Gentleman pretends to ignore her soliloquy. And the text soon returns to its sense of humor. In this utterance, however, I remain hung up, attentive to a rupture that sounds personally familiar to my class history, and that does not sound like what certain conventions of freedom sound like. Though Lady repeatedly short-­circuits Gentleman’s aspirational charade here and there, in this moment where she historicizes her relation to capital and employable citizenship, I hear her enacting simultaneously mnemonic infelicity and the potential of what Butler calls “a postmoral gesture towards a less regular freedom.”49 Or, in Lady’s case, a more internally regular but less externally regulated potential for anti-­subjectivity. Lady’s personal history sounds like nonwhite generational poverty. It bends into her performed matrilineal genealogy, which resounds with traces of Spillers’s archival search for black mothers, black female insurgents, and forms of black women’s refusal of narratives of white patriarchy (in its male and female gendered modes). In her detailed, “Brown existential” reading of The Masses Are Asses, Sandra Ruiz describes it as a “close-­up of the bodily endurance practices used to sustain colonial time in the narrow spaces of domesticity.”50 I must underscore that the sign of “Lady,” and the character positioned in that sign’s evocations of the matrilineal sans patronymic, her para-­ontology via the domestic by way of the toilet, and her function as captive to Gentleman’s pleasure and abnegation, situate her, in this reading, in relation to questions about blackness, as well as slowed speeds of defiance and anti-­subjectivity. Playfully, Lady’s matrilineal genealogy of “mama’s mama’s mama[s]” exceeds a sense of countable time, and her defiant self-­ historicization through employment and unemployability critiques Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose so-­called “Report on the Negro Family” is a way of looking that 74  Chapter Two

enacts violence on black mothers, as well as on black people touched by black mothers. Poverty remains the obscenity of a colonial form of sovereignty that can only see and cite itself in violence and call that human.

Obscene Interlude

I have used the word obscene above in my readings of The Masses Are Asses to conjure multiple senses — sight, smell, and sound. I also use it as a sign that converges the stage and the courtroom. Some linguists have argued that obscene derives from the Latin obscaena, signifying that which does not happen on the human stage, meaning that which cannot happen in the light of day. Filthy, beastly, and sexual acts are among the obscene — and so is a lack of self-­possession, or control, over the senses. In Eroticism, Georges Bataille defines obscenity thus: “Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-­ possession, with the possession of a recogni[z]ed and stable individuality.”51 One must appear to be self-­possessed when on trial, to have possession of one’s faculties. What is not welcome on the stage of the courtroom is what the master’s law sees as obscenity. The faln performed obscenity in their refusals of US courts’ legitimation. After Spillers’s historical sense of slavers’ “inveterate obscene blindness” to “human cargo” on slave ships, the US government’s torture of political prisoners, and refusal to state that it has political prisoners, enacts another mode of the obscene. I will begin the faln’s story outside of the US courtroom.

Backstory on an Explosive Time

The faln was a militant Marxist-­Leninist group that formed in the 1960s and drew on decades of Puerto Rican anticolonial history.52 They formed, in part, in a movement for the abolition of Puerto Rican political prisoners of the United States, one of the most famous being the radical, and Puerto Rican Nationalist Party member Lolita Lebrón.53 The faln claimed over 120 bombings on US soil between 1974 and 1983 (see figures 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3). The reader must hear the nuance in that last sentence. I am not motivated by the idea of the evidence that the fbi and the state’s prosecutors claimed to have gathered on the faln regarding acquiring and moving explosives. Direct connections to the bombings alleged by the fbi were not proven in court. I am not compelled by the state’s given meaning of the faln’s claims of over 120 bombings. From those 120 bombings, five people are known to have died, uncounted others were injured, but causing deaths was not the point. The “targets” of the bombs, however, are certain: US claims of sovereignty, its capitalist and internally racist disorder, and its fascist FALN, Masses Are Asses, Defiant Women  75

Figure 2.1 Cover of pamphlet, Toward People’s War for Independence and Socialism in Puerto Rico: In Defense of Armed Struggle.

economic and military interferences in South American, Central American, Mexican, and Caribbean politics. The claims made around the bombings in the faln’s many communiqués perform critical modes of multisensorial, anti-­subjective possibility. In May 1980, twenty-­four-­year-­old faln member Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres was placed on trial in Manhattan for allegedly detonating a bomb in the employment services office of the Mobil Oil Building on East 42nd Street on August 3, 1977. One person died in the bombing. After living three years as a fugitive, Beltrán Torres was arrested for the charge of disrupting interstate commerce and damaging a building engaged therein with an explosive (18 usc § 844[i]), tried in court in Manhattan, and sentenced to life in prison. She filed an appeal to vacate her sentence in 1996; the decision was made to deny her appeal in 1998. I will 76  Chapter Two

Figure 2.2 FALN communiques dated July 12, 1976, and September 21, 1976. In Toward People’s War for Independence and Socialism in Puerto Rico: In Defense of Armed Struggle.

Figure 2.3 FALN communiques dated February 17, 1977, and April 9, 1977. In Toward People’s War for Independence and Socialism in Puerto Rico: In Defense of Armed Struggle.

close-­read the appeal document below, which came into existence after the state tortured Beltrán Torres, but makes zero mention of the conditions of her incarceration and torture in its review of her appeal. She was eventually released from incarceration in 2009. The spirit in which I name her out of my readings of the state’s violent archive is to situate her in relation to other radical women, and to compose an imaginary deposition of the US from her performative language of nonparticipation in court —  nonparticipation with “self-­possession,” with her enlightenment, and with the court’s claims of democratic proceedings. I do not romanticize her insurgent actions, and hence, by implication, the conditions that operated in her rupture of them, that incarcerated her, and proceeded to torture her. Beltrán Torres was not among the faln political prisoners whose sentences President Clinton commuted in 1999, two of whom, Carlos Alberto Torres and Oscar López, refused that commutation — in part, because it was not extended to the entire group. They refused the violent sovereign’s claim of the power to grant freedom, and refused to renounce violence. Carlos Alberto Torres, a Vietnam War veteran, was Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres’s husband at the time of her arrest, and an active member of the faln, framed by the fbi as a leader, in part to intensify their allegations against him involving munitions, which they never proved in court. Among eleven members of the faln and five members of Los Macheteros, another radical Puerto Rican group, he was arrested, charged with “seditious conspiracy,” tried, and sentenced to seventy-­eight years in prison.54 Pietri also fought under conscription for the US against Vietnam. Pietri spoke of that trauma publicly and often, and it appears across his poetics, including his work for the stage. As such, he is part of the Rican sensorium that manifested the ensembles of the faln and Los Macheteros. The Masses Are Asses was first mounted in 1974, three years before the noted bombing in the Mobil Oil Building. Critics have observed that the play had on its mind the Young Lords’ occupation of the People’s Church in Chicago and the United Methodist Church in Harlem. But I imagine that the faln and their accumulating history of 120 bombings and many public communiqués against US colonial violence were certainly also on Pietri’s and the play’s minds. The play activates a paranoia in the US government’s legal distinction between radicals and “terrorists” that was being tested out at that time on radicals fighting for Puerto Rico’s independence from the United States.55 The history of the legal category of “seditious conspiracy” is important to understanding the signs of terrorism and the faln, as well as the sign of Puerto Rico.

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“Seditious Conspiracy” and Errant Nonparticipation in Democracy and Individuation

In the 1980s, the cia referred to Puerto Rico as the “Achilles Heel of the United States.”56 What they meant by this metaphor is not of specific interest to me, but I note it to say that US violent claims of sovereignty are, indeed, susceptible to being slashed. To date, the US has never admitted that it has political prisoners, but it punishes and imprisons people for their political identities and beliefs. Indeed, it has invented legal categories to make other imaginaries punishable. “Seditious conspiracy” has been one of the state’s legal and carceral tactics for delegitimizing Puerto Rican anticolonial movements, especially as they increased following World War I. Sedition implies a mutinous separation. But “seditious conspiracy” involves a specific spatio-­temporal and geographic imaginary of US property and legal jurisdiction, and the other’s intent. It is defined thus in Cornell Law School’s legal dictionary: If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.57 If the critical reader is wondering, the footnote to this code’s meaning of the term “United States” states that it is being used “in a territorial sense, [and] includes all places and waters, continental or insular, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, except the Canal Zone.” “Seditious conspiracy” need not be legally connected to actions, but drawn through induction from intentions. The state alleges that intentions can reveal the punishable force of a desire to disrupt US sovereignty’s proceedings, including commercial ones. “Seditious conspiracy,” or 18 US § 2384, is another sign for “terrorism” in US law. We hear the sign of “terrorism” today in the US, as we live a fascist historical flashpoint whereby the government, puppeteered by corporate control, propagandizes and militarizes an idea of free speech to protect white nativism, white nationalism, white supremacy, and colonialist monolingualism. That which constitutively challenges such projects threatens the US Department of Defense as “terrorism.” We also hear “terrorism” iterated in popular culture. In the remix of Puerto Rican trapero [Trap rapper] Bad Bunny’s deliciously irreverent track “Tu No Metes Cabra (Saramambiche)” [“You Don’t Scare Nobody (Sonfabitch)”], reFALN, Masses Are Asses, Defiant Women  79

nowned reggaetonero Daddy Yankee’s verses play with signifiers that imply that El Yanqui, or the United States, and he, Daddy Yankee, are both the terrorist in history.58 This sign moves beyond the state’s control of meaning. With “terrorism’s” signifiance in mind, two things specifically pull my attention to how the sign slips into “seditious conspiracy” without saying so verbatim: 1. the legalized spatial and psychic presumptions of the US’s iteration of sovereignty over Puerto Rico; 2. that “seditious conspiracy” was invented as a way to say terrorist as traitor, that is, to have a legal category under which to do (illegal) surveillance, charge, arrest, and incarcerate Puerto Ricans who intended, enacted, and/or articulated another conception of sovereignty from that of the United States, the latter of which, implicit to the US’s legal reconception of Puerto Rican subjects, they must accept as unquestionable. In this legal schema, conceptions of a (sovereign or unsovereign) future would amount to treachery. Seditious conspiracy has been used, as of the 1990s, to prosecute Muslim radicals; but its legal history specifically tracks anticolonial Puerto Rican actions in and outside of the archipelago against US invasion of the archipelago, tracing back, at least, to independentista Pedro Albizu Campos, whom the US charged with sedition and attempts to overthrow its governance, and whom the US proceeded to arrest and torture in the late 1930s and again in the 1950s. The crime of seditious conspiracy innovated by US law applies not only to those who physically fight for Puerto Rican independence from the United States, but also to where two or more gather to think about an alternative to US invasion of “unincorporated territories.” It aims to legislate on psyches, on interior life. Those who it can be “proven” to have thought about obstructing the legal procedures of the US’s colonial imaginary of space and bodies can be legally cast as conspirators to overthrow the US government. The movements of our thoughts and senses have psychic and material consequences, and possibilities. The state issued widely different sentences to members of the faln charged with seditious conspiracy and disturbances of commerce. Jan Susler has argued that this practice of sentencing was meant to generate a form of public amnesia around whom the US Bureau of Prisons held as political prisoners, and where they were held.59 Susler was the legal counsel to various members of the faln, including Oscar López, and worked as former clinical law professor at Southern Illinois University and attorney at the People’s Law Office in Chicago. These sentencing patterns also speak to the variability of the fbi’s evidence against the faln, and the illegality of their means of gathering it, which I would argue speaks more broadly to what Moten describes as the lawlessness of the law.60 As part of the counterinsurgency activities of cointelpro, the fbi illegally made video and audio recordings of alleged members of the faln’s movements and habitations 80  Chapter Two

in Chicago. This “evidence” would later be questioned in appeals court or disregarded because of the methods by which it was retrieved; it varied from case to case and courtroom to courtroom. The practice of disparate sentencing also emphasizes a cultural-­historical amnesia around the US’s waves of efforts to control and overdetermine Puerto Rican autonomy since before 1898. The US had invaded and occupied, and fought to annex, both Haiti and the Dominican Republic before it invaded Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1898. I italicize autonomy above to insinuate a self-­governing form that the sanctioned capitalist market and US governance would deign to recognize (though they historically tend to view racialized others’ claims of autonomy as insurgency or insanity, of which Haiti is the exemplary historical case). One among an explosive ensemble who acted according to a different script from that of coerced consent is Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres.61 Although published text gesturing to her biography is scant, we know she was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in June 1955, and that, following a working-­class migration trajectory, she moved with her family to Chicago when she was a child. From blurry photograph reproductions online, I read her as nonblack in a Puerto Rican visual schema, and as nonwhite in a US visual and colonial schema. She appears in archives of the faln just having turned twenty-­two years old. I am not motivated to dub the blanks in her story, the gap between her childhood and alignment with the faln, or to attempt a representation of her life, but rather to bring Beltrán Torres into this meditation on shapes, sounds, and speeds of women’s defiance. On August 3, 1977, a bomb exploded in the Mobil Oil Building. The faln made multiple bomb threats that same day, and another bomb detonated at 342 Madison Avenue, which the faln claimed. No one died as a result of that explosion, and it was not directly connected to one member of the group. On September 7, 1977, a grand jury indicted Beltrán Torres in Manhattan after the fbi claimed that her right, middle fingerprint was found at the Mobil Oil Building in Manhattan. On September 8, 1977, the New York Times reported that the Mobil Oil Building bombing and the other bomb threats also made on August 3 led to the evacuation of over 100,000 people from different buildings in lower Manhattan, including the World Trade Center.62 Beltrán Torres was a fugitive and lived undercover from 1977 to 1980, when she was arrested and tried for the charges of “destruction of property in interstate commerce by means of an explosive, which resulted in the death of a Mobil employee.”63 She was not charged with seditious conspiracy. But I want to emphasize two points: first, that I understand US law to set up an equivalence between the disruption of commerce as tantamount to the destruction of US democracy; second, that Beltrán Torres acted as part of a group, what I am calling an explosive ensemble, and that her charge and sentence, then, must FALN, Masses Are Asses, Defiant Women  81

be understood in relation to the charges and sentences of other members of the ensemble, and in relation to the historical intensification of legal attitude about Puerto Rican autonomy in the very category of seditious conspiracy. The state precisely used individuation in its charges and sentencings of members of the faln in part to bury the history of their collective radical and imaginative movement. To think about Beltrán Torres’s sensory deprivation and torture, I argue that we must imagine it in relation to other radical collectives tortured by the US government. I situate her trial for disruption of state commerce near to the legal concoction of “seditious conspiracy” to emphasize the equivalence that US law makes between commerce, private property, and democracy. I do not wish to remove in my language her agentic capacities and complexities, needless to say. But I do not echo the state’s individuating and antisensorial motives in my study. Beltrán Torres would go on to state in her emphatic nonparticipation in the court’s trial that she was a political prisoner, and that she should be tried in an international court, if at all. Beltrán Torres stated in court that she committed no crimes, since opposing the colonial invasion of her country is not a crime. This was the line of thought uttered, maintained, and reiterated by all charged and arrested members of the faln, who, again, were not tried as an organization, but as individuals. The actions of the group were criminalized, purportedly evidenced, and punished via individuation. From the jury’s decision, the court sentenced Beltrán Torres to life in prison. The federal government and US Bureau of Prisons incarcerated Beltrán Torres in a torture and sensory deprivation chamber for part of her sentence. Medical officers employed by the state did not report on the violent effects of the torture of Beltrán Torres. The state used her and other female prisoners to experiment with a specific regime of torture. That regime of torture was, and remains, particularly concerned with women who had explosively ruptured the patriarchal capacity to claim control over them. Such an explosive shape of defiance vexes the narrative of colonial invasion and patriarchal order as beneficence. In 1996 Beltrán Torres filed Torres v. United States, an appeal that she was denied Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendment rights. I turn to the 1998 decision on her appeal because it appears in the archive after the state’s torture of Beltrán Torres, and after her nearly two decades in prison. Her nervous system and sensorium had undergone painful shifts in the conditions of her detention and torture. There is something additionally obscene about appealing to lawless settler colonial law to take one’s damage somewhere beyond it. The following unequivocal and flatly worded footnote is given to anchor the transcript of the 1998 decision’s first usage of the sign faln: “The faln is a terrorist group that used violence to promote its agenda in support of Puerto Rican independence from the United States.” Eigh82  Chapter Two

teen years after her 1980 trial, the US court still approximated the sign of the faln to that of “violence,” and to having an “agenda,” distancing “United States” from the sign of violence, implying that what it has is not an agenda, and that whatever the US does that renders Puerto Rico not independent is not violent. This is the US court’s story of the 1980 trial: On May 20, Beltrán Torres entered the Manhattan courtroom speaking Spanish. She did not address the court, but supporters in the gallery. She “caused considerable commotion” and “disruption,” and the judge removed her from the courtroom until there was procedural order. When she reentered the courtroom, the judge chastised her to speak English, unless she needed a translator. At this point she code-­switched and fluently objected to the proceedings in English. One of her legal advisors in the 1980 trial had been Michael Deutsch, who would go on to become Susler’s law partner at the People’s Law Office in Chicago. Deutsch applied to the United Nations in pretrial preparations on Beltrán Torres’s behalf as a prisoner of war, and made a motion for a stay of court proceedings until he heard back from the United Nations. The court denied this motion. I want to emphasize parts of the 1980 trial story that elude the court’s sense of meaning. From the first day, Beltrán Torres refused court-­assigned legal “representation,” and refused the sign of representation itself, referring to lawyers, instead, as “advisors.” She also insisted that she should not physically be subject to the court’s trial proceedings. She refused to present her position to the selected jury who could not possibly consist of anything like her peers, and she repeated that she would not participate in the “Illegal Court.” The next day, May 21, she again was forced to enter the courtroom and she again insisted that she be seated elsewhere. Like others on trial in the faln ensemble, she was moved to an adjacent room where she continued to hear the trial over loudspeakers. This arrangement extended into the sentencing hearing, wherein she heard a relay of the jury’s decision via the judge and via an amicus curiae through an audio system of loudspeakers. I hear in her refusal of a certain structure of debate that, by armed might, gets overwrought by the hegemon’s meanings, and her refusal to hear her sentence in the courtroom as fundamental rejections of a two-­party republic claiming to be the pinnacle of democracy. Her sentencing came after she had said to the court that the crime was colonialism, which needed to be ended by any means necessary. Below is part of the transcribed exchange between the judge (as The Court) and Beltrán Torres (as Torres) around the matter of her physical presence for the sentencing hearing. the court: I just wanted to be sure that you understand the option that’s now before you . . . FALN, Masses Are Asses, Defiant Women  83

torres: I have been forced to hear a lot, right. the court: I suppose you als[o] heard, I gave the jury my version of what your position is. I just want you to understand that without waiving any of your rights on that, you have, if you want to, the option of telling the jury in your own words what your position is. That doesn’t waive any rights you have under international law or any other kind of law . . . torres: Yes, I know. It’s not necessary for me to hear anything that the government or any part of this trial or these proceedings that have been going on because as far as I am concerned they have no relevance to my stated position. My position is very clear and I am not going to alter that position no matter what this Illegal Court, you know, comes up with. . . . I am not going to take part in it. the court: I tried to state your position as best as I could to the jury. You undoubtedly heard it. torres: It’s not necessary that I state my position to anybody. Anybody having to do with these illegal proceedings because they have no say so in my position. The jury, [the lawyers], you, any one of these people in this room. the court: As a practical matter, it might have regard to the consequences. Rightfully or wrongly —  torres: Or any consequences that come out of these proceedings will be illegal in themselves. the court: I understand, but that fact that you might be in jail —  torres: I am in jail. That fact hasn’t changed. My coming in here and stating my position to the jury that I feel has absolutely no say so in my position is not going to change the situation . . .64 Beltrán Torres slashes the “option” of hearing her sentencing in the courtroom with her rejoinder, “I have been forced to hear a lot, right.” She will not take the “option” of giving her words to a system of meaning that does not know how to hear them except by refusing speech and positioning her own audition — her capacity to hear — as one that does not match with the court’s “words” or whatever it “comes up with.” Beltrán Torres does not engage on the court’s terms. She sits defiantly beside the state’s archive of her unruly personhood while it is being (un)made. She performs non­participation with being constrained to consent to her trial. Listening poetically to this exchange, and particularly to the language of “I have been forced to hear a lot, right,” and “It’s not necessary that I state my position to anybody,” I arrive at the following: while the judge-­as-­court reads as 84  Chapter Two

the costume of pageant power, Beltrán Torres throws a poetic and performative wrench in the due trial machine of representation. Beltrán Torres refuses representation on at least two levels: she refuses lawyers granted by the system that criminalizes her desires, and she refuses the idea that the state is in control of her desire’s narrative. For these nominally democratic proceedings to function, they must perform as having represented or having attempted to represent her position. Her performatives shut down the violent sovereign’s claims of legitimacy. The court is left alone to try itself. She leaves the courtroom as a scene of self-­ reference, as a scene that legitimates its own legitimacy to itself. Her language of nonparticipation emphasizes the unrepresentability of her position according to the codes of her historical enemy’s system. She states that she is already incarcerated, so that cannot be the consequence of the situation. Whatever the outcome, the trial will be illegal from her (collective) anticolonial position. The details of sound technology, space, and physical positioning limn audio-­ visual, performative, and multisensorial shapes of defiance. Beltrán Torres sat in a room beside herself on trial. In doing so, she performed both the split, “barred” subject and the “unincorporate[able] territory.” She performed the hysteric who gets off on refusing to say with her (head-­)voice what her body knows. She sat with herself, beside the court’s self-­serving version of her shaped, in part, by the fbi’s version of her individualized actions against sovereign order, and heard over loudspeakers proceedings that would affect her future self, her body, her existence in space and time. I conjure this notion — of her being beside herself — because, on the face of it, it sounds like sexist shorthand for female emotions being too much. But my imagining of Beltrán Torres’s performed physical posture and spatio-­ sensorial positioning also offers something different from the twisted, contorted, and hunched shape of the trope that Butler locates across Hegel, Nietzsche, Althusser, and elsewhere, for the subject bent over on himself in his subjection/ conscience.65 I don’t need for Beltrán Torres to be lifted and upright in some shape of manic jubilee, or puffed in hard macho face-­off, or whatever. She and Puerto Rico: multiples, maneuvering shapes of defiance in rupture. Beltrán Torres is a subject of state surveillance who comes into the law’s language out of the fbi’s transmissions of illegal audio and video wiretaps of the faln She comes into the law’s archives beside this perverse master logic: that a subject coerced to consent to his sovereignty could be imagined psychically and physically to wish, and perform, anything but his destruction, anything but to deform his perverse promises of freedom. Tried as an individual, she was over­ determined by the state’s technologies of subjection. But Beltrán Torres performed something on and in that situation that pressured the state’s self-­legitimacy and that reinstated something of her own — something that I read away from the hold FALN, Masses Are Asses, Defiant Women  85

of the individual. Besideness is not always necessarily concerned with ethical and affective modes of solidarity, such as that between the Black Panthers and the faln. Here, besideness performs an explosiveness in proximity, a rupture in the law’s enforcement of individuation. Like other members of the faln who listened to court proceedings in other adjacent rooms to their trials, Beltrán Torres performed Puerto Rico’s legalized captivity and channeled Puerto Rico’s unsovereign defiance into her performance of nonparticipation with subjectivity, and her nonparticipation’s gestures at deposing the United States in its court. That we are forced to hear the law does not mean that we must speak back what it wants to hear us say (“I am not going to take part in it”). It also does not mean that if and when we do speak, perhaps even using the script we have been fed, that we cannot enact a fraught, warped compliance with the law’s claims of self-­legitimation. When Beltrán Torres restates her position of nonparticipation, it is as though she is gesturing beyond the court’s rehearsal of its own jurisdiction, to a body that is not there, not represented in that place, to whatever form it is that performed radical shapes of defiance may become. In 1980 Beltrán Torres faced a life sentence not exclusive of the death penalty. Susler writes that Beltrán Torres served part of her sentence in what was called the Cardinal Unit at the Federal Prison Camp (fpc) in Alderson, West Virginia. Davis Hall was in the Alderson prison, where Lolita Lebrón, Assata Shakur, and Rita (Bo) Brown were incarcerated in the 1970s. The Cardinal Unit was an experiment with electronically monitored cages where Beltrán Torres and Ida Luz Rodríguez, who was convicted of “seditious conspiracy” in 1981 in connection with the faln, were held in complete isolation from other prisoners for close to one year. Susler writes that “the women were confined to cells 24 hours a day, deprived of all programming, all human contact, and much needed medical attention.”66 The Cardinal Unit informed another experimental prison, the High Security Unit (hsu) in Lexington, Kentucky, that opened in October 1986 and stayed open for two years. It was the hsu that drew the international attention of the Soviet and Cuban governments, for example, and their critiques of US claims that it absolutely did not have political prisoners. Three of the five prisoners held longest in the hsu, in three of the sixteen isolated, underground cells, were Susan Rosenberg (Jewish-­American, active with the faln, Black Panthers, and in the escape of Assata Shakur); Alejandrina Torres (Puerto Rican, active with the faln, sentenced for seditious conspiracy); and Sylvia Baraldini (Italian national, active with May 19th Communist Party, the faln, the New African Freedom Front, and in the escape of Assata Shakur).

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The United States has historically underplayed Puerto Rico’s defiance and power over itself. I would argue that certain Latin American and Caribbean discourses of independence, from the other end of regional, anti-­US nationalist desires and values, have also underplayed Puerto Rico’s political, linguistic, and psychic complexity. I draw attention here to what I am not describing in detail: the horror of the state’s torture of Beltrán Torres, Ida Luz Rodríguez, and others; and this torture as part of a collective sensorium that has unsovereign power. Beltrán Torres’s nonparticipation in court, her physical position beside the courtroom, hearing by force and over loudspeakers what registers to her as a self-­referential set of proceedings, are all marked by the gravity of her incarceration and torture. I return to them in search of a plurality of audio-­visual, performative, and multisensorial shapes of defiance. Susler argues that the radical women named above were held in the hsu specifically because of their political beliefs and past activities with groups that the US government considered to be “terrorists,” and not because of their behavior as prisoners. That is, neither as escape risks nor as prisoners prone to assaulting other prisoners or guards did the state hold them in highest security, isolation, and as experiments. Susler makes the following two points about why the US Bureau of Prisons has historically seen radical women prisoners as experiments: “First, officials seemed to think that political women would be easier to break than their male counterparts. Second, there seems to be the idea that women who break with the traditional role in this patriarchal society and choose instead to fight for a nonexploitative society warrant special punishment, to ‘cure’ them of their ‘errant ways.’ ”67 The repetition and difference of the word “break” interests me here. To whose mind does it make sense that it would be easier to break women who break with patriarchy? And, thus, break with, or mark a break in, what Spillers calls “patriarchialized female gender”?68 As Susler makes clear, the US Prison Bureau viewed Beltrán Torres as not only “unassimilable” to the general women’s prison population, but precisely as one of many insurgents ripe for penological experimentation with how to break women who have broken with patriarchy and its “patriarchialized female gender.” The torture renamed as experiments on female radicals who had broken with patriarchy also raises the specter of the US military’s (and its pharmaceutical extensions’) “experiments” in Puerto Rico, Vieques, and Culebra. This self-­justifying laboratory disposition interlocks with that of the slave trade, the plantation, early American/Western gynecology, early white masculinist photography and film usages of black, indigenous, and young nonwhite women’s bodies, and the threats made by welfare officers who ritually stole from them their motherhood and generations of touch.

FALN, Masses Are Asses, Defiant Women  87

The prison system of thought generates essentialist myths about radical women alleged to be members of terrorist groups. One obvious essentialism invokes the idea of the female body as weaker than the idea of the male body — that she/they breaks more easily than he. Another essentialism, which Susler raises, invokes the myth of the hysterical woman who needs a “cure” from her own “errant ways,” from the patriarchal state’s imposed significations of her “womb,” and the confusion of mind that the uterus sows in her body and, by extension, in the body politic that patriarchy sanctions as real. The US’s way of “curing” is “breaking” that which has already broken with “womanhood.” In this context, Beltrán Torres’s refusal of the US court’s claims of democratic legal services, customs, procedures, and standards of speech constitutes a form of errancy, hysteria, and deep systemic confusion. Throughout the three-­day trial in 1980, the court repeatedly used rhetoric that expected Beltrán Torres to “change her mind” about her political position and her affective disposition. The court punished Beltrán Torres as an individual. The language of the trial is a rhetorical rehearsal of the legitimation of US invasion of the Puerto Rican archipelago: variable and confused, it/she is told it/she needs the US to stabilize its/her historical condition as a not white, not male, not self-­possessed subject. And yet, she — as Beltrán Torres, as Puerto Rico, as hysteric — repeatedly does not change her mind. She repeatedly does not participate. She repeatedly refuses to defend herself on the court’s terms of representation and its terms of democratic legal proceedings. Beltrán Torres’s and Puerto Rico’s discursive and physical moves in explosive proximity to the US’s violent sovereign legal chambers recall my reading of the Lady character in The Masses Are Asses, who is forced to speak of her constraint against her will, and does, but through excess, refusal, nuance, bodily eruptions, and other manifestations that disturb the patriarchalization of female gender as white, properly domesticated, and in existence for the increase of white individuated holdings on being.

Rumination and Reflux

The presence of the tape recorder as a mnemonic of captivity in The Masses Are Asses has a different function from that of the loudspeakers in Beltrán Torres’s trial. The secret tape recorder intrudes on a sense of interiority by capturing words spoken in privacy and rendering them for public repetition beyond the speaker’s control. The loudspeakers facilitated a loud intrusion into Beltrán Torres’s sensorium that “forced [her] to hear a lot” in temporal sync with the courtroom from which she enacted spatial separation. But both sound devices, certainly Gentleman’s secret audio on Lady, recall the fbi’s illegal audio and visual wiretaps of 88  Chapter Two

the faln that are part of the story of what landed Beltrán Torres and others in the explosive ensemble in US courts, prisons, and torture cells. The fbi heard anything that the Puerto Rican ensemble said as code for something violent. The anti-­subjects that the fbi illegally surveilled could have been discussing Christmas gifts for kids, for example, and the fbi would hear the conversation in code: gifts signify bombs.69 Does this not say more about that listener than the captured voices? Does it not say everything about the one who is presumed to be the historical narrator of the other’s story, momentarily cast as hegemonic power’s disembodied ears? Does this not gesture one response to the question of what happens to the sadist in history? The bad audition of a bad consciousness loops on tape in his illegal archives and calls it law, power, reason. Ticking time bombs accrue to the master’s decomposing archives of trespass. On the stage of the individualizing courtroom and in the absurdist script for the theatrical stage, obscenity is agentic. The obscenely agentic does not restore narratives of “self-­possession” and individuation. Lady’s and Beltrán Torres’s ensemblic obscenities pressure the sacred spaces of the law’s perverse staging, spaces for trying others that iteratively justify it. Beltrán Torres deposed her deposer. Lady shat on a trope of constraint that hates nonwhite women’s bodies. I come back to explosions and decompositions of meaning, different speeds of undoing. If poetry is a kind of rumination of meaning, an incapacity to hold language down as given, a tendency Moten describes as a small upheaval for others, as animals do with food they masticate and reflux for their babies, then can we imagine the faln’s actions against US empire as explosive reflux on the (Enlightenment) self for some future and past others?70 A Rican whose thoughts of anti-­ subjectivity constitute “seditious conspiracy” cannot be ethically and sensorially “self-­possessed.” The universalist, Enlightenment position of exhibiting a learning from the master that sets one apart from others and only ideally trampolines one into the hierarchy of white being is beyond reach for historical anti-­subjects. And hasn’t that false-­promising trajectory been refused and distorted repeatedly? How many more shapes and sounds of defiance do we need to set about listening to, claiming, and imaginatively reenacting?

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Sensorial Errancy in Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s Cinema

3

Camouflage. That is the context that facilitates diversion.  — Édouard Glissant (1989) It is indigo now and the sea will continue to burn until the last plane crosses with its green and red wing-­lights headed north . . . and the sand exhales . . .  — Derek Walcott, “The Bounty” (1998)

A Caribbean Imaginary’s Reclamation of the Puerto Rican Archipelago

The sensoria of Puerto Rican people, as well as the creatures and ecologies of the Puerto Rican archipelago, have lived under direct attack by the US military since its invasion of that part of the Caribbean region at the end of the nineteenth century. The United States’ invasion of Puerto Rico was preceded by decades of imperial, military, enslaving, and monocrop agribusiness, and invasions of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Central America.1 Since its hegemonic formation in the hemisphere, the US has recast the figure of the Admiral’s insolent ocularity over the Caribbean Sea.2 The Admiral’s eye replicates a colonial hierarchy of the senses. It is a modality of Christian Europe’s theo-­cosmogonic mapping of the world that forces Antillean ecosystems and the torrid zone’s terrestriality, as in, its (un)being-­below, its fallenness from being, into serving the flesh-­fearing/ fetishizing hegemonic “history from above.”3 The Admiral’s oculus extends Christendom’s violent celestial conception of nonblack self and spirit, a conception an-

choring centuries of oceanic trespass and colonial conquest.4 Oceans, however, are unruly, and sensoria formed in relation thereto clock the bombast of the US’s hemispheric incursions, and sense its vulnerability on the levels of scale and time. Small islands constitute a perspective not only on themselves, but also on the plurality of being in relation. A Caribbean Americas re-­attunement to the anticolonial sensorial errancy of those who have, and that which has, lived and morphed for over a century under US military and economic invasion reveals and encodes other modes and speeds of reimagining another past’s approach to futurity, and another future’s approach to the past. In 2004, some sixty years into what in military-­diction is called the active air, sea, and ground usages of Roosevelt Roads Naval Base in Ceiba, in the southeastern part of la isla grande [the big island] of the Puerto Rican archipelago, the US government decommissioned the base — under anticolonial threat. The forced decommissioning is what some have called a closure, though that is not accurate when referring to a space today still transformed by extant military infrastructure, and where, upon the decommissioning of the base, the land was not returned to the people from whom it had been expropriated.5 Since the US Navy’s decommissioning of Roosevelt Roads, corporate, tourist, aerospace, and residential proprietary fronts have continued to use the lands reshaped by the Naval base. Gates have been erected to prevent the people of Ceiba from accessing the coastline, marsh, and forest that encroach against the base’s spatial order. As recently as a visit I made in the winter of 2019, in the ongoing wake of Hurricane María since September 2017, I saw the intensification of a long-­standing desire on the parts of wealthy Puerto Rican and US American investors to build condominiums on the property of Roosevelt Roads. The ferries that travel multiple times a day between the islands of Vieques and Culebra and la isla grande now launch from Ceiba, from the docks built by the US Navy.6 In other words, to get to the islands of Vieques and Culebra, or from those islands to la isla grande, to move by sea on public ferries, Puerto Ricans must revisit a site of US military occupation. Contrary to the military’s interests, I underscore that the forced decommissioning of Roosevelt Roads was one of many effects of a long history of uprising and defiance in the small islands of Culebra and Vieques. Uprisings grew in number and concentrated in force after the death of David Sanes Rodríguez, a Vieques-­born, nonmilitary security guard killed while at work on April 19, 1999, by a US missile that went “off-­target” in a “test-­run.”7 From the 1940s, the US Navy used the nautical and aerial miles of space over and under the Vieques Sound, the waterway between Ceiba and the islands of Vieques and Culebra, to run aquatic and aerial missions consisting of daily weapons explosions. In the years since Culebrans’ and Viequenses’ uprisings forced the decommissioning of 92  Chapter Three

Roosevelt Roads, secondary forests have grown in Ceiba. Contrary to the US military’s and real estate capitalists’ interests in this land, animals — wild dogs, iguanas, birds, and bats — have returned to Ceiba’s dense forests. This spatio-­temporal cluster of elements forms part of what the Puerto Rican/Antillean filmmaker and writer Beatriz Santiago Muñoz imagines as a “chimerical ecology.”8 Puerto Rico’s postmilitary landscapes and the ecology growing amidst the afterlife of munitions reveal a concatenation of monstrous, warped, beautiful, and humorous formations. Some reveal marronage’s traces, which the Admiral’s, the US military’s, and the plantation’s logics did not know how to see, sense, or control. Before the warring US government in the 1940s expropriated 8,600 acres of land from the people of Ceiba, and 22,400 acres of land from the people of the island of Vieques, these lands had been invaded and rearranged by the enslaving and indenturing Spanish empire for monocrop agriculture in an export economy. A cash crop of sugarcane, and some cotton, were cultivated for the sake of an economy that desiccated the earth and viewed the ocean as a means of commodity transport. On the island of Vieques, coconut palm groves supplemented the historically dominant sugarcane crop by the nineteenth century. (All that signifies virginal, paradisiacal nature bears the distortions of slavery, military invasion, and tourist fantasy, projections and impositions all of a toxically luxurious relationship to harm and trespass.)9 César Ayala describes the 1940s as a time of concentrated shift “del latifundio azucarero al latifundio militar” [from the sugarcane plantation to the military plantation].10 For example, the same roads cleared and worn down by the transport of sugarcane in Vieques, the US Navy later paved over for its uses. However, where there is the plantation there is insurgency, marronage, and forms that exceed the plantation’s spatial, psychic, and linguistic logics. The twentieth-­century Caribbean subjects in Vieques and Culebra who lived on and worked the land owned by distant and local landholders were descendants of enslaved people, maroon people, and Caribbeaners from nearby islands of St. Croix, St. Kitts, Nevis, and St. Thomas. In other words, the insurrections of the 1990s and early aughts — particularly in Culebra and Vieques against the US Navy — were waged by Caribbeaners with long social, cultural, and ancestral memories of intra-­Caribbean movement and unruliness that exceed the label attached to the uprising by whitening historical narratives, that of “civil disobedience.” From the vantages of Caribbean islands, the 1940s were a time when US military and post – Monroe Doctrine strategists intensified their investment in Puerto Rico on the United States’ expanding imperial map of the earth and its seas. That map is marked by US invasions of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Guatemala, Cuba, Grenada, and so on, at different moments of the late nineteenth and Sensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  93

twentieth centuries. But the 1940s, a time that María Josefina Saldaña-­Portillo refers to as the burgeoning “age of development,” bore the post – W WII major global economic shift wrought by the establishment of the International Monetary Fund (imf), wherein the US consolidated its moral and economic ascendancy and financial lending schemes over Germany, Britain, the Soviet Union, and so on.11 Soon after the establishment of the imf, the US also located creditor-­debtor possibilities (for its wealth increase) in the decolonizing struggles of emergent African and Caribbean nation-­states and territories. Developmentalism’s colonial difference is marked by its perception of citizens of other countries as subjects for macro-­and microloans.12 This economic machinery is connected to the US military’s expansion in the Caribbean and Latin America, and is crucial to sensing today how to pay attention to and perceive the corporate, scientific, and real estate proprietary usages of the extant invasive infrastructure of Roosevelt Roads. The US’s prolonged military invasion of Puerto Rico and the spatial and psychic residues of the sugarcane plantation and slavery: these systems force(d) disasters and visual regimes onto the lands and seas of the region and its imaginary. Military and tourist media render Viequenses as contemporary yet semi-­modern subjects, because they are marked by blackness and indigeneity, from whose underdeveloped, inherent vice “the sentimental illusion of paradise” must be protected by outside civilizing and lending forces.13 These visual projections stack up, contort, and grow into one another in the archipelago’s post-­military ecology. The breaks between them are not clarifying, but complicating. But I must shift narrative gears here to trouble dominant historical trajectories that position US imperialism and colonialism, or Spanish colonialism and imperialism, as givens, as firsts, as a priori or imminent events in Caribbean history. There is a “pre-­Columbian,” pre-­Admiral, history in the Puerto Rican archipelago that conjoins with its spatially maroon histories: there were Arawak and Taíno settlements for hundreds of years before Spanish and Dutch maritime incursions, indigenous rebellions against the Spanish and Dutch since the sixteenth century, a mythos and cultural history of the islands of Vieques and Culebra as unruly black and indigenous outposts of empire, as well as layered colonial attempts at erasing indigeneity, which manifests forms of presence despite the colonial obsession with its being bounded by an external danger, the horror vacui when lacking another name. With Sarah Cervenak, I emphasize that “the danger experienced by the subject of the Enlightenment was often resolved through the homicidal eradication of its objects,” by removing them from the picture of their place, as well as immobilizing them in their place.14 And I add that to think and sense with a “chimerical ecology” upsets the dyadic notion that colonizers were (are) the only

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ones looking, recording, cultivating knowledge and aesthetic practices, and making traces amidst violent settler colonialism. To imagine a “chimerical ecology” in language, to explicate and encode it, I have to begin to sense the many forms of dominant camouflage, as Javier Arbona uses this metaphor, set into play by longue durée and mid-­twentieth century imperialism and colonialism, so as to simultaneously sense the ludic, diverting camouflaged life and language practices, in Édouard Glissant’s sense in Caribbean Discourse (1989), at work in this place’s ecology.15 How do you sense what dominance camouflages? Sight is not enough. It involves paying attention, in part, to the discourses that render the people of Ceiba, Culebra, and Vieques as obstacles on their own land. Discourse is part of the camouflage; as is the lifeworld of the landscape, where a “chimerical ecology” eruptively grows through hegemonic coverage, and offers an ecological analogue to linguistic modes of Caribbean camouflage. A “chimerical ecology” is like Spanglish, which is also a Puerto Rican language, and plays with the unhinged feelings of being-­diasporic, being vitally broken. A “chimerical ecology” does not just invite attentiveness to what is hidden by the anti-­aesthetic of military invasion cum economic invasion’s camouflage. And in Santiago Muñoz’s cinematic aestheticization of it, this “chimerical ecology” posits an ambivalent, slowed besideness: sensoria overloaded with noise and toxicity beside a landscape of the imported plants of coloniality beside weapons storage facilities beside manufactured beaches beside living practices that think and imagine with bursting regrowths of native plants and on other terms than those imposed by every other apparatus noted in this list. Beauty beside decommissioned Naval bases beside insurgency constitute a colonial, chimerical, and complex ecology. The beaches of Vieques continue to be forcibly pregnable to the US Navy’s undetonated landmines. And the beaches of Vieques — let’s say it — are beautiful. And can we think of Puerto Rico, and provisionally of the Caribbean region, from here, semantically and imaginatively speaking? Can we enact a semantic and imaginary de-­isolation of the island of Vieques, the Vieques Sound, Ceiba, Culebra, and the Puerto Rican archipelago that is constitutively and formally Caribbean? Can we reclaim this place with the Caribbean imaginary? Being against imagining the beginning of time with colonial and imperial invasion shifts sensorial, spatial, and psychic scales of understanding anticolonial life. Or, if we understand Puerto Rican-­cum-­Caribbean ontology as the geographic rupture of colonial temporality and its dominant episteme, can we nevertheless reorient our thinking of these islands to their Caribbeanness, and of the Caribbean to its Ricanness, especially when by that we mean its Vieques-­ness and its archipelagic-­ness? By which I mean, unruliness.

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To think and imagine from the sand that exhales with the violent, kinetic burn of bombs and with thousands of years of the ocean’s shore break would constitute an instance of the Caribbean imaginary of “Relation.” In Poetics of Relation (1997), Glissant envisions a quivering Martiniquais black beach, “this beach where visitors exclaim how beautiful! how typical!” This black beach where he senses the volcanic sand not as a simple charm of the landscape for outsiders’ pleasure, but as channeling beneath the surface a history of revolts, flights, communal and affective survival de profundis. “I see that it is burning,” writes Glissant, invoking both Mt. Pelèé and the fires of uprising against slavery in Martinique. “This tie between beach and island allows us to take off like marrons, far from the permanent tourist spots, is thus tied into dis-­appearance — a disappearing — in which the depths of the volcano circulate.”16 In Ceiba, Culebra, and Vieques, the beaches and forests also burn, with the master’s munitions and toxicities, and tourists’ — those two left feet of history — confused affects, their suncreened chemical romance, their barbed consumption that cannot see the dying coral for the imported palm trees. But the fires of unruliness, and various forms of demurral, refusal, defiance, and intra-­communally focused forms of care, are also lit. Moreover, where disappearance is a form of communal re-­gathering, or what Gina Ulysse calls rasanblaj, which has been practiced at least since the sixteenth century in the Americas in antiplantation, para-­plantation, and maroon life formations; there are forms of movement that escape the tourist’s hung-­over gaze and the military’s aerial gaze.17 Santiago Muñoz’s errant cinema is aware of and does not reproduce such gazes. The scale of her cinema’s movements draws on a specific history of flight, marronage, and disappearance, leaving traces for communal re-­gathering. The scale is small. And this small scale is relational. In that, it is perhaps viable. But to get what her cinema gives your sensorium must change. Other sensorial attunements must be rehearsed.

Otros usos [Other Uses] and the Camera as Multisensorial Portal

The Vieques Sound is spectrum blue; its movements ripple indigo. A bird caws; another chirps. A propeller airplane’s low rumble rotates in the distance beneath the birds’ repeated high bursts; their overlap is outlasted by birdsong. On an insect’s frequency, ambient twittering stirs. Something metallic and heavy clangs shut — nearby, humans are afoot. Another bird’s song ascends. Sonically, the short film Otros usos [Other Uses] (2014; 16mm; 7 min.) orients viewers to aviary chattering, to the skies and treetops, to vibrations that Homo sapiens do not have to understand to feel in the bones of language. Sensorially, viewers slow down. Sight, here, is not the sense given primacy. An eco-­audio-­surround situates 96  Chapter Three

viewers in relation to filmic place, and it blurs the power of knowledge assumed by sight, especially and historically congenital to post-­1492 Homo sapiens visual approaches to the Caribbean. I am listening to a place. And I am listening to a place by way of a camera, an object pertinent not only to the visual regime that sets-­off images, but also convokes rituals — of presuming capture and refusing capture. Santiago Muñoz’s usage of the camera ritualizes a cinema that listens. I listen poetically to how Santiago Muñoz’s cinema graphs sensorial errancy, especially in how it positions the camera as a ritual and listening object in relation to filmic subjects — be they birds, Homo sapiens, a former US Navy fuel dock, or the Sound of water harboring the dock. In her cinema, sensorially errant desires manifest through physical, spatial, and semantic movements that often evoke the conditional and subjunctive tenses, which is to say, positionings in time and space that thwart the temporalities of unruliness and sovereignty. The first cawing sounds in Otros usos burst just before the screen goes from a black frame image to a recognizably filmic image: viewers are looking into the embrace of mirrored folds — visually invaginated. Carried by sound, Otros usos positions viewers to look into two isosceles triangular mirrors. This shot poses a meta-­image, an image about images. On the right side of the frame reflects a lamppost converging with clouds. On the left side reflects the brow of the sun. A glare-­beam streaks a 60-­degree angle across the frame. By way of this image, the camera proposes another use for, as in another way of sensing, this place, but necessary to that proposal is Santiago Muñoz’s specific sense of the camera itself: as a ritual object that opens multisensorial portals.18 A Beaulieu 16mm camera points not to ruins — it does not harbor imperial nostalgia. The camera points to a visual obstacle, a hand-­made, hand-­held origami mirror that reflects back to viewers the Sound, the aquatic surround of the island of Vieques, and in its lingering on that obstacle emphasizes the sonic surround. Upside down and through the middle of the frame is an equilateral triangle touching the other two. Through there, I sense that the camera’s holder stands on a long dock. This is the fuel dock at Roosevelt Roads Naval Base in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, built into the Vieques Sound by US Navy engineers in 1943. It positions itself on the dock that harbored the Admiral’s gaze but neither directly contests nor recasts it. Beyond the sound is the island of Vieques, momentarily outsized in the shot by a wind-­drawn cloud mass offering white in Obatalá’s sky. The mirror refracts the mine-­riddled and, some days out of the year, tourist-­ridden island where all days out of the year live Viequenses. This glimmering, flexibly geometric object makes us aware that the camera’s work here is not that of a mimetic mirror, but of a multisensorial portal to other ways of imagining life in a place historically shaped by waterways, tides, indigenous aesthetic practices and cosmogonies, Sensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  97

intra-­Caribbean disaporas, the invasions of Euro-­Christian imperialism’s vassals, slavery, African diasporic cosmogonies and aesthetic practices, sugarcane plantations, US naval invasion, land expropriation, nearly half a century of military “weapons testing,” “sonic booms,” cultural practices of horse riding, beekeeping, fishing, trading, gleaning, and errantry. Vieques is a powerful place in the Antillean imaginary of healing, mysticism, and ungovernability.19 As the film rolls, the camera suddenly reveals that it has been positioned beside fisher people who have repurposed the US Navy’s fuel dock into a site of quiet political action, gathering, and subsistence. At first, the people fishing are only indirectly visible. Some who work in the fishing industry came into their jobs because of the dispersing effects of land expropriation, others as Calibanic ex-­employees of the US Navy, who know the master’s language as well as they know their geographic place. (Astute witnesses to the US military’s aggressions, Puerto Rican ex-­employees of the military and folks who grew up around the spatial, psychic, and sonic incursions of bases often know exactly where to stand to bait and deflect violent power.) Like these fisher people, who also glean crabs from the shoreline, the filmmaker stands in a place where she should not be (legally), but where her unruly sensorium corresponds. The image does not show her hands, but the mirror reveals how Santiago Muñoz is there: at arm’s length, touching toward us in reverse. She stands in the site of an alien landing and jiggers another way to sense what is there as what could be there. She shows us that imaginative, future-­oriented work requires historical and multisensorial modes of listening to a place, and magic. What could be requires not only a political program, but also our sensorial reorientation.20 Otros usos’s audio-­visions propose to change our sensoria and imaginaries, not through the eyes of a developer, or the eyes of the Admiral — the master god’s eye that echoes in tourists’ movements on outdated and manipulative military maps in common usage today by visitors to Vieques. Situated beside the selectively revealed fisher people’s and gleaners’ positions, tripping on a kaleidoscope of sound-­ image, viewers come to sense the scale of unruliness in this region, and the sensorial openings this scale offers. Here, unruliness is an everyday ritual, and at this filmic moment, it is not raucous but quiet, aurally open to the sounds of other creatures and vibrations. With the reflective materiality of the origami mirror, Vieques multiplies. It reminds us that Puerto Rico is an archipelago. It is Caribbean, West Indian, and Antillean in its plurality. I situate it thusly because Puerto Rico regionally exists in relation to Hispanophone, Anglophone, Dutch Caribbean, and Francophone islands, which use the aforementioned different terms for the region respectively and interchangeably. The Caribbean, the West Indies, the Antilles are spatially 98  Chapter Three

Figure 3.1 Still from Otros usos [Other Uses] (2014). Dir. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. Used with permission of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

and linguistically indeterminate, and the Puerto Rican archipelago has a place in that indeterminacy and its unruliness. The US’s ongoing invasion of Puerto Rico isolates it from its region, its multiplicities, and its stories of itself that do not iteratively loop back to being about Puerto Rico’s legal and political gridlock with the US’s violent sovereignty. But its histoire does not stop there. In Otros usos, Vieques morphs in relation to Ceiba and the Vieques Sound, which is part of the Caribbean Sea. It becomes a triangle, a shape of mystical power and plurality (see fig. 3.1). The Sound flows and breaks into itself. Vieques is swollen with the somatic, collective memory of explosions and rampant cancer in those who lived during and since the decades of weapons testing on the island and in the surrounding waters of the region. And it is a place where Viequenses live: there is a living material culture that I will not say is beyond this damage, for it is not. And there are other forces around; damage is no one’s roi. This film’s “other uses” of sounds, a mirroring object that is both obstacle to and reflective shape-­ changer of what is visible, the fuel dock, and the camera itself, slow viewers down and offer a hallucinatory exteroception of the archipelago and the Caribbean Sea. Santiago Muñoz’s cinema is committed to relational enactments of nontraditional bodily, psychic, perceptive, and ecological dynamics, such that when a “straightSensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  99

Figure 3.2 Still from Otros usos [Other Uses] (2014). Dir. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. Used with permission of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

forward” image of one of the people slowly fishing appears by the end of the film (see fig. 3.2), viewers’ imagined collective sensorium has changed. Whichever allegories, myths, and associations might have informed what it means to be watching a movie about people fishing, have shifted, as viewers’ sensoria adjust to this gentle audio-­vision’s perceptual experimentation. With materially simple means, this arrangement exceeds the condemning regime of solely visual representation. A visual object that becomes a multisensorial portal: the camera in Santiago Muñoz’s cinema’s rituals maneuvers viewers’ sensoria into an errant imaginary of the places where her body enacts wandering as part of her living practice, and film scouting practice. Walked into cinematic encounters with others who know how to survive the droughts, jump the fences, and defy the sanctions of militarized capital, viewers have the chance to undergo a proprioceptive change in errant sensorial relation. This cinema emerges from studies of specific histories of US torture of Puerto Ricans both by “sensory deprivation” and “sensory overload,” which I discuss below. But the film does not merely do the work of documenting these histories; it playfully imagines what materially falls out of documentation, and offers that for our perceptual and sensual reorientation. This cinema also poses philosophical questions by way of magic and spiritual rituals — figurative exorcisms, hexes, meditations, and prayers, some of which are 100  Chapter Three

given audio and some of which are kept from the viewer-­listener, kept (camouflaged) for someone else.21 One of the questions that morphs in Santiago Muñoz’s cinema, which the film treats as something simultaneously practiced in everyday Caribbean rituals and not altogether known, is How does one imagine living in the war machine? How to film what is not known from in there? The war machine incarcerated Puerto Rican radicals and waged “sensory deprivation” torture against them to break their bodies from their ideology and desires for spatial un-­ sovereignty. The war machine launched planes from Ceiba and bombed residents of Vieques, Culebra, and the ecosystems of the Caribbean Sea for half a century, and cast islanders’ lives, sensoria, soma, kinship, eco-­relations, and futures as “tests.” I listen for the relationship between this cinema’s sensorial errancy that moves to materialize the unknown and magic as irrational modes of casting out the war machine while living in a “chimerical ecology.”22

Anti- ­Cartesian Magic

In La cabeza mató a todos [The Head Killed Them All] (2014), an androgynous, Afro-­ Caribbean person, a yellow-­green-­eyed cat with pitch-­black fur, and the camera-­ object telepathically dialogue about spells, magic, and the war machine.23 What is necessary when the structural effects and affective dimensions of a foreign invading power cannot just be ousted? When there is not (yet) one occupying population to attack or demand leave? What when the coloniality of things is too enmeshed for the fantasy of a Fanonian reckoning? What when coloniality has for decades camouflaged itself, distorted and pathologized others’ myths and stories of themselves, and disguised late-­capitalist armed economic terrorism as democracy? La cabeza mató a todos situates the cat in communication with — that is, in language beside — its compañerx [comrade], the artist and actor Mapenzi Nonó. She/ they smoke a spliff in a hammock on her/their small, urban farm in Carolina in the company of coquí chirping and car traffic rumbling that, together, make the night feel distinctly San Juanesque. The film’s title does not explain itself in its cinematic course, but I imagine it as an anti-­Cartesian, anti-­Enlightenment statement about Western philosophy’s colonial privileging of Man’s head.24 I mean “Man” a la Sylvia Wynter’s sense of Man, as the displacing sign that some 600 years ago dubbed itself in for Homo sapiens and simultaneously hierarchized its sapiens/ knowingness as the supreme form of human knowledge.25 Man endowed himself, via the Papacy and Christendom’s scholars’ maps of the world, with the earth’s lands and seas, and as overseer of the inhabitants of “uninhabitable zones” —  human, animal, and vegetal. The genre of Man came at the expense of the body and culture, of millions of African and indigenous bodies, kinships, languages. Sensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  101

Man mapped and narrated himself into westward expanding inevitability. His narrative inexorably required the invariably dehumanized African and variably dehumanized indigene to be in the position of the body that Western scholasticism and its imperial and colonial orders so deeply despised and feared — despised having and feared wanting. The head of Man kills. So, what of the bodies that have for hundreds of years escaped and warped Man’s ends, and retained their opacity in the face of his head’s barbaric claims of rational transparency? Early in La cabeza mató a todos, Santiago Muñoz’s camera is so close to the cat in one shot that black fur and green eyes take up the entire screen. Text appears: “The cat explains how to build a spell.” The clairvoyant cat then slowly offers this language via voiceover synched with the onscreen text, a meditation on the spatialization of analogy: A spell or a malediction requires an analogous force to the magic of the spell. If the desired magic is the total and absolute destruction of the machinery of war; if what is desired is the unmooring of the aerostat, that it split in half like a nut, then the spell requires that one consume an amount of energy like the tiger consumes the day. In some cases, as in the seas, or the force of a hurricane, or a nuclear bomb, god and the event are the same thing. Huracán. Juracán. Atomic bomb.26 The language of the spell must analogize the magic’s force. Analogy raises spatial questions of correspondence. Correspondence — as in the Glissantian notion “to sing the place that corresponds to you” — occurs in relation to a location.27 Analogy, then, is not only a formal and rhetorical device, but also an ecological and geographic arrangement. The order of spelling is precise, yet the language in this text from the film hinges on the usage of conditional tense: “If the desired magic is . . .”; and again, after the semi-­colon, “if what is desired . . .” Desire has force and seeks ways out; here, its movement through the conditional is less performative of uncertainty than of experimentation with desire’s material manifestation. After these remarks on the precision of building a spell, viewers hear the cat say that, on occasion, the name of a god and that of an event are the same. The signs of “Huracán Juracán” are spoken aloud and visually situated side by side, followed by the sign of “Atomic bomb.” Juracán is a Castilian phonetic approximation of the Taíno sign for storms, controlled by the goddess Guabancex, whose arms in Taíno art are rendered as wavy lines that look similar to contemporary digital symbols used in weather forecasts of hurricanes. This sequence of signs posits a hurricane as an ecological phenomenon and a god. And the sign hurricane and

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a nuclear bomb are positioned as equivalent forces. Three years after La cabeza mató a todos’s release, Hurricane María irrevocably destroyed the illusion of the US as a democratic entity in history, in the Caribbean. It transformed shorelines, treelines, landscapes, property lines, coral reefs, and ecosystems already altered by decades of US weapons explosions, weapons storage, and weapons trade with other nation-­states. The hurricane was a nightmare. And it is another kind of force that has altered and exposed the effects of another nightmare: the US military presence in the Caribbean. A storm thunders overhead as the cat inexplicably articulates this notion of casting a spell. The cat understands androgynous subjects. The androgyne worships neither maternity nor war; they occupy a space in between. Thunder rolls again, but the storm moves away. The androgynous, Afro-­Caribbean person rises, gathers objects for a ritual, climbs a tree, hangs upside down, and falls to the ground. Positioned very close to the camera, she/they dance to a rhythm whose music viewers do not hear. Her/their interoceptive sense of movement is simultaneously shown to and kept from us. There are moments in the film Otros usos when the people fishing address each other; amidst the bird chirping, if I listen very closely, the murmuring of people-­sounds is in the sound mix, but fleetingly and faintly. The film does not mimetically align and reveal the speech viewers see happening with what we hear happening. Similarly, in La cabeza mató a todos viewers are outside of the interior sounds that stimulate the dancing, land-­caretaker’s ritual movements. There is no imperative of speech, no ethnographic direction to explain. Abruptly, an extra-­diegetic rock track cuts across the moving image of the dance, lasts for several seconds, long enough to feel the rhythm, and then just as quickly as it appeared, it is pulled away; quiet, ambient sounds of the neighborhood enfold around the dancer. Though this cinema buzzes with a studied awareness of ethnographic filmmaking, it does not faithfully reproduce it. The blast of edited-­in music makes clear that this approach dispels attachments to representations of cultural purity that would compel the other’s opacity into legible explanation.28 Nor does this filmmaker direct in the style of auteur. Her filming practice consists of herself and maybe one other person — working sound or lighting —  in relation to the subjects of the film, which, here, are a cat, a person, and a landscape; for example, in a black and white 16mm film made close in time to La cabeza, called Black Beach/Horse/Camp/The Dead/Forces (2016), are horses, a ceiba tree, an artist who has cared for that enormous tree’s ecosystem for decades, an energy worker practicing over the sand and shoreline of Vieques’s black beach, the unseen but sensed tons of the US Navy’s toxic afterlives, a shipwreck, and small children who live and play in this post-­military ecology.

Sensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  103

La cabeza mató a todos posits cinematic ritual as an anti-­Cartesian magic suggestive of multisensorial, small-­scale, interspecies transformations. The interplay of the camera-­object in close proximity to the cat — where the camera is a prosthetic metonym of the filmmaker’s body — does not posit having analogous force to the magic that would absolutely obliterate the war machine, as in, obliterate the dominant sense of our species (which is itself constitutively entwined with the war machine). But the camera is ritualizing questions of how a para-­anthropocene conception of the world might feel, sound, and move. One bird’s bark and another’s squawk, coqui frogs’ onomatopoeic gasp and vibration, a car engine’s spark and vrooming turnover, horses’ thundering strides and playful nuzzling of each other’s scratchy-­soft manes — Santiago Muñoz’s cinema decentralizes Man, and in its uses of sounds, which are at turns jarring, subtle, concealing, and abundant, shows how it listens for overlooked meters of ritual and creaturely survival. The soundscapes across her cinema break the flat cinematic plane and, instead, offer portals to other surrounds. A discussion of sound in her cinema cannot be well served by the dyad of diegetic and extra-­diegetic sounds, in part because these are not narrative films — their visual grammar is not diegetically motivated. They swerve from plot. In her divinatory filmic studies of unruliness’s subtleties in everyday Caribbean life, Santiago Muñoz’s editing of sound is key to hers being a cinema of relation, an aesthetic field of mutual aid at this twilight of the humanist narrative project.

Auxilio mutuo [Mutual Aid]

Santiago Muñoz’s film-­objects tend to convey itinerancy — in the image movements and in a sometimes visible but always otherwise sensible materiality of the camera-­object itself that references an errant and therefore historical body, that of the filmmaker. This proclivity to wander has carried me into specific meditations on what sensorial errancy and discursive circumlocutions do in relation to Caribbean places. My theorization of sensorial errancy bears out, in yet another way, this book’s emphases on the audio-­visual shapes — including both linguistic performatives and physical performances — that remember “sensory deprivation” as a US torture tactic of radical political prisoners (as discussed in chapter 2) as well as the torture tactic of “sensory overload” specific to the US’s war games in the hemisphere enacted in the Puerto Rican archipelago, especially between Ceiba, Vieques, Cule­ bra, and the Caribbean Sea. Santiago Muñoz’s sensorially errant cinema materializes fantasies of rather than “facts” from lost archives of insurrection against the violent sovereign’s torture by means of psychic and somatic deprivation and 104  Chapter Three

overload. It gives aesthetic form and different speeds to the history of what is possible, to what leaked out of dominant history’s narrative capture, to what could be in the reimagined scenes of what might have been. It behooves us to have a sense of Santiago Muñoz as a contemporary, showing artist, and as a Caribbean, Puerto Rican, archipelagic artist. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz was born in 1972 in Auxilio Mutuo Hospital in Río Piedras, San Juan, Puerto Rico. She did her undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago and her mfa at the Art Institute of Chicago, and returned to live and make work in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean thereafter. Santiago Muñoz has (to date) released around fifteen films on digital and 16 mm formats in the rainforests, small farms, coasts, and decommissioned US naval bases of Puerto Rico. And she has roamed, with grants and collaborations with other practitioners and artists, to Chiapas, Caxias do Sol, Glasgow, San Francisco, and Port-­au-­Prince, where she has made place-­specific, collaborative, clinamenic, errant films. Among many other venues, Santiago Muñoz has shown work at Institut Kunst, the 2017 Whitney Biennial Program, the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim Museum, cca/Wattis Institute, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Espacio 1414, Pérez Art Museum Miami (pamm), and the New Museum in New York City.29 In the summer of 2016, her solo show at New Museum, That which identifies them like the eye of the Cyclops, featured two films — in digital and 16mm formats, as well as sculptures, masks, a large broadside text interview, and an archival space for reading and watching documentation connected to Monique Wittig, whose novelistic and poetic fantasy Les Guérillières (1969) was a partial inspiration for the show, and the source of its title.30 Earlier that year, María Elena Ortiz beautifully curated the exhibition A Universe of Fragile Mirrors at pamm; the title comes from an interview with the French ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch. The show generated a book by the same name, which holds essays that meditate on the afterlives of military photography, “almost-­films,” and parts of film scripts and sound experiments made in Puerto Rico and Haiti.31 Santiago Muñoz was also a cofounder of the San Juan – based independent art space Beta-­Local, and, since stepping down as a codirector, she has organized the seminario itinerante [itinerant seminar] in relation to Beta-­Local and also as a thing apart from the art collective’s many public events and programs for Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and invited international artists. The itinerant seminar is a relational, cohabitational, and collaborative art-­making, theorizing, and movement practice, one that literally involves participants walking miles together, camping, and sleeping outside as a group. In the summer of 2015, I participated in the itinerant seminar in Vieques with Santiago Muñoz and about twenty other artists and writers. Again in the summer of 2017, I participated with a smaller group in a seminar Sensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  105

in Vieques, some of us returning to continue specific projects begun two years before. This detail of my participation in the itinerant seminars is relevant to The Cry of the Senses’ method of poetic listening toward practices of sensorial openness. Slow, sensorial errancy is crucial to how Santiago Muñoz’s cinema materializes lost and diasporic archives of uprising against US claims of sovereignty in Puerto Rico, and the itinerant seminars relay this errancy as an aesthetic practice of living and occasional collective cohabitation in public Puerto Rican spaces. In a place where the government increasingly privatizes public beaches for corporatized tourism, and where the government recently made camping illegal in some public spaces as a strategy for controlling prolonged public protests, the itinerant seminars enact a corporeal performance of refusing the claims of laws made in foreign interests. Collaboration, friendship, aesthetic militancy, and listening as part of place-­based work flare in this itinerant filmmaker’s imaginary. While universal masculinist lines of reason and masterful critical distance still loaf around the halls of academe, the flows of my lines move otherwise: friendship is not an enabling force, and certainly not a simplifying force. It both pressures and opens unforeseen pleasures in how my writing performs how I listen for this cinema’s synesthetic reminders of Puerto Rico as a Caribbean multiplicity.

The “Theater of War” and Modes of Hysteria

Relation’s sense of multiplicity is different from what Javier Arbona calls the “hallucinatory” “multiplicities through which the military has presented itself [in Vieques].” Arbona writes of the US military’s hallucinatory multiplicities thus: “Restorer of nature after Spanish ravaging of the island, yet steward of virginal wilderness; altruist, and muscular, protector of tiny Puerto Rico; defender of America with timely demonstrations of power, but also defender of America with dutiful, disciplined practice for future combat.”32 All of this “synchronizes” with weird and normalized forms of dominant camouflage, including manufactured beaches that hide the Navy’s dumps of toxic waste, abandoned bunkers filled with piles of chemically treated metals, fields of unexploded land mines in the east of Vieques — a space camouflaged graphically on tourist maps as mono-­green forest where wild, 2-­D horses roam, the narrative of the “drug-­interdiction radar” that stands today not far from the town of Esperanza, on what the Navy called “fields of fire” — earth razed and remade for bombing and firing drills.33 This contradictory activity of erasure and spectacle is part of what Arbona calls a “Theater of War” made by the US military and lived in and beside by the people in the archipelago.34 I say lived in and beside, and not summarily lived, with Glissant’s lan-

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guage above in mind: other kinship, culinary, aesthetic, musical, and eco-­relations have always already eluded the master’s sense of spatial order in this region. Around the master’s toxicity in this field of islands, a “chimerical ecology” grows from this soil’s hysterical status. And the practices of an itinerant cinema made in relation to “barred subjects” — in a Lacanian and legal sense — who belong to a barred, eruptive, and vital place, offer sensorial errancy that de-­pathologizes and makes something else with a hysterical orientation to history, language, and ecology. Antonio Viego argues for Latinx studies’ engagements of psychoanalysis, as well as Marxism and black studies.35 In conversation with Hortense Spillers’s notion of black “interior intersubjectivity,” Viego argues for the performative refusal of the assumed transparency between signifier and subjectivity as a mode of disavowing comportment with the racist schema projected by the majoritarian sphere/white supremacist apparatuses of dominance onto black and minor fields of study. In “Toward the Sociogenic Principle,” Wynter rereads Fanon’s theorization of the antiblack epidermal schema and shows that it is not a variably socialized element but a regulated principle of social existence in the Western hemisphere.36 Amidst the antiblack epidermal schema’s manifestations in the US university, Viego argues for a deployment — specifically in Latinx studies — of what he calls “the hysteric’s arsenal.”37 The “hysteric’s arsenal” is a linguistic and psychic deviation from assimilative affects and enactments of mastery; it offers an alternately intellectually playful and sometimes berating performance of knowledge around what the master presumes to know about the nonwhite other. That Latinx studies is a site from which to theorize and perform Spanglish — as language content, as a form of semanticizing thought, and as a negative yet generative force — is among its powers. But exerting this power means refusing to tell the story of this mode of thinking, living, and making in the master’s style, a style that excludes consideration of the sensorium, emotions, and imagines the head at odds with the body. A Spanglishy Latinx studies performs a hysterical histoire from within what the master thinks is his house, his property — so from an English department, the US university, and “unincorporated territories.” The “hysteric’s arsenal” rejects the positivist trap of self-­possession, and channels hysteria as an unruly affective range that combusts that trap. But what would a “hysteric’s arsenal” do with a camera, and with cinema? Would it have to convulse? Present the paroxysms classically associated with the hysteric? Viego’s fantasy of a “psychoanalytic-­historical-­materialist reading practice” that can comment on the multiple and even inexplicable dimensions of loss: how might that sound when translated into a score for movement or a sound experimentation?38 By how many modes might the “barred subject” enact awareness of and play with being barred? By how many modes might that subject use barred Sensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  107

being in their barred place to imagine something else that does not pathologize the histories of that subject and the place to which they claim broken belonging? I argue that such must occur, ethically, from and in relation to black diasporic, maroon, and sensorially errant practices of study and living. Such a cinema might sound like, or rhyme with, Spillers’s argument in “All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race” for a perceptual shift whereby “psychoanalytic culture criticism . . . would establish the name of inquiry itself as the goal of an interior intersubjectivity,” that is, an attention to the black self that can wander off and considering something else.39 I must note that Spillers makes this argument in a scene of African American literary criticism that marks one of many moments of her oeuvre’s distinctive attunements to the Caribbean as geographic and semiotic space, which, I argue, is crucial to how her essay-­poetics enacts an African American literary criticism that does not become imperial and prescriptive regarding the diversity of black lifeworlds. Spillers continues that this mode of inquiry “does not commence in the psychoanalytic at all but is firmly rooted in habits and levels of communication, reading, and interpretation . . . how communities are apprenticed and interpellated in culture and the ways such lessons are transmitted.”40 What she describes as a third “dimension of activity in the lifeworld,” the “contemplative” that is in tune with the dimension of the everyday, and, again, can roam, I locate in Santiago Muñoz’s cinematic practice of movement. 41 “Negotiating the ground between forms of exile and belonging captures precisely the historic vocation of communities of individuals on the periphery of the dominant order,” Spillers writes.42 In the context in which I write, the periphery is archipelagic, and the archipelagic gives a specific and moving ground from which to imagine the Lacanian conception of the “barred subject.” In Spillers’s case, the “contemplative” or “third level of stress,” which is to say, a perceptual attentiveness that is given time to consider itself, how it sees and is seen, and, moreover, how it feels among other phenomena, so, to shift its attentions from the urgencies of the biological organism to a “difference of perspective,” requires a psychoanalytic protocol reoriented not only to race but specifically to black being in language, formed and distorted thereby — not whole prior to, but especially historically equipped to “decentralize and disperse the knowing one” therein.43 As I discuss in the introduction, psychoanalyst Patricia Gherovici argues in The Puerto Rican Syndrome (2003) that the suppression of the diagnosis of hysteria in the 1950s coincides with the US’s intensified military presence in Puerto Rico, which, I argue, was and is part of its ongoing, auto-­camouflaging invasion of the Caribbean, a trespass that signifies its positionality in the hemisphere as such, as trespasser. Gherovici reads the cases of Puerto Rican soldiers in the 1950s 108  Chapter Three

turning the military’s aggression against themselves as a mode of escaping that from which there was no exit. She theorizes that what US medical officers called “Puerto Rican syndrome” was “a mode of hysteria” in Lacan’s “extended sense” of it, not only “a neurosis but also a mode of discourse whose ultimate function is to tighten particular social links” and “creat[e] want.”44 Like Lacan, Gherovici senses hysteria as a “cultural barometer” that affects not only the diagnosed but also the one who diagnoses. Hysteria, Gherovici argues, “is a question of the wandering story,” not of a wandering womb, “and of whether that story belongs to the hysteric, the doctor, the historian, or the critic.”45 Replace the signifier “hysteria” in the subject of the last sentence with “the Caribbean,” and the meaning does not change much. In that semantics of the wandering Caribbean story, Santiago Muñoz’s cinema moves itinerantly with the camera-­object and opens portals of sensorial errancy.46 Sensorial errancy displaces the centrality of the white humanist narrative and its antiblack hierarchy of the senses while usurping the story of the Puerto Rican archipelago’s history for a differently hallucinatory and imaginative futurity — one unknown — hence the deviation from plot, hence the urgency of slow rehearsals that thwart the presumptions of the known. I sense an attentiveness to modes of hysteria in Santiago Muñoz’s cinema. Santiago Muñoz positions herself as the holder of a camera-­object in a dynamic with plants, animals, trash, weapons, with ongoing US militarized economic, spatial, and psychic invasion, with the violent structural afterlives of the military’s contracted presence, with historical uprisings in Puerto Rico, and in the diaspora in “the states,” that forced the Navy out of parts of the archipelago, and refused the placating, false promise of the status of statehood. This is a (nonpathologized) irrational position from which to move in a place with a complex political status. Readers can imagine Puerto Rico’s vexing political status by engaging it aesthetically and on a smaller scale. Consider the language from one of the former members of the faln, the artist Elizam Escobar. Escobar kept journals while incarcerated in US federal prison in El Reno, Oklahoma. Santiago Muñoz translates his text in her film Prisoner’s Cinema, which I describe below. Note the entry’s emphasis on status as a mode, if not a metonymy, of hysteria. . . . mi status, no sé si estoy asociado en igualdad, si sigo siendo colonia, si estoy anexado, y no lo sé si solamente soy un pobre símbolo que sueña en el porvenir del tiempo nuevo, si soy un siervo del bosque de las relaciones humanas, un vejigante verdadero . . . toda forma es inútil porque tanto la libre asociación como el contrato social de la pareja es imposible . . . el conflicto ha llegado en que el status quo es insoportable. Sensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  109

. . . my status, I don’t know if I am freely associated, if I am still a colony, if I am annexed, and I don’t know if I am just a poor symbol who dreams with the coming of a new era, a serf in the forest of human relations, a true vejigante . . . all form is useless, because both free association and the couple’s social contract are impossible . . . the conflict has reached a point where the status quo is unbearable.47 Escobar’s writing is aware that he and his poly-­named, constitutively anticolonial place are subject to a “Theater of War.” The text moves across various planes: from legal terms specific to the farcically many that apply to Puerto Rico, to the amorous, state-­contracted couple and an otherwise-­contracted formation, to the fantastical, monstrous Puerto Rican folkloric figure of the vejigante, to an invocation of the status quo that speaks of Puerto Rico’s normalized dynamic with the enemy of the United States, and gestures to neoliberal capital — whatever phase of post-­liquid while primitive finance the dominant market is ever-­entering — and its heavily militarized, xenophobic, and fascist unbearableness globally.48 There is something grammatically clairvoyant and off in the movement across scales. There is something slow and urgent in the writing that works semantic magic over layers of status contradictions that generate intense historical feelings. My claim on a slower attentiveness to various modes of hysteria’s geographies and aestheticizations, which improvise something that the positionality of master cannot take away given the resounding opacity of listening in this place, relates to how José Esteban Muñoz rereads the project of This Bridge Called My Back (1982). He argues that the writers and poets of This Bridge “show that . . . craziness was a powerful way of being in the world, a mode of being that those in power needed to call crazy because it challenged the very tenets of their existence.” 49 They made the form of the book into a variously nonwhite female epistemology, and they sometimes used ostensible crazy talk to do so. Crazy talk can help do the vital and difficult work of listening for the sounds of racially intersubjective aesthetic worlds. In relation to This Bridge, Muñoz thinks with the fictional world of playwright Ricardo Bracho’s play The Sweetest Hangover, in which he feels the ecstasy of “a world without white people.”50 The few that appear briefly in the play on a dance floor, causing what one character calls “colonial regression syndrome,” are ousted by magic, “leaving a brown world of feeling.”51 Santiago Muñoz’s cinema does not represent a world altogether without white people (for there are white Caribbeaners in her world), but it wanders and listens to the historical tensions, contradictions, overlooked potentialities, and aesthetic rituals enacted in the hysterical simultaneities of “chimerical ecolog[ies]” in a nonwhite place. It imagines vitality in Man’s toxic midst, growing at the rotten, gated 110  Chapter Three

edges of his decommissioned naval bases. Santiago Muñoz’s sensorially errant films build fantasies and cast spells. Her cinema is that of a located itinerant who knows split subjectivity both in the specific terms of Puerto Rico’s historical relation to the United States and in its situation geographically as part of a Caribbean, West Indian, Antillean collective imagination of space, sea, and life.52 Caribbean, West Indian, and Antillean wandering is not like colonial wandering as a matter of scale, and not like Enlightenment or Romantic tales of errance as a matter of cultural and geographical history. Note the Martiniquais imagination of Glissant regarding archipelagic, Antillean errantry: Our field is the sea that limits and opens. The island presumes other islands. Antilles. The giant call of the earth’s horizon is unknown to us. We could not wander without ends to the ever withdrawn limits. But we forage. Our role will be to convene. The island is an amphitheatre with ocean stands, where representation is temptation: of the world . . . In the gigantic world we dare to have a limited experience of the sea, a challenge of smallness and concentration . . . I believe in small countries. And what does it matter if I want only to believe in them because my land is completely eaten by the sea and finitude. I imagine Antilles: they are there, not only destitute and isolated, but already a multiple body and radiating a lived example.53 Antillean errantry is a foraging, convening, disappearing multiplicity that remembers marronage both as escape from slavery and as constitutive of another communal, subsistence, and exchange practice, another economy lived elsewhere than the plantation, with some relation to those in its captivity, but at enough of a distance for another black psychic and communal interiority to flourish. For Glissant, the Antilles is an example, in the world of a relational plurality, that premises itself not on dispossessing and consuming others but on seeing the same in difference as sensing the other’s opacity, their motive to collectively self-­ authorize, to move not teleologically. I want to draw attention to Glissant’s vision of islands as amphitheater, one with ocean stands, to juxtapose between his vision in this passage and what is at stake in writing attention to the violent “Theater of War” that is also part of Caribbean history and poetics. Glissant’s vision — which believes in small countries — diffuses some of the “Theater of War’s” power. Glissant looks with poetic love from Martinique, sees St. Lucia, and imagines the arc of the Antilles, its curvature an amphitheater of small countries performing for “ocean stands,” so performing for the elements, other species, the dead, and the unknown. Let’s extend and re-­spatialize the syntax of this vision. The second section of this chapter looks from Ceiba to Vieques; now let us look in reverse. From Vieques imagine: Ceiba in la isla grande of Puerto Rico fourteen miles to the west; Sensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  111

Culebra stands fifteen miles to the north; and twenty-­two miles northwest is St. Thomas, the US Virgin Islands, less narrated in the stories of Caribbean imaginations. Imagine all these islands’ maroon lights on the horizon of Vieques’ nights. Note the juxtaposition with Glissant’s language in the following relay of the US Navy’s vision of archipelagic space. “The Navy was fond of Vieques,” writes Arbona: They could practice beach landings, special-­operations parachute drops, and small-­arms fire in the maneuver area. They could shoot big artillery shells from the dry forest into the bombing range. They could shoot from ground to air, air to ground, ground to sea, and sea to ground. And they could simulate realistic combat involving close coordination between units and even foreign allies. They claimed such multiuse was hard to find.54 Nowhere in this imaginary are there creatures, people, and varied animate systems. Arbona describes how on April 19, 1988, El Mundo ran a story from the chief admiral of the Atlantic Fleet’s Southern Command reporting that they planned a “mock event” involving over 40,000 service personnel called Ocean Venture 88, the simulation of an attack on “an imaginary island.”55 The bombs were not imaginary. And the island attacked was Vieques — is Vieques. Ocean Venture 88 coded Vieques as “Encanto,” meaning Charm.56 The hubristic extractive scale of US empire is carried out by the military’s delusional actions and usages of language. Santiago Muñoz’s cinema’s thinking scales down, slows down, and recodes the urgency of a sensorially errant poetics that listens to this anticolonial place under residual attack. I am precisely listening for different kinds of sounds made from “the [Puerto Rican] hysteric’s arsenal,” forms of expression that mark interiority, and compel perceptual reconsiderations of exteroception as well as what forms and stories of life are possible.57 Slowing down for small and misshapen breaches of movement, Cervenak writes in Wandering (2014): “Breaking with the hegemonic white logics of freedom, reason, and resistance, wandering describes a choreographic and philosophical strategy performed by black artist and ‘activist philosophers’ — an interior kinesis not given over to sight or sound.”58 My study moves with a desire for many things to remain opaque, and to transform by whatever magic there may be in listening poetically to the sensorial reorientations of Caribbean places.

Sounds from “the hysteric’s arsenal”: Ceiba and Post-­military Cinema

The 2014 vinyl record Ceiba/Faslane is made up of two soundscapes. Side A holds recordings made by Scottish artist Bradley Davies at the active Faslane Naval Base in Scotland. On the B side is Puerto Rican sound artist and musician Joel 112  Chapter Three

Figure 3.3 Drone over Roosevelt Roads, circa 1975. Cover of Ceiba/Faslane album jacket. Used with permission of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

Rodríguez’s transformed field recordings made at the long fuel dock in Ceiba, from which the film Otros usos reimagined Vieques. Rodríguez made this sound experiment in conversation with Santiago Muñoz’s film, and he has also done sound mixing for several of her films, including Esto es un mensaje explosivo [This is an explosive message]. The front of the Ceiba/Faslane album jacket wears an archival image of a drone that was likely built at the US naval base in San Diego, California, being tested in 1975 over Roosevelt Roads and the Vieques Sound (see figure 3.3). The drone image is a found image, one that Santiago Muñoz relays out of research she has done in Vieques and in relation to Viequenses over several years. And the image speaks to the US military’s photographic penchant for materializing visual documents that project its vast geography of military power for itself. On the back of the album cover are several paragraphs of text; a short and adroit theory of what Santiago Muñoz calls “post-­military cinema,” a post-­military imaginary of space, language, the senses, and futurity. Rodríguez made the sound recordings, later mixed into the soundscape Ceiba, by wrapping contact mics in layers of latex condoms, an idea improvised with SanSensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  113

Figure 3.4 Artist Joel Rodríguez listening in security booth at Roosevelt Roads (2014). Photograph by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

tiago Muñoz. He fished his audio-­orientation off the fuel dock, in the same waters of the Vieques Sound where people fish in Otros usos. Ceiba exorcises harm from Ceiba, not by “exposing” it but by resounding sonic opacity. This is a mode of sound making with playful techne and listening from below that opens sensorial possibilities from what (and where) Macarena Gómez Barris calls “submerged perspectives.”59 What listeners may find in Ceiba comes from small mechanisms of resistance dipped and played with down there. In figure 3.4, Rodríguez hunches in a shape of intense listening to his recordings of Ceiba’s waters’ sounds inside a former security booth on the fuel dock. His sensorium repurposes the Navy’s security booth as a sound booth. In Ceiba, the inaugural crackling sound of burning wood situates audition on land. Sound scratches out, dragging forth the materiality and audio memory of the needle’s scratches on vinyl preparing the beginning of a track. Water gurgles, bubbles bulge and echo in the distance, so I know the land that grounds the crackling fire is near shore. Then the soundscape plunges, at around one minute nineteen seconds. The sounds submerge listeners in waters off the coast of Ceiba — waters for living organisms to regenerate, for fishing, swimming, healing; waters that also came to signify the extensive tropical property of the US Department of Defense, becoming the center of operations for the Atlantic Fleet Guided Missile Training Center and the US Naval Forces Southern Command. Uranium 114  Chapter Three

bombs, Agent Orange, drone technology — the US Navy and a phalanx of other countries and international corporations “tested” these “innovations” of modern warfare here. Underwater sounds like the inside of a stomach. This stomach invaded by US imperialism is cancerous; this stomach is in a body loved, a person who will be mourned; and this audio-­ekphrasis, like the people and creatures it holds as unnamed, injured referents, is split. Something taut, perhaps a wire, is plucked and vibrates hypertensely. Another something tight stretches, latex wrapping, pulling to the point of breaking. The wire slackens and each pluck vibrates more loosely, wildly. As Ceiba continues, I hear a roar on the horizon. It sounds like war; imminent bombs in the flight of the apocalypse; or, rather, remembered bombs detonated in the minds and bodies of the people of Ceiba, Culebra, and Vieques —  bodies that developed vibracoustic diseases, because the tissues of the human body cannot bear the intensity of day after day after day after decades of the different frequencies of noise set off by sonic booms. “The network of war is spread out thinly in order to disguise its consequences and our responsibility,” writes Santiago Muñoz on the jacket cover of Ceiba. I fantasize that what Rodríguez’s arrangement exorcises from Ceiba, from earth, wind, and water, are the metallic, grating sounds of violently penetrative war games. If the white super-­masculine fantasy destruction of the world grinds out as a soundtrack of progress toward “freedom,” free doom, then I desire sonic exorcisms that disrupt, slow down, swerve, and enact another audible arrangement, so as to compel sensorial errancy, another way of being in places where invasion as status quo, structural disuse, thriving life, contamination, new growth, and art-­ making happen in kaleidoscopic concurrence. I fantasize that my syllabic and semantic arrangements lend force to these and other forms of exorcism from earth, wind, and water, the metallic, grating sounds of violently penetrative war games. I listen to Ceiba and wonder as the minutes build, by roaring minute thirteen of the fourteen-­minute-­thirty-­second-­long soundscape: Does this roar come from “the hysteric’s arsenal”? Is this a hyperkinetic sonic fit, a sound of “Puerto Rican syndrome” — un ataque de nervios — meets “Gulf War syndrome”? Is this what the Angel hears in Walter Benjamin’s ekphrasis of Klee’s painting in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” soaring up as wind hurls his back forward? Is Rodríguez playing those thin lines that bind the Angel of history like a broken electric guitar? An explosive rip through the continuum of history re-­sounds the clamor of Viequenses’ and Culebrans’ rebellious ruptures of the unbearable status quo of colonialism: the palpitations of Caliban’s heart. The disorderly dead’s percussion. A hurricane blows like a hysterical Puerto Rican soldier’s enactments of fits, then post-­fevered calms. Sensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  115

I must underscore: Puerto Rican people’s senses continue to be under attack in the United States’ unending state of exception, which is to say, war. Santiago Muñoz’s aesthetics of sensorial errancy enacts a self-­authorizing power of movement, exorcism, and possibility — including the possibilities of mourning and fantasy amidst ongoing invasion. The colonial history of forced immobilization smacks up against the historical flights, resistance movements, insurrections, linguistic deviancies, and libidinal forms of peoples of the Antilles. (No one here has been conquered; slavery, and its prison-­complex progeny, always also shared time with revolt, marronage, not-­visible-­to-­the-­master intracommunal love, art, and antiplantation/aberrant ecological growth.) Residents of Ceiba speak of US submarines snaking nuclear weapons through the Vieques Sound, despite the antinuclear Treaty of Tlatelolco signed by Latin American and Caribbean states, including Puerto Rico, in 1967.60 With their words in mind, our imaginations go underwater, upside down, in debt, contaminated, and knowing better than to believe the colonial state’s version of things. Near the bones, balls, and chains of slaves leapt overboard, or thrown over the sides of slavers’ ships, at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea of maroon cells, there are bombs. I emphasize the Caribbean Sea because the imaginary operative here channels the Black Atlantic as vast signifier of disjuncture, loss, interethnic and transimaginary pleasure, and displacement’s emplacement into an aquatic signifier of regional connection. The US government camouflages to what extent the waters off the southeastern Puerto Rican coast are contaminated. The shore and the land beyond it were converted into a “nature preserve” after the US Navy’s forced departure in 2004. But according to the “preservation” laws put in place after the Navy’s formal departure, the land and coast can be, and are, gated off and blocked to local residents, positioning them as barred subjects on their own land. The post-Navy/corporate military afterlife of gates deliberately renders miles of the place, coastal, swamp, and forest, extremely difficult to access (since the making of the film, indeed, even higher gates have been built). Private security and local police drive around and will not hesitate to kick out what they have been contracted to view as “trespassers.” This spatial derangement also means that the US government will never do the studies to find out how contaminated the land and water are, much less clean up the toxicity it has forced into inhabitants of Ceiba. Santiago Muñoz’s eleven-­minute film Post-­military Cinema (2014) moves on this coastal land that is hers — in an antiproprietary sense — and from which she is juridically barred. It was shot in the disused movie house at Roosevelt Roads, not far from the dock where Rodríguez made field recordings. Viewers wander into Post-­ military Cinema: the opening shots are made in walking motion that peeks around corners of the movie house, and beyond it. The camera takes us near munitions 116  Chapter Three

storage facilities; nearby, landmines are buried and still active. As the film ends, we wander out of what we learn, visually, is a gated, barred, and prohibited area. Errancy has stakes, and this film shows the importance of rethinking hysteria in this place barred from itself, from its archipelagic region, and yet bursting and beautiful with new growth. When Post-­military Cinema begins, viewers look from inside the darkened movie house with an exit door flung open, pointing our attentions out of its rectangle to a forest’s new growth, its booming small sounds of vitality, and beams of light. This image — from inside a dark box, through a rectangle, beholding wind-­tussled green foliage — is formally cinematic. But the camera doesn’t do a bunch of tricks to make it so; the material camera-­object retraced in the shots moves slowly. Viewers change positions as the cuts show us the camera-­object shifting from one side of the space to the other side. Another cut reorients us to beams of light drawing the shapes of the plants outside of the movie house onto empty, turquoise blue, crushed velvet seats inside. The filmmaker’s gait via the camera walks viewers outside. After a sequence of shots of flora blowing in the wind and spider webs ciphering light against the exterior movie house walls, out of nowhere a beekeeper appears, makes a small fire with dried grasses, and smokes out bees living in the disused movie house’s roof. The smoke weaves through the trees and bushes, changing the shape of the light. The bees buzz as the camera follows the smoke through the trees, like a finger tracing movement. The film does not narrate why the beekeeper is there, or why they move the bees from this place, or where the bees will go. A long take of a glistening spider web juxtaposes its geometry with that of the movie house. The camera reenters the dark cube and watches in a slow trance the reversal of the usual direction of light at the movies: instead of from the projector over audience heads onto a screen, this light streams from outside onto empty blue seats and deep darkness. The camera faces directly down at a wavy line of termites doing their micro-­work of breakdown, along with the mold and the cycles of storms. After a cut, viewers are repositioned far from the exit door, sensing how cavernous is this space. The ambient forest sounds disappear abruptly — replaced by postproduction silence. In the silence, an amoeba of light grows from the unrevealed source, shape-­shifts, and writhes glowing across the wall. The shape of the contorting amoeba conjures small details rendered before in close-­up: spiders’ webs; smoke between the trees; and the plasmatic texture with which the bobbing shadows of plants taking sun grace this strange dynamic of destruction, disuse, and new growth. When the sounds of the forest appear again, their “natural occurrence” blares. Heightened by editorial usages of sound, the camera-­object sensorially reorients viewers as well as the recorded images of this place. Sensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  117

The film shows the secondary forest that grows out of soil not far from where undetonated bombs lie buried, their kinesis interred but not disarmed, and creatures that inhabit the military movie house, a lo trópico. This enlivens a historical and aesthetic argument that viewers are not looking upon ruins. From somewhere on the scale of the filmmaker’s body, grounded, not floating above the world, in the aerial view of gods and military might, down here, light strokes the seats, coquis call, plants grow eruptively, and here we have the movies, the light of life in motion. In Ceiba and Post-­military Cinema, disuse and toxicity are not the summary meaning of what is proposed to and for the senses. They do not depict ruins, a way of seeing that is sick with nostalgia for empire. Rather, their titles name a Caribbean place, that is also a West African tree, and a temporality desirously relieved of the United States. But that imagined temporality, like Ceiba’s ecology, like the history of the term chimera itself, is vexed, illusory. As Puerto Rico has been facing a form of fiscal crisis that is another form of junta, or military control, and spatial invasion facilitated by new and old lending schemes, this invocation of the post-­military is simultaneously partially true and very much about desire: how to analogize the spell to the required force of magic that undoes the war machine. I choose to render Post-­military in its modification of Cinema as spatial in addition to temporal. This sign speaks from a poetics of anticolonial place and archipelagic insurgency that will outlive and resignify the US military’s material remains. This cinema historicizes by listening to and reimagining the present’s past for an unknown future, and it does so by aestheticizing uncertain, chimerical conditions. It is tricky to make Caribbean cinema that does not somehow lend itself to the service work of the developmental genre of the tourist travel guide. This difficulty bears out how private property in the Caribbean is historically tied to making this into a place that is not for the people who live in it, but for settler colonial outsiders, money launderers, capitalism’s shady profiteers seeking the occasional sun kiss. Their beach towels and beachfront properties are among the loci in a shifting “Theater of War.” And Santiago Muñoz’s cinema’s sensorial errancy also informs its antidevelopment through para-­plot, if not antiplot structures, and a visual schema that repeatedly plays with sonic opacity. Shadowing my engagement of Santiago Muñoz’s films and my focus on their sonic opacities and speeds of movement rather than a device such as plot is the filmmaker and cinematographer Arthur Jafa’s notion of “Black Visual Intonation,” or “bvi.” He has re-­elaborated his notion of “Black Visual Intonation” recently in conversation with Tina Campt about his film-­elegy–­new song, Love Is the Mes118  Chapter Three

sage, the Message Is Death (2016).61 In the first “Black Visual Intonation” essay (1998), adapted from a talk, Jafa thinks through how to sense black vocal movements, which are related, for him, to how to cinematographically depict black pleasure. Jafa distinguishes between his interest in the interiority and intramurality of black pleasure and the spectacle that white audiences make of black joy in proximity to black suffering. Jafa describes how early twentieth-­century black US filmmaker Oscar Michaeux spatialized black audio-­visual subjects in his films in a way that continues to break Hollywood’s visual expectations. He entered film history as irregular, in a way that is analogous, for Jafa, to how Michael Jordan played the game: in such acrobatic flight and excess that any sunk shot should count for ten points where others’ shots count for two or three. In this spirit, Jafa fantasizes various films that haven’t been made yet, such as one about Malcolm X that is a love story for two Bettys, or a slow, hardcore film about Martin Luther King Jr.’s sex life. For Jafa, how to spatialize black pleasure — which, in the “bvi” essay, evokes African American and African diasporic pleasure — in cinema is best imagined through sound, and sound metaphors, hence the term “Black Visual Intonation.” Sensing African diasporic pleasure as a sonically oriented, enunciative set of desires opens up unregulatable realms of feeling for the visual. Jafa imagines making films that move at the rates of black speech(es), black enunciation(s). As a cinematographer, he imagines using a hand-­cranked camera to best enact his fantasy techne, making films that would become “the visual equivalencies of vibrato, rhythmic patterns, slurred or bent notes, and other musical effects. . . . You could do samba beats, reggae beats, all kinds of things.”62 He speaks of exceeding the dominant regime of visual expectations in cinema — a form obsessed with black constraint, joy in pain, pain in joy — by visualizing irregular sonic rates of expression, movement, and pleasure. Jafa’s film fantasies that have an ear for black voice, meter, and spoken shapes come to me in how Santiago Muñoz’s camera positions itself as listening to and moving with nonwhite subjects’, as well as creatures’ and biotic and abiotic elements’ and forces’, movements in her films, and in how her films often occur in a parallel, mixed world of conditional and subjunctive tenses of desire. The conditional and subjunctive are not about undeterred forward movements in time, or even about the Lacanian anticipatory historical time of the future anterior that interpenetrates past indefinition with future becoming, what will have been; rather, when combined, they playfully reimagine portals of what could have been copulating with what would — with no pathos, no nostalgia — through sensorial errancy.63

Sensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  119

Prisoner’s Cinema, or, Sensory Deprivation and Sensorial Errancy

Extruding through the ocean’s and hurricanes’ wreckage in the Puerto Rican archipelago today is the invasive structure of US colonialism, which holds the thought of national self-­determination at bay, at gunpoint. Let’s rehearse: my position is that Puerto Rico enacts modes of hysteria. Puerto Rico is not vexed by statehood. Rather, Puerto Rico refuses the pseudo-­democratic and sadistic “options” of freedom-­binds arrayed before the archipelago by the United States’ ongoing colonial invasion of the Caribbean region. Broken chains bind the islands; the US’s invasion is not spatially limited to the sign of Puerto Rico. All in the archipelagic, regional neighborhood somehow perform a position of relation to this ongoing spatial, linguistic, legal, psychic, economic, and historical trespass. The hurricanes that swept the islands in September 2017 were not solo acts. They are part of colonial durational performances that ripped open our different attentions to the brutality of the colonial status quo. Two films that cluster around performativity, political incarceration, “terrorism,” and performance show how the brutality of the status quo is felt differently. I have been talking about sensorial errancy, in part, because there is a Puerto Rican anticolonial history of sensory deprivation and sensory overload. Plainly said, inside my reclamation of sensorial errancy opened by this cinema is a history of torture of Afro-Caribbean life. In 2014 Santiago Muñoz made a thirty-­minute film, Prisoner’s Cinema, with the artist and former member of the faln Elizam Escobar. The fbi arrested Escobar and eleven other alleged members of the faln in Evanston, Illinois, in April 1980. He was charged with seditious conspiracy, sentenced to sixty-­eight years in prison, and served nineteen in the federal prison in El Reno, Oklahoma. El Reno is near the site of a fort and settlement built on Cheyenne and Arapaho lands. It is the site of ongoing land controversies between the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes and the US federal government. El Reno was a far cry from where Escobar had family or friends. This logic of sentencing political prisoners to a locus spatially far-­flung from their communities was typical of the punitive tactics in the incarceration of Puerto Rican, as well as African American, Asian American, indigenous, mestizx, Jewish, and other radicals in the 1970s and ’80s. In this case, a subject who was “in prison for Puerto Rican independence” was incarcerated in a prison built on occupied indigenous lands. While he was in prison, Escobar and the lawyer Jan Susler, legal counsel for the faln, became lovers for years. The amorous, like certain forms of friendship, is something at once public and particularly unknowable. It is a form of relation protected and kept, by the lovers and by others who witness it, in some para-­discursive refuge that approximates whatever remains of privacy. The state took away this formerly incarcerated sub120  Chapter Three

ject’s social and public life. It acted to break his body from his political desires for a place’s autonomy. An amorous, and radically politicized, relation that breaches the threshold of prison and supposedly free space reorients us, we who witness an aestheticization of incarcerated senses and our collective sensorium. Santiago Muñoz writes this in her artist’s statement about the film made with Escobar, and what “prisoner’s cinema” signifies sensorially: After prolonged incarceration and sensory deprivation, some prisoners experience visual hallucinations filled with extraordinary luminescence and color. These hallucinations are sometimes referred to as “prisoners’ cinema.” Elizam Escobar is a Puerto Rican artist and writer who served 19 years in US prisons for the crime of seditious conspiracy. Escobar never experienced these visual hallucinations, but his writing during these years evidences an extreme and sometimes painful attention to mental processes, and an expanded sensorial, emotional and intellectual internal life. Prisoner’s Cinema is the film that might have been imagined by Escobar during these years of imprisonment. The words in the film are taken from what Escobar has called his prison Anti-­diary, a record of the thought processes that ran parallel to his painting, poetry and essays from 1988 to 1995.64 In the film, Escobar is positioned in his home in Puerto Rico. He initially reads from his prison diaries while sitting at a desk, facing the camera but not looking directly at it. Soon, the filmmaker’s voice assumes the readings of the diaries. Again, this cinema plays with who maneuvers histoire. Hence, in various positions of relation to the camera, Escobar moves about. The camera shows him in the context of a painting class that he is teaching at the time of the film’s shooting in San Juan. He cuts tree branches, drives a car, watches the Puerto Rican men’s baseball team on television, and folds clothes while wearing the mask of a vejigante — fantasy enters. Through the mask and in close-­up, late in the film, he looks directly into the camera. Frequent cuts to images of cruise ships and other sea craft cutting across the bay of San Juan show militarization and tourism blur in each other’s wakes. At times, these movements sync with Greek mythological metaphors in Escobar’s densely philosophical writings about the positions of “I,” “you,” and “they,” about the politics of encounter, about interior life, about mythic attempts to situate the self, all while incarcerated for nineteen years. The audio overlaps the language of the diaries made in prison with spatially invaded “free” everyday life around Escobar in San Juan. Prisoner’s Cinema becomes part of the ephemeral traces of an explosive and expanded Puerto Rican history of the senses — of the senses’ overexposure to bombings, explosions, and toxicity, and of the senses’ deprivation, in conjunction with their Sensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  121

regional isolation from other islands, at the violent sovereign hands of the US. But there is the senses’ errancy — its interiority, imagination, recordings, desires — that the sovereign’s grip cannot control. Santiago Muñoz’s cinema reveals attachments to sensorial experimentation, narrative promiscuity, and the divinatory. It often plays tricks on official histories by thinking in the subjunctive, in desire’s tense, and in the conditional, that of potentiality that specifically acts as a rewriting of the violent sovereign’s given history — not as a recuperation, but as a ripping through the granted plane of visibility and sensibility so as to wander, feel, and imagine what might have been toward another way of being. As when she writes above, “Prisoner’s Cinema is the film that might have been imagined by Escobar during these years of imprisonment,” she is taking the name of a “condition” and re-­signifying it as an aesthetic, which my writing here hopes to extend. Santiago Muñoz is questioning the space-­time between Escobar’s incarceration in El Reno, Oklahoma, and a notion of freed life in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the early twenty-­first century. And she is granting sensory deprivation a poetics of sensorial errancy. If the incarceration of Escobar that produced physical and mental breakdowns in many also inadvertently produced what Santiago Muñoz calls “an expanded sensorial, emotional and intellectual internal life,” then perhaps we need to sense on different terms whatever we imagine to be freer barred space.

Esto es un mensaje explosivo [This Is an Explosive Message]

Direct representation and documentation are not devices used in this cinema to approach historical Puerto Rican performances of sovereign refusal. Rather, viewers encounter a listening and being-­with that wants to know more, and does so by tracing and reimagining unruly movements. There is not one truth to reveal about events that are themselves citational of others that are errant, recursive, and that disinterpellate the US government. Made in 2010 with the white conceptual artist and painter Carlos Irizarry and performance artists Carlos Torres López y Beatriz Irizarry Gauthier, the film Esto es un mensaje explosivo [This Is an Explosive Message] reimagines the histoire of a performance of a bombing of the US government. Irizarry speaks in circumlocutions throughout the film. He says at one point of his 1979 act, “Era símbolico. Pero era real. Era terrorismo.” [It was symbolic. But it was real. It was terrorism.] Esto es un mensaje explosivo shows acts of listening to the periphrases spoken by Irizarry not to confirm the truth of his action, but to play with the dimensions of unsovereign performances that go beyond masculinist tropes of revolution.65 Indeed, as the film goes on, it subtly decenters him, and, by extension, decenters masculinist revolutionary performance as its “primary subject.” 122  Chapter Three

For longer than two minutes, the film only gives us a black screen with intermittent white text and a blasting, low, whooshing sound cut across by a high-­ pitched, piercing sound. The opening sounds hit like gusts of wind and changes of air pressure slamming up against steel, as when a plane lands. You cannot just have it: the film’s beginnings in sound orient how your senses approach this iteration of the story of US terrorism and Puerto Rican performances of unruliness. Text appears on the black screen: “In 1976, artist Carlos Irizarry rented the conference room at El Zipperle Restaurant and held a press conference in which he threatened to kill United States president Gerald Ford, who would be visiting the island for an economic summit during the following weeks.” Irizarry was arrested for making this public threat, and quickly released. In 1979 Irizarry enacted another sequence of events. He wrote a letter to then-­ president of the US, Jimmy Carter, demanding the liberation of all Puerto Rican political prisoners. He threatened to blow up an American Airlines jet if his threat was not heeded. The film tells us, “A week later, he boarded a plane to Vieques, slept overnight at La Esperanza and in the morning boarded a small plane to Luis Muñoz Marín [Airport] and from there headed to Washington.” An archipelagic detour follows his next moves. From this moment in this version of the story, Irizarry went into a phone booth and called the Washington Post and said, “There is an explosive message in this telephone booth.” He left a copy of the letter to Carter in the booth. He then called the fbi from another phone booth, saying the same lines about an explosive message, and leaving another copy of the letter. He then got on a bus and went to Newark, New Jersey. From there, Irizarry called the fbi several times. The next morning, after taking a taxi to the New York Daily News, he called the fbi once again, as well as the United Nations. He then boarded the last plane that night from JFK International Airport in Queens en route to San Juan. After the plane took off, Irizarry gave a flight attendant an envelope with a message for the pilot. About a half-­hour into the flight, the plane rerouted back to New York City and landed at JFK, where Irizarry was arrested. Upon arrest, a bomb squad checked the sole object in Irizarry’s possession, his briefcase, from which they recovered soiled underwear and a random cable, what Irizarry called his “symbolic bomb,” his dirty bomb. At trial, Irizarry’s lawyer, Marco Rigau, argued that Irizarry was exercising free speech and, moreover, creating a work of conceptual art. The defense hinged upon conceptual art. After the film’s opening of nearly two minutes of black screen and white text relaying much of what I have relayed above, it cuts to an unclear image. The piercing, funneling sounds continue, and the image shows the reflection of the filmmaker vaguely on the left side of the screen, adjusting the camera lens. She apSensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  123

pears in the reflective surface of a portrait painting of a male face. Then the film cuts to an old Irizarry’s face on the far right of the screen. He’s in the middle of a sentence about calling the fbi from Newark when another voice interrupts and attempts to clarify whether he called from Newark Airport or somewhere in the city. He does not specify. While he goes on not directly answering the question, the filmmaker’s reflected head appears again with the camera protruding from one hand while the other visibly adjusts the lens. At this point, the sound cuts and shifts. Irizarry is audible, but it’s as though he speaks from inside a tin can. A motor of some kind seems to be running. A world is posited around Irizarry’s voice, where he appears blurry on screen. When he comes into focus, so does the back of another person’s head on the left side of the screen: he is not a solo subject in the film. Man is not the subject of Santiago Muñoz’s cinema. The human as such is positioned to be maneuvered into errant and decentering sensorial rearrangement. Almost in aversion to portraiture, the frames are tight, close-­up when the film does show the faces of the two others in the room listening, the performance artists Torres López and Irizarry Gauthier. The film listens to Irizarry’s circumlocutions and to the two others listening to him. Audiences of the film hear only periphrases and the making of another version of this meandering story through the editing of the film. This is an ample refusal of understanding and rational articulation. The suspension of transparency regarding this one (and repetitive) historical action guards the difficulty of rectifying political desires with aesthetic form. In this case, aesthetic form realizes and conceals a political desire for Puerto Rico’s autonomy and regional reorientation, something the US government could only ever hear represented as terrorism. According to this iteration of the explosive message, Irizarry never intended to bomb anything. But his utterances are repeatedly errant — they bump into and contradict each other. Irizarry’s discursive errantry is not incomprehensible, yet how he says what he says in the film’s constructed scenes of swerving encounter between Irizarry’s “I” and the “you” and “they” of the other artists and the camera in the room, which implies more witnesses of this encounter, performs how historical positions converge and shift. What piques my attention is that Irizarry argues that what he did “se convertió en arte conceptual” [became conceptual art] in the process of his lawyer having to make a defense. By having to represent Irizarry’s phone calls, letters, thinking, and movements in court, in that specific kind of theater of sensorial control and imperial legal procedure, as truth, and in a specific political moment, Rigau collaborates and makes (obscene) conceptual art. Irizarry goes on to say that this defense quieted the media because they did not know “qué carajo es [arte conceptual]” [what the hell is (conceptual art)]. Before the film cuts to the performance by Irizarry Gauthier and Torres López in 124  Chapter Three

Carlos Irizarry’s house, near where he sits drawing, he says this: “[Era] un tipo de teatro. Un performance, ponle.” [“(It was) a kind of theater. It was a performance, let’s say.”] The scenario of his performance at a moment in history when the legal invention of “seditious conspiracy” battered the possibilities of an autonomous Puerto Rican politics refuses the authority of the state to overdetermine the meanings of desire through aesthetics. This aesthetics performs a barred politics. The movements that the two performance artists, who had been depicted as listening in the first part of the short film, make in relation to the camera in the second part are not representational. In the second part of the film, their imaginative movements shuttle between a phone, a small bed, a pack of cigarettes, and a small unidentifiable object that had some former electronic life; they repetitively lift their arms in submission, walk back and forth, and write loudly with a pencil on a piece of paper. They do not use spoken language in their reclamation and reimagining of this explosive histoire. They enact physically and spatially the imaginative effects of errant listening. I sense them as making embodied periperformatives, to remix Sedgwick. That is, they do not merely cite him; rather, their movements call for something else from you and the camera with their rendering of a hysterical histoire. Performative movements that redraw errant listening to circumlocutions are hard to follow if what we are listening for is understanding. Writing with them is a way of circling their allure and recomposing various shapes of defiance, opacity, and rupture within the hostilities of the given world so as to imagine space and time to sense otherwise.

Marché Salomon’s Epistemic Flip

When Jafa wonders, in “Black Visual Intonation,” “And I would like to know what kind of version of Little Richard’s life Andrei Tarkofsky would do,” he is talking about something that exists only in his enunciation, and at its specific rates of movement.66 What kind of performative is this that considers its fantasies’ enunciations to be sources of knowledge? What is the rate of fantasy “almost films” — their value and their speed? Santiago Muñoz has written about what she calls “almost films” in her book, A Universe of Fragile Mirrors, and in two films she made in Port-­au-­Prince, Haiti, Nocturne (2014) and Marché Salomon (2015). She fantasizes in a section of the book called, “I am going to describe a ritual,” about Maya Deren’s film that was not made from many trips made and scores of film reel shot in Haiti observing ritual dance and becoming an initiate in Voudon. Deren never made the exact film that she proposed to the Guggenheim; her book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953) and another iteration of the book Sensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  125

Figure 3.5 Market space in Marché Salomon, Port-­au-­Prince, Haiti (2015). Used with permission of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

in a film made and edited many years later emerged where the proposed film did not.67 Fantasy films, almost films, military film rolls at the bottom of the rivers and sea of the Caribbean: What do they become? Santiago Muñoz’s interest in Deren’s belief in the aesthetic and sensorial experience of ritual echoes in her cinema’s play with the material camera-­object as a portal to practices beyond dominant visibility’s grasp — conditional and subjunctive, uncertain yet vitally desirous. The film Marché Salomon is named for the Salomon meat market in Port-­au-­Prince in which it was made, in collaboration with two Haitian teenage artists, Marcelin Exiliere and Mardochelène Chevry, who, in the film, work in the market (see figure 3.5). Rather than filming a Vodoun ritual to think with the camera about life, death, and ritual, a nonrepresentational poetics of Vodoun emerges in the open-­air meat market. For much of the film, the camera positions itself behind or beside Exiliere and Chevry and their interactions with each other, as well as their ritual interactions with the living and dead in the market. Walking between the tables of meat and machetes, colorful plastic bottles of soda and water for sale, and women seated and removing an herb’s leaves — parsley or cilantro — from stems, the camera moves at the back of the young boy who carries around a handheld red and black radio, listening, singing, and bopping along to his music. While they chop pieces 126  Chapter Three

of goat meat, the camera listens to Exiliere and Chevry discuss the poetics of the meat market as a galaxy with its own solar system. The meat cutters are the sun, says the boy, the vegetables, flies, bottles, and other objects are the planets. The girl remarks that the only thing alive in the market is flies — almost everything else there is dead, bottled, or packaged. In their poetic back and forth while they cut up chunks of meat, the teenagers talk about a black hole in this galaxy — I imagine that the black hole is the camera. The boy says something that I hear as, Were he to go into the black hole, he would be lost. The girl says what I hear as, She wants to enter the black hole, and imagines that from there time recedes. Time would not go forward, but rush backward. After this exchange, they play a game with each other: they squint and look through a circle made between their respective index fingers and thumbs. They play on the air with how to see around them, through a circle, a hole. They tilt their heads backward, looking up at the roof over the Marché Salomon. At that point, the camera swerves back and up, set off by their hand gestures. The screen goes dark and an unseen woman sings. The film ends. The Haitian actors’ conversations throughout the film, of which viewers are given only parts by the camera-­ object and editing, about the living and dead, zombies, the sacred, the senses and the without-­sense, question the presence of the camera as a device of capture: In entering its black hole, where do they go? What becomes of their images? Who or what might “take” them? And their poetics proposes that they are doing something beyond the mechanism of capture, changing the signification of the camera as a ceremonial object of black attunement. The boy speculates, “Kisa? Se mwen menm ki dwè fòs la vi a?” [What’s this? Is it me who must be the life force?] Exiliere’s and Chevry’s poetics turns mere sight on its head, that is, turns cinematic and hierarchical sensorial orders upside down. What breaks, opens, and moves in the aestheticized epistemic flip?68

Sensorial Errancy in Muñoz’s Cinema  127

Slow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning, and Migratory Refuge

4

It’s terrible. . . . We’re struggling to try to figure out a poetics [that] will allow us not just to describe but to continue to enact what we’ve already done and been. . . . It’s ecstatic.  — Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nonperformance” (2015) a golden darkness, brightness / so bright that it was darkness. / And there were angels, their faces hidden / from me, angels at war / with one another, angels in dazzling / combat. And oh the splendor, / The fearful splendor of that warring. / Hide me, I cried to rock and bramble. / Hide me, the rock, the bramble cried. . . .  — Robert Hayden, “The Ballad of Nat Turner” (1962)

Hypersensitive Reading

Poetics emplaces multisensorially stimulating audio-­visual things side by side, in relation, broken together. Poems are super-­sensory, compressed audio-­visual things; and poems are but one kind of thing in a world of things that are especially good at imagining a desirous, complex system of proximities. “Terrible . . . ecstas[y],” “fearful splendor,” an “I” resounded and dispersed into “cried” and “cried” — epigraphs are often there to be skipped over, but I position these lines by Fred Moten (channeling Robert Hayden) and Robert Hayden (channeling Nat Turner) for the poetic, sonic, and psycho-­geographic long division that they do in my hypersensitive readings of Eduardo Corral’s debut book of poems, Slow Lightning (2012). I have broken those lines from their contexts precisely to foreground their synesthetic connections to Corral’s viscerally formalist poetics. Corral, Hayden, and Moten poeticize fugitive, itinerant sensoria formed by movement, danger, and sensuous possibilities. They also compel our geographic imaginary

west of where it has been hitherto, into a landscape as damaged by the Monroe Doctrine (and the Roosevelt Corollary) as Puerto Rico and the Caribbean: the US southwest, northern Mexico, and the Sonoran Desert region. My readings offer a sensorial inter-­“intramural protocol” of American poetics.1 Afoot in Slow Lightning are migratory senses of space-­time. At the crux of the book is a 161-­line elegy, “Variation on a Theme by José Montoya.” The poem buries the body of a migrant, named Monchie, found dead in the Arizona desert, in Orizaba, Veracruz, México. The region of Veracruz, and the Cofre de Perote and Pico de Orizaba specifically, is historically maroon, Afro-­Mexican, Afro-­indigenous, linguistically mixed, and heavily Nahuatl-­speaking.2 Veracruz is part of the Caribbean. The elegy does not reveal if its lost subject is Afro-mestizx, Afro-­indigenous. But the elegy’s burial evokes the many people ritually unburied, the dead who have died because pushed by the militarized, post-­n afta border to cross forth, through a desert ecosystem made more treacherous by whiteness, and Monchie’s burial place evokes a site of historical marronage. To overstay the crossing because of the risks of crossing over — as in dying in the Sonoran Desert, a landscape reshaped by US nationalist auto-­bounds and its self-­legitimating cartography of trespass3 — registers the ecological, hemispheric crisis of US nationalism, not the misrepresented notion that immigrants locate freedom in the inhospitable, in-­ crisis United States. As do many lyric speakers across the book, the elegy’s speaker re-­composes the pleasures of those who live with migratory losses. It reimagines the losses that the state dictates remain recanted in close proximity to reverie and praise. The elegy at Slow Lightning’s middle also directly cites these lines from Hayden’s poem, “Runagate Runagate,” which retrace the running perspective of a fugitive maroon: “and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere / morning and keep on going and never turn back and keep on going.” 4 I will head off anything like a positivist reading of these lines, a fate that has befallen Hayden’s poem “Frederick Douglass,” which I read antagonistically, as formally critical of the given, constrained shapes of “freedom”: freedom is not ahead of fugitives in the poem, and is not a destination. Blackness is ahead, and blackness is not an arrival place, but offers a stratus of refuge. Freedom is not the opposite of slavery; freedom horizons slavery. The “runagates” do not have anything as cruelly unimaginative as integration into a white epistemic fixed destination on their kinetic minds. “Blackness ahead . . . and keep on going” gives spatial, sonic, and extra-­semiotic refuge to nonwhite inhabitants of flight. In Moten’s “terrible” and “ecstatic” meditation on black poetics and nonperformance, I hear a rapturous struggle with the semantic limits of articulating —  putting back together at a joint — a vital sense of African diasporic refusals of 130  Chapter Four

the brutally regulated traps of “freedom.” In Hayden’s poem “The Ballad of Nat Turner,” which lets the Prophet speak before the uprising and far beyond earshot of the Southampton County lawyer, I hear desire and cries for refuge on troubled grounds, cries made by black insurgents and maroons, as well as by a landscape threatened by Man’s violently homogeneous, invasive settler project. In Corral’s Slow Lightning, buoyed at its center by the ecstatic mourning of a migrant’s death in Arizona and burial in Orizaba, I hear refuge given, losses claimed, and the risks of nonwhite, queer, interspecies pleasures taken, and loved. Slow Lightning makes spaces of migratory refuge and anticolonial sensorial solidarity in relation to border-­crossers today. “Packed / into a car trunk, he was smuggled into the States.”5 Corral’s poem “In Colorado My Father Scoured / And Stacked Dishes” sounds out a frightening, familiar image of how many have crossed the Mexico-­US borderlands, particularly after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta) and Operation Gatekeeper in 1994. As Alicia Schmidt Camacho and Noam Chomsky have shown, nafta’s implementation compelled massive, hitherto unseen scales of movements of Mexican and Central American peoples north toward precarious and dangerous but loudly circulated economic promises. The US government, by way of the ins and police in Texas and Arizona, militarized the border concurrent with some and in anticipation of more movements of people under the shadow of the very economic event it triumphed, nafta.6 Border militarization criminalized crossing and pushed migrants into the Sonoran Desert, causing thousands of deaths. To be explicit, nafta and Operation Gatekeeper made deadly a historical migratory movement, and unequivocally encouraged a historical white supremacist configuration attendant to settlement and property relations formed through slavery: vigilance committees and vigilante violence in the name of US nationalism. Vigilante violence must also be imagined on emotional and sensorial levels, as part of the topological and ecological derangement of the borderlands since the mid-­nineteenth century.7 I refuse the notion that post-­n afta migratory movement is imaginable as operating “in the hope of justice under capitalism,” as Gayatri Spivak wrote of the “New Immigration” under financialized capitalism in the 1990s, that hope is a “scandalous secret” of “unity” equally applicable to “the ‘illegal alien’ and the aspiring academic.”8 The over twelve million undocumented Mexican and Central American people living in the US, some of whom overstay precisely because of the militarization of the border, do not move or labor to endorse white Enlightenment notions of justice or neo-­abolitionist freedom narratives. Rather, these migrants retrace a historical, and melancholic, circling movement of labor, and they reveal how that circle, as well as promises of economic justice through labor rights, have Slow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning  131

been broken by a reassertion of property relations and white supremacy in the region of the US southwest and Mexican northwest. That reassertion of property relations draws on juridical and extrajuridical white nationalism, antiblackness, slavery, anti-­indigeneity, and the violent cartographic recklessness of white settler imaginations in the region. Car trunks, undercarriages, and false floors have sometimes become coffins and, other times, kept movement’s secret life across the militarized border. This imagery elicits both death and mobile refuge. The itinerant music, smells, sounds, textures, and colors of Corral’s lyrical Mexican migrant imaginary of Arizona and northern Mexican desert synesthetically incite ecstatic mourning. My invocation of mourning draws on arguments of migrant melancholia across a range of studies concerned with the emotional life of migrancy, some of which I discuss in detail below.9 Mindful of the ongoing history of interstate violence against Mexican and Central American migrating peoples, however, I turn away from a literary critical and sociological discourse emergent in the US university in the early 1970s about Chicana/o melancholia that summarized itself thusly: “the border crossed Chicanos, Chicanos did not cross the border.” Yes, and that discourse came to romanticize nineteenth-­century Mexican nationalism, to idealize the fourteenth-­century Aztec empire, to sidebar historical and contemporary indigenous land claims that assert alternate temporalities to that of the violent sovereign’s universalist Manifest Destiny, to forget the making-­savage of indigenous and maroon peoples who rejected white settler monocrop, mono-­temporal, and monolingual notions of space in northern Mexico and beyond, and situated the melancholia of Chicanxs away from blackness, indigeneity, and Asian Americanness.10 Lest Chicanx poetics continue to lose what has already been lost in the same ways, my hypersensitive reading of Slow Lightning centers pleasure, play, sound, memory, and mourning amidst a death-­bound project (i.e., the state’s) and offers a multisensorial reorientation to a poetics that viscerally baffles the violent optics of the regime of white supremacist surveillance — a regime that requires its citizenry’s policing of their own and others’ senses. In the spirit of the work of Electronic Disturbance Theater’s Transborder Immigrant Tool, a mobile app “designed to map water sources for those crossing the border,” my hypersensitive reading mode is aware of daily, intense numbers of recent deaths of border crossers, and of many more people living with those losses over time.11 In the spirit of Jennifer Doyle’s reading of Transborder Immigrant Tool, which highlights the problem with rebutting the Right’s attack on the app by defending it as being merely art, I take seriously the difference between the subject position of “coyote” in the world and that of a lyric speaker “coyote” in a poem. And I take seriously how Slow Lightning works to reimagine migrant deaths, what losses make, and anticolonial sensorial solidarity 132  Chapter Four

in the world. Slow Lightning is not just poetry. Slow Lightning’s poetics traffics moments of queer sexual pleasure, emotional ecstasy, desire, and melancholia into proximity with urgent grief and mourning; this concatenation is part of the book’s difference, a book that also has on its mind the aids epidemic. Music aids Slow Lightning’s poetic memory-­structures of ecstatic mourning: elegy, aubade, nocturne, and ballad resound across the book.12 These forms do not reveal our utter separation from each other as beings, but shelter how we are apart, together. They compel my argument for the contra-­value of sound sense, which listens poetically, abnormally, and bilingually to the deviancies bound up in denotative meanings of words. Lyric poetry’s history is orally performative, mnemonic, and itinerant, carried by troubadours inclined to multilingual resonances that distort monolingual deadlocks of referentiality.13 Music is formally border-­transgressing and gender-­bending, and lyric poetry is music’s wandering companion. Lyric poetry’s inscriptions are particularly bound to speech and song, to decisions made in language for sound sense over tone-­deaf reason. The US settler state of Arizona is a twisted binding on a beautiful, intense desert ecology in Slow Lightning, in which lyric speakers, with documents and without, multiply. Not an individual voice but many “I’s,” human and nonhuman, speak and think: the shadow of a vulture that feeds off of the plague of whiteness; a young Mexican girl crossing the border in a group of women; Latino border patrol officers; and the ghost — or soul — of Josefa Segovia, a Mexican woman whom an Anglo miner assaulted. Anglo settlers hanged Segovia in Downieville, California, in 1851 for having allegedly killed her attacker. Among readings of a plurality of historical and fictional voices, I will attend to literary connections with Moten, Hayden, Tomás Rivera, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Gil Cuadros. From queer poet and ceramicist Gil Cuadros I draw my hypersensitive method of reading and listening to Corral’s viscerally formalist, synesthetic poetics. Cuadros died young, slipping out of the telos of literary influence, of becoming a daddy. His poems and poetic prose in City of God (1994) imagine from the position of the sexually greedy supplicant (“Resurrection”), the lover, in Roland Barthes’s sense, the one who runs to be taken (“Letting Go”), and the brown-­skinned, shy mestizo who wants to be chewed up by his white daddy after the swerving chaos of encounter (“Turmoil”; “My Aztlán: White Place”). Cuadros’s fictionalized desire for white men has troubled heterosexual, gay, and lesbian Chicana/o scholarship; his death at thirty-­four troubles canonical desires for longevity. I bring Cuadros into different company here, and claim what I read in his short story “Sight” as part of a hypersensitive and synesthetic imaginary. In “Sight,” the main poet-­character has full-­blown aids; his body is breaking down, with all of the secretions and weakness in each cell that come with unreSlow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning  133

lenting attacks on the immune system. He is losing his vision. In myth, the blind seer is an oracle, prophet, interpreter of signs and dreams, someone who moves between planes of consciousness, sensations, and temporalities. Refusing to add more meds to his regimen of pills, even one that would potentially “save” his sight, the character frustrates his doctor. But with the degradation of the poet-­ character’s sight, loss of muscle, sinew, and what Hayden calls “life-­wish,”14 comes a “new-­found power”: a hypersensitive synesthetic experience of phenomena: I can see that everything, everyone . . . has a glow around their bodies . . . [S]ome people leave trails of light, a residue that takes a long time to dissipate. Occasionally a trail will curl upward, a large snake the color of ochre, poised as if ready to attack any nearby person. The doctor wants me to understand, says without this medication there is no hope . . . what is one more drug to you? She is telling the truth, I can see it being said in the gold light that temporarily covers her body, can taste it under my tongue like a hazelnut liqueur.15 Sensations appear out of place as decay’s beautiful disturbances. A hypersensitive synesthetic reading method is open to “vision” appearing in our fingertips or a smell carrying a sound, that is, open to the multisensorial and out-­of-­place effects of a migratory poetics’ itinerant sensorium. Slow Lightning’s landscapes become smell-­ and soundscapes. Wood smoke, horses, body odor, blistering feet, lilacs, shit, rotting pelts, and dirt give aroma and texture to the book, much of which is desert. Tender, hardened, pungent poetic feet trek the sands of verse. Corral charms lyric poems of difficult migrant movements with music, such as corrido, a Mexican musical form constituted by memory in flight (the verb correr [to run] makes the genre’s name), as well as bolero, ranchera, and Prince lyrics. Throughout Slow Lightning, lyric speakers vocalize pleasure and pain to the accompaniment of guitars, trumpets, trombones, mandolins, and harps. Lovers are compared to cellos coming in and out of their cases — large bodies inviting touch. Musical invocations bleed into lyric forms, aubades, nocturnes, elegies, lists, and quasi-­ekphrastic poems (for Ester Hernández’s, Félix González-­Torres’s, Tino Rodríguez’s, and Gabriel Orozco’s visual art). Slow Lightning holds an ensemble unafraid to show their calloused feet and use their hands, magic workers that make sounds fleetingly visible and tactile in forms that keep memories. Methodologically, there is no “dissection” of “individual” poems here. If, as José Esteban Muñoz writes, “the lost object returns with a vengeance,” then the cruel, commodifying, and postmortem work of certain valences of American poetry and criticism better take cover.16

134  Chapter Four

I loosen lines from many poems, let them float and generate other meanings beside music and the language of the law, not instead of, but in addition to what the poems themselves do — what the poems do and could mean as parts of a system that deliberately thinks about what and how to situate bodies, things, feelings, and sounds in broken nearness beside each other.

Book of Refuge

Literary canonical time does not account for the nonwhite bodies taken by the “untimeliness” of the aids epidemic. Nor does it encourage black, mestizx, indigenous, and queer poetic touching across time and space. When not analogically motivated, or flattening of historical differences, side-by-side considerations of what could be open, queer, trans-­temporal connections, and trouble attachments to anthological illusions of racial, ethnic, social, and citational monogamy (e.g., that Chicano poets only read Chicano writers and socialize with only Chicanos of the same generation and status and have only Chicano lovers and shouldn’t be discussed beyond Chicano literary criticism). Slow Lightning’s spatial breaks and alignments enact an itinerant, synesthetic plurality of voices and touches. Corral, a queer child of Mexican migrants, grew up in the legally tumultuous, white supremacist state of Arizona. Arizona and deserts of northern Mexico pervade Slow Lightning. On volatile legal grounds, migrant and maroon poetic pleasures make refuge, take risks, and reclaim losses, including those of the earth, of land, but in ways unbound by nationalism. In Slow Lightning, blackness — as a sound-­image on the page — figures as illicit companion to the variably documented migrants in flight across deserts, apple orchards, greasy diner kitchens, and motel rooms. Blackness is a companion in ecstatic mourning and a companion in making refuge on the page. Slow Lightning’s book cover and binding are luminously black. The cover holds an image of a nest of shiny black snakes. The cover’s black color delaminates into blacked-­out pages spliced throughout the book — literally and materially, black pages disperse between the poems. Cracking the spine, going into the poems, readers meet with the title pages’ black wingspan. The black wings bear a squiggly white mark, which looks like an E for Eduardo, or an untangled ampersand (&), or a snake that has slithered out of a bird’s beak, scarred, awaiting the reader in the cleaved hiding places of verse. In the vocabulary of bookbinding, delamination can signify an unintended coming apart of a book’s layers over time, with wear and tear, with the drying out of a binding’s glue or the tearing of its threads. As in art books and other small press books of poetry, Slow Lightning curates the image of itself as ob-

Slow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning  135

jet more carefully than as sheer vehicle of text. After series editor Carl Phillips’s foreword to the book, the acknowledgments, and table of contents, on the cusp of the poems, a black page appears. Thirty pages later, two more black pages appear on both sides of the elegy at Slow Lightning’s middle. One last time, at the end of the book, appears a black page.17 I read the disseminated black pages as signifying opacity, and therein locate refuge. You, reader, move with this book’s sites of migratory refuge inasmuch as you refuse their dissolution into transparency, warring, instead, for opacity’s multiplication — as sonic, atmospheric, ecological, and perceptual metamorphoses. You’re a copulating coconspirator with this book of migratory refuge and ecstatic mourning. You must think about the ethics of reading and liability in the encounters ahead.

AIDS and Enjambment

Two poems into Slow Lightning, a surreal deer leaps out of the brush at the edges of a harvested field, and strides past the lyric speaker’s awed dream state in “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.” “A scarlet / snake wound / in its dark antlers,” the deer follows the speaker.18 The enjambed, cut image of a scarlet snake wound in antlers holds the slight bend in sound of wound, injury. To enjoy the sounds in this imagery, listener-­readers must be sensuously open to traces of mournful attachments joltingly close to pleasure. Slow Lightning offers words that are free to make sounds, to mishear, misspeak, and mispronounce. Abundant mistakes come with bilingualism, as does the sense of humor it stink-­bombs in the serious air of standard language. Slow Lightning bears two poems titled “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.”19 They are two different bodies that share dreamy, surreal moods and connect in that they transform. They are situated as the second and second-­to-­last poems in the book. Both “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” poems splay out metamorphoses across highly enjambed verses. In their constant transformations, the poems invite the process of being hypersensitively read, cruised, and listened to playfully to manifest more of the synesthesia they offer. The “I” in the first “aids” poem verges on ecstasy, and the “I” in the second “aids” poem ejaculates la petite mort. Both poems operate through abstraction, and both pant under night’s cloak with the vast scale of their speakers’ sexual hunger. Filled with metaphor, loss, and the repurposing of objects, they also operate as a frame within the frame of the book’s thirty-­one poems. The titles of some of the twenty-­seven poems between “aids” and “aids” are “Border Triptych”; “In Colorado My Father Scoured / And Stacked Dishes”; “To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage”; “Se me olvidó otra vez” [It Escaped Me Again or I Forgot 136  Chapter Four

Once Again]; “To a Mojado Who Died Crossing the Desert”; “To the Beastangel”; “To the Angelbeast”; “All the Trees of the Field Shall Clap Their Hands”; and “To Robert Hayden.” Some of the lyric speakers who appear and slip away in the poems perform receiving, serving, and bottoming: they give everything for the hail and grip of their lovers. Risks are taken to be taken. But there is movement from giving to receiving pleasure, too, and the repeated splendor of living with variation. The lyrical positions switch idioms, directions, and tones into topping, demanding, and giving care for what has been driven into the breaking places of the other. Indeed, this switching of positions reveals various modes of playing with bindings within the book’s binding. Two passages in the two different “aids” poems’ surreal dreamscapes frame an interplay in the book of (dis)obedience and pleasure. In the first “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” parts broken from a harp transform into strings for a mandolin, a frame for a church window, and paint for a soup bowl. A deer leaps from the brush around a harvested field and follows the lyric speaker amidst transformations, becoming a measure of time, a figure of desirous waiting: “The deer passes me. / I lower my head, / stick out my tongue / to taste / the honey smeared / on its hind leg.”20 In the second “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” the lyric speaker awakens in a panic beside his lover, whose form in bed becomes a cello, and the heavy breathing of mules measures time and the speaker’s expansive desire: “I toss off my robe. A mule / curls its tongue around / my erection. I throw / my head back, / & stare at the slowest lightning, / the stars.”21 The book’s title emerges from “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” — where the speaker’s head is thrown back, jouissance soaring his sight toward slowly aging hulks of light. Earthbound, heavens-­arched, the contractions and mutations of the poems’ bodies suggest that aids generates something in how it subtracts life.22 I sense that something in the lyric speaker’s tongue jutting out to taste honey on the deer’s haunch in the early poem and the speaker’s erection being tongued by a mule in the later poem. aids is not represented, but morphs as a multisensorial, phenomenological acuity, as in Cuadros’s short story “Sight.” aids travels across the boundaries of bodies “in the blood,” to use the title of one of Carl Phillips’s early books of poems.23 Mainstream discourse renders hiv and aids as acquired moral “deficiencies” constitutive and criminalizing of the diagnosed subject, and the subject whose sexual practices appear to pend normative diagnosis. But in Corral’s poetics, aids conveys a hypersensitive awareness to shifts of perception. How to account for pleasure in hypersensitivity, this power that makes one a particularly good intimate?24 Slow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning  137

The first line of the first poem in Slow Lightning, “Our Completion: Oil on Wood: Tino Rodríguez: 1999,” reads: “Before nourishment there must be obedience.” Whether a command from the top to the bottom, or a mnemonic chant by the bottom who holds the top’s instruction, the book opens with the enchainment of desire and need.25 The last line of the last poem, “As my master ate, I ate,” makes its position clear — the master comes before the “I.” The “I” of this stanza in the poem, “Monologue of a Vulture’s Shadow,” is the sun-­spawned, shadow-­shape of the winged beast. Its beautiful soaring draws one of its other names on the air, cathartes aura, or air purifier, seeking edible death as it glides a crucifix over the desert sand.26 The New World Vulture’s sweeping gaze also evokes a border patrol helicopter, mechanical bird of the warring master, which cannot see from the earth where guerrilla, migrant, maroon, and indigenous imaginaries move.27 The last line of the last poem, “As my master ate, I ate,” hearkens back to the first line of the first poem, “Before nourishment there must be obedience,” as if to say, “From beginning to end, we are bound.” The dynamic between the first and last poems in the book, as with the second and second-­to-­last “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” poems, presents a book-­length scale of enjambment that makes it impossible to stop at reading these poems “individually.” Enjambment is a device that is conventionally understood as more seen than heard. However, Cuadros has (disobediently) granted sight hypersensitive synesthesia. Now, give sight a sense of touch: enjambment occurs when one verse straddles meaning into the next verse. Enjambed, a sentence continues, but broken up on the poem’s way down. As here, in Phillips’s poem “X”: . . . X, not just for where in my life you’ve landed, but here too, where your ass begins its half-­shy, half-­weary dividing, where I sometimes lay my head like a flower and think I mean something by it. X is all I keep meaning to cross out.28 138  Chapter Four

Enjambment “decides upon” the lyric, as Sedgwick puts it.29 I would add that it decides upon the sound of a poem’s appearance. Enjambment is toppy, and it offers another way to imagine signs with different histories in broken nearness, in touch. I imagine enjambment as a redistribution of the site from where thought emerges, and as privileging sound, shape, and breath to reason. For example, the enjambed sentence from lines 25 to 26 in “Monologue of a Vulture’s Shadow” shifts readerly senses from sight to taste and smell — so, from the classically highest to the basest senses.30 It goes: “But the scent of decay always lured my master / earthward.”31 The master looks down, smelling destruction, unable to sense that he is this earth’s plague. This is morbid, to invoke decay in close proximity to aids. But decay, decomposition, and delamination are vital to Slow Lightning’s sensorium. Sense rot. Beside survival. Beside pleasure. Beside the hypersensitive synesthesia of Cuadros’s speaker in “Sight” who tastes his vision as a “gold light” spreading “hazelnut liqueur” under his tongue.32 The porous edges of bodies trip beyond their containment becoming wavy streaks of light, sulfurous snakes, some sign in an ancient script. And spoken language becomes stuff the poet can hear-­see, taste-­smell. Cuadros’s perceptiveness and hypersensitive synesthesia dispose us to sense how Corral’s lyric speaker in “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” tastes like honey licked from auburn fur, tongues ecstasy from a dream of death.

Ecstatic Mourning’s Queer Literary Historical Embrace

Morning light’s breach of darkness suggests a cleavage somewhere in the drawn curtains. He awakens to the smell of your cologne in his linens, looks around. Cue the mariachi’s strings and horns. He’s coming into the felt fact of your anticipated predawn flight. Your departure not only carries with it your body, but also blasts with absence his loving attachment to loving. Juan Gabriel cries: “Ya lo sé que tú te vas. Te vas, te vas” [I already know you’re leaving. You’re leaving. You’re leaving]. The repetition persuades the mind to let go of what the body can no longer have: “Adiós, amor. Adiós, amor” [Goodbye, my love. Goodbye, my love]. He spills the feeling of imminent loss bottled into love’s fragrance: someone will leave — marking the end of one world, the limit of language. Movement is bound to happen because many worlds are possible. Lyrics emerge from the recomposure that comes after weeping the roiling babble of heartbreak. Yet recomposure in lyric is not a straightening out of the blabbering sounds of feeling. Lyrics of lovers’ losses, like the histrionics that José Quiroga describes in the curtain-­ripping, nail-breaking, emotionally heaving musical bouts agreed to in bolero, may keep on feeling for feeling. Jarring heartbreak Slow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning  139

with memories of pleasure is one way that those constituted by loss mourn, as is insisting on what will not be forgotten.33 In Slow Lightning, Corral samples verses and sensations from the music of beloved Mexican singer Juan Gabriel’s (Juanga’s) melancholic boleros and rancheras who sing the power of losing. Quiroga writes of bolero: “If we imagine the context as canvas, then bolero is a gash; if any love song taps the vein of sentimentality, bolero cuts that vein with a razor blade. By the time the chorus makes its appearance, the curtains have been ripped and the apartment is in shambles.”34 In this genre, a diva can exert masculine sexual force.35 And a subject read as male in the public sphere can sing for the genre and be all the diva that she is. Juanga carried the affects of bolero into how (s)he sang ranchera, a genre whose name comes from ranchos and is filled with yearning, losing, and being stuck in a place and stuck with the loss and provocations of wanting. Whereas corrido is a genre of loss in flight, ranchera and bolero sing from the place of those left behind. All of these genres are deeply susceptible to queer touch and performative of the corta venas [vein-­cutting] pleasures of singing loss, and all of them appear in Slow Lightning. Feeling’s songs and sounds are not answerable to the sensible order of reason. Making literal sense is but one possibility for word-­sounds. In Slow Lightning, word-­sounds perform something like magic. In “Velvet Mesquite,” the lyric speaker trebles sparks in the poem machine. Looking out at a “he” who could be a father or a lover preparing to leave for work, readers sense from the lyric speaker’s position: “the engine / stalls as he turns / the ignition I shout / a few words arroyo / socorro arroz / the rolled r’s coax / the engine into a roar.”36 Jutting a’s and o’s kindle a fire that jumps from the poem machine to the truck engine. The stalled truck jolts ahead into the day of manual labor. Socorro means help; from the book’s dedication page, and the poem “Watermark,” readers know it also names the poet’s mother. And it is the one word among the three of rolled r’s that “makes sense” to say in the hopes of getting an engine to turn over. Its sensible presence plays off of the sounds of nonsense, or what I call sound sense, in relation to the other two signifiers, arroyo [river] and arroz [rice]. The rolled r’s ripple a coolant to temper the pickup engine’s staples, gasoline and fire. Sound sense ignites movement. The onlooking lyric speaker, a boy studying a father figure, helps him prepare for work by making sound sense, and then joins him, apprenticing, gathering branches and mesquite pods into burlap sacks. A stench distracts the speaker. He takes off after a funk that leads to a rotting coyote carcass in a patch of saguaro. He cannot help but touch its pelt, like he cannot help but turn into metaphor the sensation of touch, “troubling water.”37 “Velvet Mesquite” enjambs the sweat of manual labor, the textures of male-­bodied love, tree trunks, and desert sand, and gets lost in the nonsense of sound sense that offers readers a range of feelings and magical 140  Chapter Four

transformations. Moving from a domestic interior to a truck, to the desert, to the intimacy in work, “Velvet Mesquite” synesthetically performs migratory refuge. Syntactically and sensuously, the poem’s refuge does something of dire, creative necessity in American English, a language that gets inventive when it needs to insult but wants not to say an explicit X. Slow Lightning jars American English’s racist dead ends with a bilingual, racially performative sense of humor: “Sapo shits behind a cluster of nopales, / & shouts out our favorite joke, No tengo papeles!”38 “I don’t have papers!” cries Sapo, somewhere in his crossing of the desert, making defecation into a punch line for his border-­crossing friend — the “I” speaking in the third part of the poem “Border Triptych.” Sapo makes a fleeting scatological joke of what the ins has turned into a moral and mortal requirement. The two friends are three days north of Nogales, Sonora, and walking west, because their compass is Sapo’s denim-­donned erection, which curves left as they walk north. Marking a distinction between his indigeneity and his perception of such in el norte, the “I” says to Sapo: “We’re Indios but no grin-­/ go will mistake us for Navajos.”39 Rather, gringos will mistake these indios for “illegals,” just as they mistake the earth for theirs. In the poem “Want,” the lyric speaker’s father crosses the border alone. His coyote has abandoned him to die or navigate the desert. Starving, the migrant-­ father smashes a lizard on a rock, tears it open, and shoves its flesh down his throat. This image transforms within five lines into a metaphor for the lyric speaker’s desire to press his lips to another man’s zipper, to unzip, suck his meat, draw his nut with that same hunger. The “I” that “suffered such hunger” swells with a history of so much want and loss.40 Morphing border crossing into a sex act risks the reader vacating the act of meaning, rendering it diminutive or a false analogy. It is neither. This imaginary touch risks everything. “Want” unzips one page apart from a poem that surreally poeticizes a vision of Mexican American ins officers finding dead migrants’ bodies in the desert.41 Corral traffics the image of the migrating father two pages apart from a poem that coos a melancholy lover’s lament accompanied by a fantasy mariachi under the same title as Juan Gabriel’s song, “Se me olvidó otra vez” [I’ve Forgotten Once Again].42 The proximity of these brushes with the visceral dangers of crossing the desert, queer sexual desire, filial love, and the ins, enact the possibility in some other world from that of the present of “many thousands crossing over” and living.43 Living to desire, living to transform with migratory sense what and who we think belong where in the world. I want us to momentarily just hear the sound of a stiff zipper unzipping. Metal’s peel. The shape of the poem “Want” is a highly enjambed rectangle. “Want” looks like the toothy grin of a zipper. I want you to let out what’s jammed in, or, perhaps, jam in what you let out. Slow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning  141

“All that glitters isn’t music” opens a poem situated late in Slow Lightning, “To the Angelbeast.”44 “Angelbeast” is a compound word, which Hayden was fond of making. It appears in his poem “Bone-­Flower Elegy” (1982), published posthumously, at the poet’s request — a detail of literary history I learned from an interview given by Corral.45 Corral says there that he reads “Bone-­Flower Elegy” as a “homoerotic poem.” In it, the lyric speaker enters a sex theater, lured and tortured by bodies twisting erotically in the partially lit darkness. “I want / to stay and watch but know somehow / I must not linger and come to the funeral / chamber.”46 The lyric speaker feels his desire as “caging,” and as something he must disavow. “I whisper but shrink from the arms, / that would embrace me.”47 The speaker calls on the “beastangel” and the “angelbeast,” desire and what seems like its inverse, redemption from it: “caging me for you beastangel / raging toward me / angelbeast shining come / to rend me and redeem.” 48 These supplications, to be caged for the beastangel only to be redeemed by the angelbeast, are tortured by and bursting with desire. Note Corral’s account of his emotional response to reading “Bone-­Flower Elegy”: I had a visceral reaction to the poem. It made me furious. It terrified me. The desolation in the poem made me defensive — I had to respond. So I started drafting two poems. One addressed to the beastangel; the other to the angelbeast. I intended to write poems that highlighted the emotional and physical bliss possible in same-­sex relationships. Instead, I wrote poems with speakers who’ve completely given themselves to their lovers, who risk everything (including their own mental and bodily health) to keep them. My speakers worship the beastangel and the angelbeast. And they make no apologies. The poems troubled me at first. Then I realized that the subservience of my speakers counterbalances the reticence in Hayden’s homoerotic poems. Talk about extremes!49 Corral’s two poems, “To the Angelbeast” and “To the Beastangel,” emerge from sensing fury and terror upon reading Hayden’s “Bone-­Flower Elegy.” Terror gives over to a lyrical recomposure that is a lingering with feeling, not its negation. Corral’s poems’ voices risk everything for their lovers, for their own desire, for their bodily worship of the “angelbeast” as the “beastangel.” Corral’s complex queer literary historical embrace of Hayden redistributes his language into scenes of pleasured touching and sex, which I read under the signs of ecstatic mourning and refuge. Hayden lyricized his shuddering with the potential pleasures of the public sex he craved and didn’t have with men, at least not in “Bone-­Flower Elegy.” The normativizing and closeting tendencies of literary history have further isolated 142  Chapter Four

Hayden from queer black poetics in the shape of claims around him as a formal poet, as W. H. Auden’s student, and as the African American poet who called himself an American poet to the distress of younger black avant-­garde poets in the 1960s. His black ballads, in which Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, and Sue Ellen Westerfield (his adoptive mother) speak, are not read alongside what I imagine as poems of explicitly queer feeling. But across Hayden’s poetics, he explores the fear and pain knotted in unsaying what one feels and knows bodily. I note this not as apologia but because I claim Hayden for nonwhite queer poetics. In Hayden’s long lyric poem, ‘“An Inference of Mexico,” I hear a different glimmer of nonwhite queer desire from the recoil that is audible in “Bone-­Flower Elegy” and in his 1962 poem “The Diver.” The lyric speaker moves as a self-­aware tourist in Mexico. In the first section of the poem, “1. Day of the Dead (Tehuantepec),” “vultures hover wheel and hover / in skies intense as voyeur’s gazing.”50 The speaker of this poem — Hayden, I imagine — moves about a town in Oaxaca aware of the vices projected onto nonwhite boys below the border by tourists, the desires only achievable south of propriety’s Protestant border, and the precarious economy made by such projections’ speculations. The tourist as imperial-­vassal-­ voyeur is likened to “graveblack vultures” (giving vultures a bad rap).51 The tourist’s monologue is interrupted — another body-­shape appears: “In flowered shirt, androgynous, / the young man under palmleaf knives of sunlight / invites, awaits, obliquely smiles. / Such pretty girls, señor, / but if instead — ”.52 This is a formal tactic familiar to readers of Hayden — the em dash’s disturbance of what follows. What if — what is proffered there instead of girls? For the queer overreader, the androgynous man is the lyric’s/cruiser’s obvious object of desire. The em dash’s cut and the enjambment that would conduct the reader down stops me. The line points back to the one in the “flowered shirt.” Perhaps instead of offering “pretty girls,” the androgynous Oaxacan man, who could be indigenous, black, or mestizo, smiles, speaks, and makes Hayden his for a moment. Although I do not know what is left unsaid in the poem, the grammatical gesture of “ — ” with the swerve set off in the word “instead,” rather than just the conditional “but if” abutted, say, by a period, a comma, or something that determines a predicate, invites me to imagine something different from “girls,” and something more from this exchange.53 I read this grammar of desire, in part, out of my identification with Corral’s “beastangel,” as well as with Gloria Anzaldúa’s powerful, gender-­y “shadow-­beast.” The “shadow-­beast” is what she wrote hoofed within her, a terrible, beautiful, gender-­nonconforming force of defiance and desire. She calls the “shadow-­beast” a “rebel” that “[b]olts” at the slightest sense of another imposing unwanted constraint.54 Corral and Anzaldúa show how the visceral and emotional take on form, Slow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning  143

and speak to poetry’s contra-­value. There is no useful equivalent or practical value for making poetry — which insists on generating language in a time of language-­ destruction, eludes the metrics of reason and financialized/looted common resources. Corral’s “To the Angelbeast” closes with a dedication to the queer composer, cellist, and unclassifiable musician Arthur Russell. The poem opens: “All that glitters isn’t music.” Corral has said that this line gestures to none of the immediately imaginable literary references (Aesop, Chaucer, Shakespeare) or musical ones (Curtis Mayfield, Marilyn Manson, Prince, Rubén Blades, Rihanna), who have performed variations on the maxim about capitalism’s illusions of value. Corral tells this story in the Poetry interview cited above: “All that glitters isn’t music” was a phrase he misheard when eavesdropping on two elderly women in a park exchanging treatments for foot blisters.55 This missed hearing speaks to how bilingualism as a mode of listening, listening for and with the body, allows for playful mishearing and mispronouncing language as what I am calling contra-­value. These missed meanings transform language with an itinerant sense of humor. Notably, Corral’s lyric speaker’s addressee is in control of the very passing of time in “To the Angelbeast.” With quiet patience, as though awaiting a deer’s disorienting leap from a dark wood, a bound compared to the gentle and scale-­ altering sight of a cello being lifted from its dark case, the one who the speaker serves measures expectations, limits, and rewards. The speaker asks the suspense-­ holding addressee: “Am I not your animal?”56 The speaker-­animal, the lover, and the poem imply that their glittering forms are beyond equivalence, beyond measurable value. Music, like poetry, is made of gold when gold means personal-­historical feeling finding socializable form. Slow Lightning is devoted to and generative of music, its upswing, its breakdown, and all the sound sense outside of it that goes by other names: noise, babble, wordplay, mispronunciations, mishearings, and silence. Here, sounds do things from the vantage of the listener — a historically feminized and passivized position — against the reign of the visual. One of Corral’s quasi-­ekphrastic poems, “My Hands Are My Heart: Two-­Part Cibachrome Print: Gabriel Orozco: 1991,” bears the verse, “Even music can bleed.”57 If music can, so, too, does its hypersensitive wandering companion, lyric poetry. Corral bleeds music into lyric. His poems blister with sound sense. Their sounds cry with pleasure and this terrifying prophecy: there is more violence to come. Particularly around the obsessively and obscenely militarized US-­Mexico border, there is more violence coming from the state’s experiments with detention and death. The border as a wall is a geographic, economic, and legislative impossibility. Yet it already exists, profoundly harmfully, rhetorically and in US policed legal excesses of ethics. The border is a state and market-­instrumentalized 144  Chapter Four

punitive practice of optically racializing surveillance that inhabitants of the US carry around inside. In the next section, Corral’s poems take readers on dangerous walks, ones that shimmer with reverie’s sweat and cum, and also bleed, dehydrate, die, and rot in the desert. Each succeeding section of this chapter holds epigraphic fragments from Hayden’s “Runagate Runagate.” They spell protection, benediction, and refuge for creatures, human and nonhuman, in flight.

“keep on going . . .” for “we never arrive . . .”: Death, Melancholia, and Stargazing Some go weeping and some rejoicing some in coffins and some in carriages some in silks and some in shackles  — Robert Hayden, “Runagate Runagate”

Bodies disappeared into desert sands are somebodies’ beloveds. According to Schmidt Camacho, “an estimated three thousand migrants died in attempts to enter the United States through the . . . hazards of the Sonora desert” in the decade following the passing of nafta.58 “More deaths go unreported and undiscovered,” she writes. Corral’s poem “Immigration and Naturalization Service Report #46” raises the dead in the Sonoran Desert. Border Patrol officers zip closed a body bag and then go to investigate an animal pelt where the dead were found rotting. The ins officer Ignacio caresses the soft pelt, joking that it must be nice to die sleeping on fur so smooth. His finger snags on something not visible. Probing the snag, he feels ears too large to be a wolf’s. Then, metamorphosis: there’s a “patch of coyote ears” buried in the sand, a protruding pack of pelts that reveal not one border crosser’s body to be recovered dead, but that the southern Arizona desert is a mass grave. The ears begin to rise two by two, disinterring bodies from the sand. The presumably Latino officers stumble at the vision and say the names of their padres for protection: “Ramón. Juana. Octavio. More and more ears rose. Rodolfo. Gloria . . .”59 The poem’s speaking of names and the ellipsis that comes after “Gloria” — ending the poem with the implication of a continuing toll, a massacre —  elegizes the gone who are not merely gone, the disappeared who could be living, missing, or dead. Those gone missing who have not been mourned — who knows how anyone will know who all has passed. “Mexican consuls have had to apportion ever greater percentages of their budgets to the forensic identification and repatriation of bodies,” writes Schmidt Camacho, “both of migrants who perished in transit and of those who died in the United States.”60 How much cannot be known means there is more to sense. The poem’s brief roll call of names, a lament, and Slow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning  145

the invocation of lifted coyote ears amidst shifting sands whisper a subtle instruction to readers: witness, listen, for the dead speak. And they speak from earth that will not abide the short-­lived and unimaginative bounds of nationalism. Sculpted, colorful, and eroticized rot abounds in Slow Lightning. The poems layer shredded and removed parts: scarlet pelts; snake skins; fish scales; mapas de cuero [mammal-­skin maps]; black flower petals; pilfered verses from Emily Dickinson’s undone fascicles; used Trojans; lizard bones; tossed sheets; foreskins; moth wings; shaving cream lather stubbled with razored growth in a bathroom sink. Decompositions, delamination, and metamorphoses enact redux, to code-­switch from the Latin, meaning, “bring back to life.” Slow Lightning’s poetics imagines border crossings as they are happening — its migrant memory is fresh. The sharp preterite tense that the American Dream demands of immigrants’ relationship to their movements and memories isn’t a tense to which Corral’s poetics succumbs. Yet, the vast geographical space of Mexican and Central American migrant border crossings into the United States shrinks down, occurs across short page distances, bringing readers close to bodies on the move — on the move where death hangs heavily. This sense of proximity conjures the urgently pervasive temporal sense of the past being in the living-­and-­ remembering-­present, and generates an ethical remainder for readers: study how the poems convert the state’s injunctions of surveillance, legalized detention and torture, and individualist aspiration into nonwhite racially and poetically performative, queer pleasure. A child of an undocumented father speaks in the poem “In Colorado My Father Scoured / And Stacked Dishes.” Couplets summon the father’s labors in kitchens, on farms, in fields, as well as his sense of humor.61 Playfully, the lyric speaker calls himself an “Illegal-­American.”62 He pokes fun at the proclivity toward identitarian hyphenation — the suture that, in some cases, gives in to the pain of giving in to an impossible assimilation. Whereas Mexican-­American, for example, positions a subject in relation to the country and histories of Mexico, Illegal is not a place —  Illegal is no one’s country. Indeed, capitalizing Illegal emphasizes how it operates as a noun in ins cum nationalist discourse, a state-­invented condition disguised as an adjective that recategorizes people as less than human from the humanist vantage of the Enlightenment idiot-­offspring that is the middling US American vigilante public.63 Consider the lyric speaker’s migratory father’s movement “Packed / into a car trunk”64 in relation to the flight Moten underwrites across the subprime debt “crisis”: “But what if there is something other than the phantasmatic object-­home of inclusionist desire . . . to which we can appeal, to which we have always been appealing, in flight or, deeper still, in movement?”65 The term Moten improvises 146  Chapter Four

later in this passage, for what other than an “object-­home” of “inclusionist desire” black poetics makes, is “kinetic refuge.”66 The fuller syntax: “Again, the question concerns the open secret, the kinetic refuge, of the ones who consent not to be a single being. The corollary question is how to see it and how to enjoy it.”67 Behind this question, which draws on Glissant’s notion of (Caribbean) blackness as a multiplicity, is not a question mark but a period: “how to enjoy it.” — “it” being “kinetic refuge.” This syntax unmarks the interrogative grammatically with a period and reads to me like a generative command: to not seek to arrive, assimilate, or be incorporated into the illusion of the US as freedom’s home, but instead to incorporate into the ego, into one’s memory, into one’s everyday movements the dead, and the vital love that death makes. I align the poetics of “kinetic refuge” and migratory refuge. The sensoria of those who appeal to such refuges have much to say to each other. To appeal to movement’s refuge rather than the bank for an object-­home, and to feel pleasure in this melancholic refusal to let go of the lost, opens a rethinking of blackness as a mobile structure of thought that is concerned primarily with black people, yes, and with blackness in biotic relation, hiding in open flight. As disturbing to US nationalism as the idea of the undocumented remaining clearly is, what is also historically disturbing to the white settler imaginary within US nationalism are migratory temporalities of lingering, laboring, and cyclically moving back and forth, that is, movements not trying to arrive and achieve citizenship, not trying to purchase Enlightenment-­sanctioned subjectivity as the “object-­home of inclusionist desire.”68 Normativity’s inclusion is a dead end. Slow Lightning’s refuges deviate from the loop historically embedded in Mexican migrant workers’ seasonal lives. Working-­ class Mexican lives became less rhythmically “seasonal” in the US after WWII, and even more intensely after nafta.69 With nafta and Operation Gatekeeper, there was a major shift from protecting migrants’ labor rights to protecting US citizens’ property rights in and near the transborder corridor. The termination of historically circular migratory labor in the mid-­1990s perversely empowered employer exploitation of migrants from Mexico and Central America, as well as vigilante, extrajuridical violence in the name of white nationalism as private property. Published between those dates, Tomás Rivera’s novella . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra [And the Earth Did Not Devour Him] (1971) conveys a recurrently fractured sense of the loop of seasonal, migrant Mexican field labor in the US southwest, midwest, and west. Rivera’s is a groundbreaking work in twentieth-­century Chicanx and American literature, and in experimental narrative shapes. One of the motifs of the lyrical novella is “We never arrive” (Nunca llegamos). “We never arrive” puts into words the temporal, geographic, psychosomatic, and emotional Slow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning  147

circles wrought by the novella’s migrant worker character-­figures. The novella’s structure draws circles through its disconnected vignettes, remaking for the reader’s imagination the seasonal movements and ruptures in attachments of migrant fieldworkers. And the Earth . . . recirculates readers in various vignettes to a boy character who is sometimes in and sometimes out of school, in and out of working in the fields with his younger siblings, and in and out of systemically produced traps for criminalized trouble. “We never arrive” repeats late in the novella in the vignette “When we arrive” (Cuando lleguemos), in which a truck hauling migrant workers — consisting of adults, children, and babies — breaks down. Not named, multiple shadowy character-­figures speak in this section. Indeed, the close listener can connect who is speaking in this vignette with prior patterns and iterations of character-­figures in the novella. In “When we arrive,” the migrant workers have interior thoughts, desires, and pains. I am in no hurry to say that they articulate these thoughts, desires, and pains in every instance. The vignette’s language plays in between interiority and exteriority, spins around what is withheld by the “anticaptivity” of thought.70 What is not exactly articulated by the other toward the sense of the “one,” what is kept in a hiding place that bespeaks the impossibility of total privacy for an undocumented subject, is a mode of survival and thought.71 Unreadability and the unspoken can be agentic. Seasonal lives wandered to and from labor to labor on invaded land, land forced to ground detention centers for people of Japanese descent. In the novella, seasonal lives squat sometimes to withhold, sometimes to say more, and sometimes to stargaze. As the truck’s breakdown protracts in the vignette, one character-­figure goes off to take a shit. Squatting in high grass, finding brief privacy, he stargazes. Another character-­figure only talks in expletives, enraged at the violence of the situation of transport where the laborers are hauled as animals in the back of the truck. Mothers worry for themselves and their kids. Connecting their wandering thoughts and anxieties is the motif, “We never arrive,” which I transliterate as: Freedom is not a place, and it certainly is not the US; and never arriving is a disavowal of whitening, forgetting losses, and pathologizing incoherent movements. Unbound from the destiny logic of freedom, the movement of never arriving goes somewhere epistemically elusive. Slow Lightning attunes my ear to hearing an unbind from freedom unlocked in the movement of never arriving. And the Earth . . . traces in literature the loop of memory in Mexican migratory melancholia.72 That loop turns and breaks in Corral’s “Velvet Mesquite,” where sound sense tickles the truck engine into starting, and migrant poetic figures move where losses are fresh and the smell of death wafts near the sensuous exchanges of desire. 148  Chapter Four

Unbound from Freedom’s Sensorially Violent Individuation: On SB-­1070, HB-­2281, and the Fugitive Slave Act I’m bound for the freedom, freedom bound and oh Susyanna don’t you cry for me  — Robert Hayden, “Runagate Runagate”

Slow Lightning unbinds American poetics from freedom as destination. The US is not that place, punto. It unbinds the poetic voices it ciphers from the horrific bounds of US border-­militarized nationalism, which has caused thousands of people’s deaths and more thousands of people’s losses. Slow Lightning’s poetics argues for a movement not toward freedom but toward a lost, sensed connection, a melancholic solidarity that does not collapse difference or depend on forced analogies, but opens a multisensorial range of possibilities for living broken together, living with losses. The broken-­together thought structures in Slow Lightning open a path for the senses to snake across the boundaries disciplined between bodies and their histories, feeling for migratory refuge. And what I call migratory refuge must be imagined alongside contemporary US military and vigilante protections of property relations in the transborder corridor, as well as in mid-­nineteenth-­ century juridical events. The title of the poem “Border Triptych” disturbs the duality that militarized border surveillance wrenches into the transborder corridor, and into the psyches of crossers. The first and third sections of “Border Triptych” literally make jokes on the border. I discussed the third section above, and the sound-­images of Sapo and his friend crossing the Sonoran Desert without papeles, signifying both documents and toilet paper. The first section of the poem is written from the perspective of a Border Patrol officer who cannot figure out what a man who crosses the border on his bike every day is smuggling, only to finally be told by the man years later: bikes. The second section of the poem, however, does not make a joke. It is gravitational pull down where the other two sections lift with humor. In the poem’s tripartite entirety, and its juxtapositions of migratory affects, I locate pleasure in close proximity to loss. In the second section of the triptych, Sofía speaks from a testimony transcript in the bizarre ins archive of how she listened to her mother before crossing from Tijuana into San Diego, a zone of accelerated life and aggression provoked by intense border militarization and high rates of settlement and urbanization.73 Sofía poured gelatin powder in her underwear before she was packed into a van to cross: “The women were ordered to undress at gunpoint. / I unbuckled my belt, lowered my jeans. Sweat, / gelatin powder had stained my underwear a reddish brown. / I was one of ten women. Our mouths were taped. / I was spit on. I was slapped. The other women were raped.”74 Sofía’s mother anticiSlow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning  149

pated the refusal of touch that her daughter would not be able to enact and sustain; the blood taboo leaves Sofía beaten, but not raped. Sofía’s crossing speaks a variation on this American poetic theme: the ride to freedom is violating, violated. And Sofía also speaks a variation on one of Hayden’s poetic themes that is critical of arrival: keep on going, or die. Slow Lightning morphs this fugitive verse in Hayden’s “Runagate Runagate”: “Bound for the freedom, freedom bound.”75 “Bound for the freedom” sounds hung up as bound by. What does it mean to be bound by freedom in a place where freedom horizons slavery? Consider Hayden’s poem’s wording above alongside Schmidt Camacho’s essaying on migrant melancholia in relation to the US public’s desire for a regulated border to “guard” the white nationalist inside and the same public’s desire for cheap, disposable labor afforded by unregulated economic incursions outside: “This contradiction has led to an impasse between the boundaryless spheres of free trade and the bounded spheres of US nationalism.”76 If the “runagate” articulates this horizon: freedom is conditioned by the capacity to enslave, then the post-­n afta migrant articulates this horizon: the [free] States are conditioned by vigilante citizens’ violence. And that model of violence has been in practice as long as there has been enslaving property relations in the hemisphere. Our riddling hemispheric limits: we who do poetics of the Americas struggle to make a poetics of the thing, beautiful, terrible, needful, and “usable as air,” when, historically, the thing has signified slavery and freedom.77 Bloodthirsty, populated by citizen wardens of stolen, violated lands made inhospitable, the state of Arizona’s laws protect open and concealed carrying of guns, vigilance committees, the “Minutemen militia,” and white rancher fantasies of self-­and land-­possession. One of the strictest anti-­immigration acts in recent US history, Arizona Senate Bill 1070 (sb-­1070), or, the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, was signed into law on April 23, 2010. Before it could formally go into enforcement, the US Department of Justice set an injunction against its application, contesting select provisions. A version of the original act became law in 2012, which upheld the capacity for individual police to determine an immigrant’s legal status. Federal law requires an alien over fourteen staying in the US for more than thirty days to have documentation that legally legitimates their presence on their person at all times; violation of this law is a federal misdemeanor crime. sb-­1070 makes this same violation a state misdemeanor, compounding the sentence, and signifying loudly the state’s investment in a fundamentally unethical inhospitality. That this law was known colloquially as the “show me your papers” law reveals its perverse bearings in fugitive slave laws.

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Three provisions of sb-­1070 provoked civil disobedience in and far beyond Arizona. In these provisions I hear echoes of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: 1. state police officers are charged with determining “reasonable suspicion” that a person may be undocumented; 2. the law establishes penalties of fines and prison time for sheltering, hiring, and transporting undocumented aliens; 3. residents of Arizona can sue for the full application of federal and state laws against undocumented migrants, and against someone who shelters, hires, and transports undocumented migrants. It is a deeply short-­sighted imaginary that would believe that what is lost is altogether gone, just as it is a deeply historically naive imaginary that misunderstands that this Arizona law is not conditioning a citizenry to openly, publicly kill and take others captive. Drawing on former fugitive slave laws, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: 1. rewarded officials who captured alleged runaways; 2. penalized officials who did not abduct and arrest an alleged runaway; 3. and made those who knew of a runaway and did not participate in their capture liable to heavy fines. If an allegedly white claimant swore that a black person was a runaway, law enforcement officials legally were enjoined to arrest the alleged runaway. The runaway could not ask for a jury trial to consider evidence that questioned the verbal testimony of the claimant, who, whatever their racial identification, is a figure in history that aligns themselves with white individuation. Anyone aiding, sheltering, feeding, or transporting a runaway was legally subject to six months’ imprisonment and a fine, and extralegally subject to violent punishments typical of white notions of secular justice.78 White supremacist Arizona state senator Russell Pearce used the term “invaders of American sovereignty” for the human targets of Arizona sb-­1070. While the construction of the “illegal” as an “invader” by nationalist discourse is not analogous to the construction of the black body as slave and slave as property built into the US Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, these discourses and imaginaries are deeply entwined. Legalized antiblack practices apply their protected violence to black people. And legalized antiblack practices are inextricable from a structure of thought, space, language, (un)imagination, and the senses that the policing optical regime wields over lands and bounds of mobility. This sensorial regime exists to oppose the free movements of nonwhite racialized peoples, and anything like solidarity between variably and nonvariably nonwhite peoples, which do not look or sound one way, are not monolithic as separate terms or in relation. And this sensorial regime becomes an audio-­visual tautology inasmuch as part of the Arizona police’s capacity — and the vigilante repetitions thereof — to determine the other’s legal standing has to do with how they hear the

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other’s usage of language and sense their movements as ways of seeing legal status where status is categorical. sb-­1070 holds an entrenched paranoia about diverse anticolonial solidarity. For it disturbs white supremacist legal and secular imaginary’s grasp on subject-­object relations, who is bound and how, whose land claims hold water, and for how long. sb-­1070 makes punishable harboring undocumented peoples, and it encourages (white-­identifying) state residents to sue for the application of anti-­immigrant laws, when not taking it upon themselves to hunt migrants whose claims on space contradict white settler claims on property. Like the Fugitive Slave Act, sb-­1070 hails poor whites and makes clear that to be individuals, they cannot live in class or otherwise historically conscious solidarity with other historical, racial, linguistic, and sensorial formations. White aspiration, class solidarity between racialized positionalities, and multisensorial attunements cannot cohabitate. If the forms of refuge that harbor runaways and not-­documented-­enough bodies include poems, then Slow Lightning gives refuge and enjoins readers’ ethical, spatial, and sensorial defiance of laws and customs against such. Again, the sensoria of police as well as potential police/individual citizens presume to determine and practice determining the potential legal status of others based on what they see and hear. Slow Lightning makes imaginable a collective refusal of the sensorial violence of individuation. Shadowing sb-­1070 was hb-­2281, which banned ethnic studies from Arizona public and charter schools. According to Arizona lawmakers, ethnic studies “promote the overthrow of the United States government; promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” by which its writers mean white people, “and advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”79 Solidarities of anti-­individuation threaten the white supremacist state, as does relational and queer sex, friendship, and thought. hb-­2281 is concerned with producing paranoid individuals who must be discouraged by punishment of law from questioning and reflecting on their place in coloniality. How crucial is our deviation from the project of individuation, which is inextricable in this hemisphere from the project of whiteness. Whiteness as a category is empty; it defines itself through what it is not, through what it slots into the places of object, potential captive, disposable laborer, and interior/emotional excess. Saidiya Hartman considers in critical detail the position of whites in relation to the free and the slave in the operation and application of US slave law: “There are questions of the operation and application of slave law for the free as well. Regarding [the slave], we note the fact that ‘the absolute submission mandated by the law was not simply that of slave to his or her owner, but the submission of the

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enslaved before all whites.’ ”80 Jared Sexton thinks with Hartman about whiteness regarding property relations. Of whiteness, he writes: The latter group is better termed all nonblacks (or, less economically, the unequally arrayed category of nonblackness), because it is racial blackness as a necessary condition for enslavement that matters most, rather than whiteness as a sufficient condition for freedom. The structural position of the Indian slaveholder — or, for that matter, the smattering of free black slaveholders in the United States or the slaveholding mulatto elite in the Caribbean — is a case in point. . . . In other words, it is not labor relations, but property relations that are constitutive of slavery.81 Whiteness is not a sufficient condition for freedom. Sexton emphasizes what Fanon called the racist epidermal schema in his conception of “racial blackness as a necessary condition for enslavement.” And in this hemisphere, blackness is also not an insufficient condition for property ownership. Rather, where being free is literally not what it claims to be, but where freedom is legally defined by the capacity to enslave others, how property relations contract and militarize themselves is crucial. I want to make two points here: 1. that the shift in the post-­ nafta transborder corridor from imagining migratory movements through labor relations to property relations compels scholars of Latinx studies to study slave laws, and how property laws are coconstitutive with contract law, as Sora Han has argued; 2. that whiteness as an “unequally arrayed category of nonblackness,” since at least the middle of the nineteenth century in the colonial, warring cartographic incursion on eco-­diversity that is the US southwest, must also be imagined in relation to the phenomenon of vigilance committees.82 Ken Gonzales-­Day’s and Nicole Guidotti-­Hernández’s work on vigilance committees that formed prior to and after the Mexican-­American War, and that lynched, maimed, and, with legal protection, hunted indigenous, mestizx, and Afro-Mexican peoples in what settler and military invasion were reshaping as the US west and southwest, demand thinking about Arizona and the Sonoran Desert in historical relation to blackness and juridically protected vigilante whiteness. The white supremacist state instrumentalizes Latinos in the promise of individuation and its attendant sensorial realignment with policing the bounds of white nationalism — as we read in the poem, “Immigration and Naturalization Service Report #46.” I argue for an ear that is multisensorially attuned to other ways of enacting relation with the over twelve million people who live in the US with a non­status that white-­aligned citizens imagine their sense of space, time, movement, and value can overdetermine, deport, and perversely underpay in the name of property/nationalism.

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Schmidt Camacho argues that the sanctioned violence of Arizona’s sb-­1070 is consonant with long-­standing desires of federal immigration law enforcement to reduce the undocumented population — largely Mexican and Central American —  through “attrition,” which is to say either as self-­deportation or police-­aggressed processes of deportation.83 Extending the power of not only state and local police, but also vigilantism, Schmidt Camacho maintains that this law, and its progeny in other states, constitutes “political theater [as] a cynical bid to sustain governmental failure, rather than material change, since it is only a distraction from the inevitable reckoning with the situation of the 12 million without status” that renders migrating subjects as a “separate class” of being.84 The US governs through failure in a way that shadows capitalism’s operation through profitable and iterative collapse — so, through a form of failure that premises itself on systemic antiblack, anti-­indigenous, and anti­queer violence in perpetuity. The US’s violent obsession with its own bounds repeats the bind of freedom as the horizon of slavery. Recent anti-­immigrant laws, the government’s outspoken encouragement of vigilantism and white supremacist secular life, and the phenomenon of a white Latino man, George Zimmerman, as a legally and publicly defended murderer of a black boy, Trayvon Martin, make manifest again the long history of legally protected antiblack violence.85 And these events show us how antiblackness moves in disavowals of relational solidarities. The specific usage of the word “individuals” in hb-­2281 reveals the importance for the state of making “Latinos” into what Sexton has called “minority middlemen,” subjects who can acquire white aspiration by believing and playing a role in the policed romance of capitalism. The idea of this legal individual is part of a myth of (a never intended) civic integration in the US. Integration is a false promise. But it is a false promise that sells, and interpolates selling out, the difficult and threatening work of multisensorial and affective solidarity with faux secure citizenship. Muñoz’s notion of Latinx as a performative structure of negative feelings and what I have called hypersensitive synesthesia are germane to opposing the effects of hb-­2281, including the construct of Latina/o/x as “good” minority in a version of the world “organized by cultural mandates to ‘feel white.’ ”86 Racial and affective performativity make various solidarities possible through feeling, and, I add, through sensing. On the heels of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Gadsden Purchase, or La venta de Mesilla, of 1853 – 54. Mary Pat Brady describes the Gadsden Purchase as premised on the cartographic errors of the 1847 Disturnell Map, a map of known inaccuracies that the US government used to “(mis)take Arizona” and advance its Monroe Doctrine ideology into southern Mexico and Panama, as it would come to do a few years later throughout the

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Caribbean region. “Arizona began as a mistake,” Brady writes unequivocally.87 Arizona is an invasion of private property that forced the losses of indigenous, black, multisensorial, and ecological relationality.88 The legal and secular event of New Mexico passing the Organic Act of 1850 is likewise relevant here. The Organic Act claimed to extend citizenship to all annexed Mexicans, as Saldaña-­Portillo writes, supposedly “regardless of race.”89 As of the 1824 Mexican Constitution, “afromestizos” were acknowledged “as equal citizens with equal rights to land, public office, and education.”90 However, as Martha Menchaca shows, almost immediately after its triumphant invasion of Mexican and indigenous lands, the US Congress “refused to recognize that Mexico had ‘ever’ extended rights to Blacks.”91 And “[s]ince Blacks were not allowed to take the citizenship oath,” writes Menchaca, “the Organic Act could not apply to them.”92 The Organic Act, then, attempted to de-­blacken Mexicans in the US and reiterate US citizenship as a project of white individuation, which is also to say, a project concerned with defending the fundamental capacity to take nonwhite others captive and to protect property relations in conjunction with white nationalism. Meanwhile, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made manipulative use of the words “character” and “reason” to render as “savage” indigenous peoples, such as the Comanche and Apache, who refused to assimilate and fought for their lands. To be “hostile to civilization” was to be “without reason” [gente sin razon]. “Lost in the loss of Mexican character,” Saldaña-­Portillo writes, “under the terms of the treaty is its nuanced, multiracial nature, exchanged for the immutable categories of US racism. . . . Mexicans of mixed racial heritage suddenly found themselves in a position of having to disassociate themselves from themselves, from their Indian and black racial heritage.”93 “Lost in the loss” is a Butlerian line of thinking, wherein what is lost has been disavowed and, thus, has not been grieved and mourned.94 The positivist and paranoid valuations of assimilation, integration, and individuation repeat these disavowals and losses in the name of the faux stability of the white supremacist citizen. Saldaña-­Portillo’s discussion of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo critiques a loaded analogy made between Chicano nationalists in a 1996 conversation with the Zapatistas, where they called themselves “los indios del norte” [Indians of the north], a term neither she nor the Zapatistas heard as anything except needing to be troubled. She suspends it for structural questioning, stating: In the embrace of Indian identity by Chicano nationalism, the [Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo’s] history of stark racial division between colonized mestizos and Indians becomes disavowed. To reclaim Indian heritage without a recognition of the differences 150 years of US racialization has wrought Slow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning  155

among southwestern indigenous peoples confined to reservations, African Americans, and southwestern mestizos, is to reclaim an innocent history that is not so innocent after all.95 This critique of analogy and false historical innocence recalls Frank Wilderson III’s claim that there is no analogue for the particular construct of (the incoherent threat to hegemony of) black life.96 I invoke Saldaña-­Portillo’s critique of Chicano nationalist analogical haste of identification as indio, and the disavowal, in that case, of historical differences between US Chicanxs and indígenas from southern Mexico and Guatemala, and black nihilist critiques of flattening analogues made to black being, because they raise important questions about the speeds, terms, and imaginaries of mourning losses and reclaiming mixed-­race, melancholic solidarities.97 There is not an analogue between Chicanxs and Zapatistas. There is not an analogue between those migrating with “insufficient” documentation today and the runaway of African descent in the nineteenth century. But the movements of four hundred years of black and indigenous marronage in the hemisphere offer this part of the world other imaginaries to live by. Hypersensitivity to loss’s forms of less visible presence is an ethical obligation of poetic listeners.

“and blackness . . . a wetback’s motel” — Sense from Below: Mobile Homes of Refuge, Mobile Shapes of Thought Rise and go or fare you well.  — Robert Hayden, “Runagate Runagate”

The long poem splayed at the crossroads of Slow Lightning, “Variation on a Theme by José Montoya,” is an elegy for Monchie who is buried in Orizaba, Veracruz, México. Orizaba Nahuatl is a prevalent language of the region — and of México. Veracruz’s inhabitants also speak Totonaca, Huasteco, Popoluca, and Spanish; Veracruz is a historically black Mexican region, and it is a sign of blackness used by Mexican state discourse to signal that blackness is over there rather than everywhere. Corral’s “Variation” poem is a variation on the Chicano poet, muralist, and activist José Montoya’s theme of the deathly demands of US assimilation, wrought in his most cited elegiac poem “El Louie” (1969). In the poem, El Louie transforms from a tailored suit – wearing vato from small-­time Fowler, California, to a Korean War veteran, to a man wasted away by his vicios — one of which, the poem suggests, is assimilation. Assimilation is a toll taken on the body in the poem; as an aspiration, it plays with the structural fire of an integration that is never civically 156  Chapter Four

intended to happen. The poem ends on a vexed note about El Louie and how his pained progress from vato to aspirational citizen destroyed his life. Corral’s “Variation” also draws on Hayden’s poem, “Theme and Variation,” which has music on its mind. But the elegy’s zigzagging stanzas transport lines from Hayden’s “Runagate Runagate” directly into its structure that retraces Monchie’s crossing back and forth across the Sonoran Desert out of Mexico into the US, out of the US into Mexico. And the poem enacts a recent event of mourning in the melancholic emotional landscape of the Mexican migrant imaginary. Corral’s poem lays Monchie down in “his black caja” in Orizaba — not Arizona.98 Monchie did not arrive, as in assimilate. The poem leaves blurry how exactly he died in the desert, in coming and going, but the details of his person are attentively noted: “Saturday night pachangas. / Western Union / patron. / Drinking piss but dreaming of Patrón. / . . . Camisa negra. Gold necklaces. / Dólar / store cologne. / La pinche migra at every pinche corner. / The batteries / for his radio. Los Yonics. Los Bukis. / A small apartment. Six roommates.” 99 You can feel the heavy line breaks in my embedding these lines into prose, but I must add that the lines splay, spread, and make the eye dart across and down the page. Twice, Corral’s “Variation” directly cites, bends, and puts music to the following lines from “Runagate Runagate,” which fall as the sixth and seventh lines in Hayden’s opening seven-­line stanza: and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere morning and keep on going and never turn back and keep on going The first time Hayden’s lines appear in Corral’s “Variation,” they look like this — notably on a page by themselves. and blackness ahead and when shall I reach (the trumpet cries) that somewhere morning and keep on going (the accordion moans) and never turn back and keep on going

(the trumpet wails)100

These lines follow the first section of the poem, which gives six stanzas of orally driven tercets about Monchie’s burial, that he had worked in Palo Alto and Sacramento, that his body was found in Eloy, Arizona, and that he was “naco” but not

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“narco,” or, a coward but not a narco-­trafficker. Hayden’s “Runagate Runagate” sounds out the flight of footsteps charging through the Underground Railroad: Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing and the night cold and the night long and the river to cross and the jack-­muh-­lanterns beckoning beckoning and blackness ahead and when shall I read that somewhere morning and keep on going and never turn back and keep on going Runagate Runagate Runagate Many thousands rise and go many thousands crossing over101 Running breaks open the poem and continues throughout. “Runagate Runagate” spatializes the “ghost-­story train” of the Underground Railroad, its fields, tunnels, attics, and basements.102 Harriet Tubman, other runagates — an archaic and literary term for what the law calls runaways — masters’ newspaper-­run slave ads, and the darkness all speak in the poem. At the runagates’ heels is the fate that was worse than death for the character Sethe in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987).103 Given momentum, sanctity, and legal protection to capture and murder black people by the Fugitive Slave Act, at the runagates’ heels charge slave hunters, master teachers, the plantation as moveable psychic force, the coerced return to the mad pastoral or maritime or urban kitchen of captivity — all sites of extreme arrival-­as-­ontological-­erasure to no place like freedom. The Underground Railroad is refigured beside — slowly and with space — the truck, car, and van in Corral’s poetics of border crossing. The Underground Railroad is reimagined in the present, and in Arizona, which is also to say México, which is also to say the Caribbean Americas. The “mythic North”104 and “Northstar and bonanza gold”105 of Runagate Runagate” are pulled through Corral’s “Variation” in the imagery of “old wagon trails / hiking paths / ruthless north star.”106 Coyotes, vigilantes, and the ins are in a genealogy of gun-­armed and hunting dog – companioned slave hunters. ins reports enter a genealogy with the slave ad in “Runagate Runagate” for “my Pompey, 30 yrs of age.”107 The anti-­ immigration, and fundamentally anti-­Mexican (which also signify as antiblack, anti-­nonwhite, and anti-­indigenous), laws of sb-­1070 and hb-­2281 resituate the language and spirit of whiteness as antifugitive in the time warp of our present. 158  Chapter Four

It is the proximity that the poem performs between blackness and the “undocumented” border crosser that compels multisensorial and historical reattunement to current anti-­immigrant laws, mid-­nineteenth-­century legal events in the region, and mid-­nineteenth-­century Afro-indigenous disavowals of nonwhite parts of themselves concurrent with how the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Gadsden Purchase empowered whiteness as the capacity to take nonwhite others captive in the name of nationalism as auto-­bound property. “Variation” remixes and redistributes the same lines from “Runagate Runagate” for a second time, in verses 112 – 30, in a one-­page, sprawling stanza in which the speaker stares at a 1968 Impala stuck in the desert sand. The stanza is surreal from the start and becomes more so with the stanza’s ending on the image of an acoustic guitar in the abandoned car, set atop “tattered jackets,” and invoking the trope of “a mischievous girl lifting / her dress,” inviting the possibility of touch, and its refusal.108 In this stanza’s scene, blackness is more sonic than strictly semiotic. Blackness and the undocumented migrant find refuge (in part, through repetition) and move beyond optical surveillance. Hear sonic blackness in this coaxing flow of sounds: “morning / and keep on going / and never turn back / and blackness / ahead / morning / and keep on going / and never turn back / and blackness / ahead.”109 Carried on music, imagine the cries that could not make their way out of the bodies of fugitives and border crossers. Bodies in flight who held their tongues charge the poet not with the burden of representing what he cannot know, but with experimenting with what he can imagine in another shape. Blackness is a sonic shape of interruption and charged memory. Again, the order of the repetition of Hayden’s words is not faithful as a strict citation; it transforms and shows you the pleasure of variation across poetic desert space. In two other stanzas, the shape of “and blackness ahead” and the usage of italics morph into the highly enjambed repetition of: “hoy / me / voy / hoy / me / voy.”110 And at the very end of the poem, after Monchie has been buried in his Dodgers jersey, italicized words in the final stanza remember the poem’s prior shaping of “and blackness ahead” and transform them into another utterance: “porque no quiero olvidar me voy me voy / (the trumpet cries) / a Los Angeles porque no quiero olvidar / me voy a Los Angeles me voy me voy / (the accordion moans) / a Los Angeles porque no quiero olvidar / mi México / (the trumpet wails).”111 Remembering is carried in movement, and given refuge. That somewhere is never reached as a singularity —  it is not reachable in this version of the world, hence the importance of its repetition, to conjure others. Where Monchie reaches is the ground of Orizaba, Mexican and Afro-­Caribbean site of marronage. In “Variation,” the sounds of instruments comprise a mariachi and display desire for a sonic accord that makes space for difSlow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning  159

ferences. And México, at last, is uttered in a book that invokes it much as an absent presence and names it explicitly little. The trumpets cry and wail, the accordion moans, and the elegy ends with an emphasis on migrancy as a form of remembering México in blackness ahead. The rusted 1968 Chevy Impala jutting out of 161 lines of verse and marigolds is a mile marker in the middle of nowhere.112 Manufactured the same year as the passage of the Equal Housing Act, the car maroons value: it will not pay the “exaction of a semiotic debt” — like the poem’s, this car’s meaning can’t meet with an inclusionist dollar amount.113 Useless, long past the point of exchange value, the verdigris Impala’s carcass cracks open for border crossers’ transitory dormitory use. Inhospitality, shelter, flight, music, and seduction stick to this dead vehicle’s busted frame. The Impala is a site that conjoins kinetic and migratory refuge particularly in the sound and appearance of line 118: “and blackness ahead a wetback’s motel.”114 Recall the truck that the lyric speaker jumpstarts in “Velvet Mesquite.” Recall the van smuggling Sofía and other women in “Border Triptych.” Recall the vehicle that stashed and transported the lyric speaker’s father in “In Colorado My Father Scoured / And Stacked Dishes.” Recall the “carriages” in Hayden’s “Runagate Runagate.” Mobile homes of refuge, mobile shapes of thought. I am not a fan of American cars, but I am a fan of Cybotron’s Detroit-­unbound “Cosmic Car,” Outkast’s “Wheelz of Steel,” and Parliament Funkadelic’s “Mothership Connection” — more sites of refuge’s transport to the slowest lightning, the stars. Moten’s imaginary in The Feel Trio (2014) occasionally recalls Nevada sands of military weapons testing, ufo landings, Las Vegas strips (rip, Tupac), and migratory movements. Feel this rhythm, of an imaginary formed by the US south and southwest: motherfucker i love cars. i love to struggle with cars. i love it when rusty cars won’t start for me and when yellow cars won’t stop for me. i want to be buried in one so i can rise in one. i want to be born in one so I can be buried in one. this tore-­up shit means i’m not you. if i ain’t got but two tires with tread on ’em can it be a bicycle? if my eight-­track work, come on ride with me to look at them new rims. you may not have a car at all, miss ella, your groceries, my jitney, and the singers all intimate in all languages.115 These cars stall as much as they start, bypass, and break down on the speaker, whereas “the singers all intimate in all languages” evokes the movements of troubadours, corrido singers, lyrical travelers whose historical relationship to multiple languages float far away from hegemonic narratives that overdetermine the citizen as human figure of proprietary stasis. Blackness rhymes with corrido as 160  Chapter Four

song of illicit flight. I say rhyme to mean a way of getting close in sound without collapsing one word, or one figure held in a word, into another. Rhyme as in position several sound-­bound things apart, allowing something in their break to hold them together. The elegy speaker says that Monchie’s “grito” [cry], like many other details of his migrant-­self-­aesthetic, was “tan chido” [so badass] — an anaphoric phrase that repeats some thirty times enumerating all that was badass about Monchie, and taking an entire page. Cries are hell-­bent on rupture rather than enclosure. “Variation” praises Monchie for living outside of any enclosure, for not assimilating, for being migrant — errant to death. Monchie’s “Cell phone strapped like a pistola / to his belt. His grito: La revolución no nos hizo iguales”116 does not draw for readers an immigrant with “the hope of justice under capitalism.”117 Monchie and the twelve million undocumented immigrants targeted by homo oeconomicus’s investments in detention centers and white vigilantism live “in the shadow of another impossibility”: integration.118 And they summon a radical poetics of inchoate, itinerant, sensorial solidarity. Poetic form, as a mobile home structure for thought given refuge, can deviate from where prose’s essays put rhetoric on trial and seek resolution — it can rework the supposedly rational through sound. Enjambment carries prose’s emphasis on continuity into the historical commonplace of rupture.119 Enjambment enacts another art of losing that, in Slow Lightning, redistributes thought’s place, makes thought move down, sense from below. But Slow Lightning also emplaces state-­ hunted migrancy alongside fugitivity, refracting past and present. “Variation” is held on both sides by blacked-­out pages. The poem preceding the black page on the way in is called “Cayucos,” with this epigraph: “boats used by African emigrants to reach Spanish islands.”120 The poem tells us: “The word ‘contraband’ arrived / in English in the 16th century via Spanish.”121 The poem succeeding the black page on the way out of “Variation” is “Caballero” [Gentleman]. There, the lyric speaker’s “breath / tightens around” his “Apache-­/ dark” lover, a “mojado,” “like a harness.”122 Queer of color desire moves in never-­spaces, out-­in-­ the-­open-­fantasies, trans-­spatial tandem. The melancholic and aggrieved “illegal” is not an integrate-­able subject position.123 Across Slow Lightning, as a refuge and as a set of papers, this position repeatedly speaks, moves, mourns, laughs, fucks, and finds typos in American English. (Monolingual nationalism, the joke’s on you.) To mourn with pleasure and play in the mix with loss is to dangerously recognize that what was lost was loved. This unspeakable love reminds us of the value in ephemeral, transitory acts of making language: there is no equivalence of value for the fugitive’s and the migrant’s, and the migrant as the fugitive’s, rights to opacity. Slow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning  161

There is much between “aids” and “aids” in Slow Lightning, as there is between blackness and state-­hunted undocumented migrancy. In Slow Lightning’s fantasy desert landscapes, blackness — Orizaba, marronage, and relation — is ahead, not whiteness. In Hayden’s poem “The Ballad of Nat Turner,” it is not only Turner who addresses the “rock and bramble” asking for a hiding place from white devils. The “rock and bramble,” too, supplicate: “hide me.” The earth cries out for refuge to those in flight, to the “Many thousands” who “rise and go / many thousands crossing over.”124

162  Chapter Four

Coda, in Three  “fifty-­two plastic bombs exploding as one, thundered against the sky”

I tear it apart. I fix the scales to my lips. Every word I utter is opalescent.  – Eduardo Corral, “Self-­Portrait with Tumbling and Lasso” (2012)

You Can Show Absence

Oneiromancy is a practice of interpreting dreams to tell the future. Like an oracle and a soothsayer, an oneiromancer speculates about the unknown through divination. These creaturely guides exist between dimensions, between the terrestrial and celestial planes; but for them, the earth is not degodded and disenchanted. The social roles of oracle, soothsayer, and oneiromancer, like those of the griot and poet, exceed positions bound and liberal market – oriented to the individual. Whereas the word oracle is etymologically tethered to speech from the Latin oraculum, and soothsayer, by way of the Old English soth, to truth, oneiros holds over dreams from the Greek, and romancy, storytelling, from the French. Imagine an oneiromancer, then, as one who puts into stories the past’s subconscious and unconscious through divination of dreams, who guides how the future may manifest in what was already in the past but beyond the obvious, dominant domain of visual sensibility. For the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz made the film Oneiromancer with the lawyer Jan Susler, of the People’s Law Office in Chicago, whose

writings on the US government’s incarceration and torture of radical, nonwhite women I discuss in chapter 2. Susler was the legal counsel to various members of the faln, and had an amorous relationship with one of the incarcerated, the artist Elizam Escobar, the subject of Santiago Muñoz’s film Prisoner’s Cinema (discussed in chapter 3). Susler’s legal, physical, emotional, psychic, sensorial, and dream-­ state relations to the faln constitute the plural aesthetic subject of Oneiromancer. The film was made in Chicago, in part in Susler’s home, specifically in her home office and bedroom, and, in part, in a warehouse. The camera is often positioned behind Susler, and, toward the end of the film, to the side of her while she sleeps. There are a few, and striking, frontal shots of Susler in the film, but viewers, by way of the camera’s positioning, are most often situated nearby — behind and beside. I am moved by the camera’s relationship to Susler’s curly hair and her hands: her hands surrounded by reference books and stacks of case files; her hands typing quickly at her desktop computer; bangles jostling together while her sun-­spotted, freckled hands flip through personal albums of Polaroids and point-­and-­shoot photos, and through a peculiar, different set of blown-­up images that exceed the scale of the personal photograph. Her hands convey a mixture of high-­quality image reproductions evoking the Big Bang, prehistory, plate tectonics, dinosaurs, the Milky Way galaxy, planets, private property, industrialization, as well as film stills of the disappearing landscapes in Santiago Muñoz’s Caribbean oeuvre. Several minutes into Oneiromancer, while Susler is visibly flipping through photographs in a pile, her voice erupts from a recording that does not match the visual, and states unequivocally: “never, never, never, never, never would the United States admit it had political prisoners.” The filmmaker’s voice asks in response to Susler’s, what else the state could have called the incarcerated faln members, if not political prisoners? Susler states that members of the faln were called “people who were in prison for Puerto Rican independence.” The filmmaker’s voice asks again, audibly nonplussed: “Is [seditious conspiracy] not a political crime by definition?” To which Susler replies, “Of course.” The filmmaker continues, “Would they mention seditious conspiracy, would they talk about the sentences, how did they get around actually saying, This is a political crime. This is a crime of political ideology?”1 The linguistic circularity in the filmmaker’s questions emerges around the state’s avoidance of the complex sign of “political prisoner” sublimated into the falsely straightforward and incendiary signs of “conspirators” and “terrorists” used to individually criminalize the imaginary of Puerto Rico as part of the Caribbean Americas, and apart from the US. Susler replies to the circling question saying, “They just didn’t talk about it. And they also didn’t talk about them as a

164 Coda

group. Each case was reviewed individually. The merit of each individual case was considered. But it just so happened that they all got disproportionate sentences for this political crime.” Individuation enacts a faux directness that is fundamental to the state’s misdirection of collective, anticolonial action and complex solidarities, ones that visual representation cannot explain, and that the state cannot capture. Susler’s hands continue flipping through images and suddenly the audio cuts out completely. This is an editorial action, one that repeats across Santiago Muñoz’s cinema. The action deprives viewers of a diegetic sense of sound for several seconds. When audio returns abruptly, it does so in the middle of another conversation between the filmmaker’s voice and a third voice, an Other, a witness whose body the film does not ever visually reveal. The camera continues to shoot over Susler’s shoulder, pointing viewers to her hands moving through the pile of images that evoke the history of the beginnings of time: stars, planets, huge, verdant ferns — and of dominant, colonial modernity: tractor-­plowed fields, factories, highways, and landscape-­altering architecture. The filmmaker says, “No importa la cantidad de tiempo que uno esté mirando el lugar, no va a comenzar hablar.” [It doesn’t matter how long you stare, looking at the place, it will not start speaking to you.] And the Other asks: “¿Pero es posible documentar esos lugares que no existen?” [But is it possible to document places that no longer exist?] The filmmaker’s voice replies to the third voice: La ausencia. Se puedes ver que no está. Y puedes mostrar la ausencia. Pero no importa cuanto documentes ausencia, no equivale a lo que pudiese producir una cultura — un material, una forma de pensar que fue desaparecida. Es como la desaparación de un lenguaje. Esos lugares simplemente no existen. No existen porque la ciudad ha sido arrazada, ha cambiado. No hay una cultura material que pueda hablar de ese momento. [Absence. You can see that it is not there. And you can show absence. But it does not matter how much you document absence, it does not amount to what a culture will have produced — a material, a form of thinking that was disappeared. It’s like the disappearance of a language. Those places simply don’t exist. They don’t exist because the city was razed, it’s all changed. There’s no material culture that would be able to speak of the moment.]2 After this gut-­wrenching exchange, the filmmaker says that some of the footage for Oneiromancer was shot in a warehouse in Chicago, the exact location undisclosed, that houses enormous amounts of documentation and objects belonging to the work of the faln, as well as documentation generated by the American “fifty-two plastic bombs exploding”  165

Indian Movement, the Black Panthers, and Chicana/o/x radicals. The film pre­ sents the warehouse as a para-­archive of multiple sensorial solidarities and political imaginaries. Proof of what was, what is not, and what may be reimagined as the future of the past — what is still speaking of a moment when the violent sovereign attacked those who, I imagine, signified the unruliness of unsovereignty, de-­individuation, collective imaginary, and sensorial solidarities that crack the limits of the murderous, falsely emancipatory Western episteme. The warehouse holds evocation of other apocalyptic modes of living on earth. The camera wanders among the hundreds of boxes of material traces of radicalism, rendering and becoming another trace among those material traces, both an image-­maker beside the world and another image in the world, tracing what has been made absent. I hear the filmmaker’s footsteps, and on a couple soft occasions, I hear her breathing as the camera weaves through the piles of documentation and objects. The warehouse site exists outside of the fbi’s archive of surveillance of the faln, now housed in Yale University’s library. Stacks and stacks of newspapers, letters, didactic materials, pamphlets, books, and other objects sit decomposing, and not, doing some liminal form of persisting, pending metamorphoses. In the warehouse, the camera records boxes of wrapped gifts organized into large piles by different ages of prospective recipients, remainders of the faln’s social lives. The gifts recall how in the fbi’s wiretaps of the faln’s safehouses and members’ homes, almost everything the fbi heard spoken, they heard as a code for bombings. A discussion of Christmas gifts for a community party were re-­signified by the fbi to mean a bombing plot. In surveillance’s lawful lawlessness, in its concealment that is also a reenactment of the lawlessness of the law, it aims to reveal proof of state suspicion: everything that the fbi heard translated as a potential cipher for an explosive. Not what the faln said in Spanish and Spanglish, but what the sovereign subjectivity active in the fbi’s audition heard was suspicious. The gifts in Oneiromancer’s warehouse, a space akin to that of the subconscious in psychic and dreaming life, sit wrapped as undetonated bombs of an ongoing refusal of the given future.

Concerning Violent Desires

The film that Santiago Muñoz made after Oneiromancer is called Safehouse (2018). For the soundtrack of the film, the filmmaker and her collaborators in Chicago made bombs in a university lab, exploded them in the controlled setting, and recorded the sounds of their explosions. The filmmaker writes of Safehouse: “Informed as much by what is said and can be seen as by what is invisible, gone, and

166 Coda

remains unsaid, Safehouse presents a series of moving image works and objects used to explore [the] sensorial unconscious in order to expand and reformulate the constellation of ideas surrounding [the faln’s] history.” Safehouse essays a relational, speculative, maroon, and explosive imagination. It does not document what did happen, but reimagines what could have happened as one mode of reorienting radical possibility in the post-­military future-­present. Muffled booms scatter themselves across Safehouse’s soundscape. Much louder are the creaky wooden floorboards underfoot of the actors who play unnamed members of the faln, pacing as they wait to act, and dreaming of unsovereign explosions on the violent sovereign from inside their wire-­tapped safehouse. Just a few years before the faln’s radical community actions and bombings of sites of US economic and political sovereignty, Enrique “Hank” López published the novel Afro-­6 (1969). The novel tells the story of a black uprising and multisite bombing in New York City. An epigraph to the novel situates the reader in relation to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with a quote that describes the explosiveness of black life accumulating and waiting to go off in every US American inner city. The novel’s main characters are black Americans and an Afro–Puerto Rican named Juan Ríos, all members of an armed radical organization that has cells in multiple US cities, Afro-­6. López was born in Chihuahua, México; moved to the United States at a very young age with his parents, who were migrant workers; and grew up in Colorado.3 After studying at the University of Colorado at Denver, he reportedly became the first Chicano to be accepted by and to graduate from Harvard Law School. Thus far, his story sounds like one of multicultural positivism. However, I am compelled by his imaginary and object relations, by a mestizo immigrant US juris doctor fictionalizing insurgent black Caribbean and black US American desires, and Afro-­6’s inter-­intramural, black and nonblack anticolonial, and multisensorial poetics of refusal. The novel fails in some ways, particularly around its heteronormative scenes of romance. But more than its story per se, its system is provocative. The novel involves the reader in plotting multiple bombings of the bridges into and out of Manhattan, bombings of the ferry system, and organized takeovers of the subway, community centers in Harlem where white and black hostages are held (the whites for ransom), as well as a commuter train from Harlem to somewhere in Connecticut. In the outfit of novel, Afro-­6 plays out a poetic manual for reimagining the given future, which is also to say the stolen past. In how its main Afro-­Rican character gets caught, Afro-­6 also makes a case for illegibility. After the climactic explosions of Afro-­6’s world-­making endeavor,

“fifty-two plastic bombs exploding”  167

in which the reader is complicit, the novel also shows the re-­invasion by the white supremacist state: the Department of Defense cuts the water and electricity in Harlem, where the radicals established their headquarters. “When the honkies shut off their electricity and threatened to cut off our water supply, they started their own rebellion — against us,” Ríos says.4 The government does not ransom the hostages. It invades, makes arrests, and begins returning the city to its former antiblack economic and legal order. Some members of the radical group are arrested and sent to Rikers. Several escape. But Ríos, who keeps diaries throughout the novel, both audio-­recordings and written journals, is caught and arrested. A prison guard finds Ríos’s written diaries that recount in detail the planning and events of the insurrection, and lead police to his apartment, where audio-­ recordings of his reflections on the planned takeover sentence him to many more years in prison. Ríos’s audio-­recordings in his apartment and writings in prison become the state’s evidence of his a priori black guilt. Which raises questions of the genres of guilt and the genres of illegibility. Speculation and fantasy can participate in the unsaid desires of the unsovereign, and remain “gone,” as in, maroon, uncaptured. I want to call attention to two passages where bombs go off, and evoke sensorial overload, here from the perspective of black radical characters: An ear-­splitting blast, fifty-­two plastic bombs exploding as one, thundered against the sky, sending a hot rush of air in all directions. The east tower of the bridge trembled and tilted slightly as the two giant suspension cables burst apart at both ends, shaking and falling slack in slow motion, like lazy serpents floating in midair. The long middle span of the bridge, having lost all support, buckled at dead center under the enormous weight and crashed into the river.5 And here from the perspective of white, liberal characters, one of whom was Ríos’s roommate in college: Seconds later, another explosion, louder this time. Speechless and numb with disbelief, they now saw the bulky framework of the Williamsburg Bridge split apart and crumble slowly into the river as the third rumbling boom reached their ears. Then, a deafening roar of multiple explosions, unleashing a blast of hot air that shook the windows behind them, rocked the near tower of the Queensboro Bridge, and ripped the huge supporting cables into shreds, causing the middle span to buckle and finally split apart at dead center.6 168 Coda

This language thunders with violent means addressing violent structures. I relay these passages because I must avow the parts of me that want to bomb the imperial bomber. I must avow the pleasure I take in Afro-­6’s fictional fantasy of what Ira Livingston calls “joyful apocalypse,” in Safehouse’s muffled booms, and in the speculative bombings in the minds and dreams of unsovereign radicals. I must avow that my writing is yet another disturbance effect. My semantic arrangements desire a post-­military ecology of possible life on this damaged planet — but this desire does not erase my historical sadness and rage, which also manifest in how I listen, and in what I want to hear.7

Semantic Safehouses and a Psycho-­geographic Deposition

Listening is ideologically charged. The tangled, gangly, knotty day-­to-­day grind of bilingualism and Spanglish as modes of imaginative listening enact a sounding out of what’s partially understood, heard in pieces, thrust into the mouth and regurgitated by that mouth that’s used to making other sound shapes that it has learned by listening, for the match of articulation to audition to something like understanding. Communication is not premised on a matchy-­matchy, twinning exchange of what’s audible and what’s understandable. It enacts impasses and misfires, failures, and trying. Trying again. Another way. It’s all practice and no finale. Bilingualism, particularly when enacting the semantic play of Spanglish, is a Caribbean affective-­linguistic mode of listening to the sounds caged in words, and letting them burst loose, for sueltos [wild] is what they constitutively are. Listening bilingually as a promiscuously driven practice involves letting go of “fix[ing] the scales” by seeking equivalences of meaning and value, seeking integration and equality in the sovereign’s civic.8 Loosening attachments to immediate, equivalent returns on investments in meaning allows for eruptions of synesthesia in the prescribed, colonial sensorial order. It makes transitory refuges, semantic safehouses from which to imagine vital, anticolonial relation. I close with a rehearsal of an oneiromantic, multisensorial, psycho-­geographic deposition of US hegemony, shaped by an affectively bilingual, explosive, and creaturely ethics of poetic listening that has Puerto Rico on its mind. Puerto Rico is under attack by tax evaders, money launderers, and earth-­razers, vassals of the sovereign-­scoundrel imperial economy. And, to remix a line of thinking that enacts mourning and misfire in C. L. R. James’s appendix to his powerful study, The Black Jacobins: “The Caribbean is [not] now an American sea. Puerto Rico is [not] its show piece. Puerto Rican society has [not a] near-­celestial privilege of free entry into the United States,” but a strategic position in the torrid zone from which

“fifty-two plastic bombs exploding”  169

Figure C.1 Macha Colón at Quiebre Performance Festival. Photograph by Walter Wlodarczyk.

to depose sovereignty from below.9 May the Puerto Rican Trench subduct the US’s hemispheric influence. While aesthetics offers escape routes from this episteme, the Caribbean Americas poetics imagined in The Cry of the Senses enacts a multisensorial and uncapturable call to arms in the form of listening to places — ones disappearing and shapeshifting  on terms unknown.

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Notes

Preface

1 In chapter 4, the Sonoran Desert comes into relation to the historically maroon, Afro-­indigenous regions of Orizaba and Veracruz, México, in Eduardo Corral’s book of poems, Slow Lightning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 2 Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 42; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 122. 3 Judith Butler, “Against Proper Objects,” differences 6, no. 2 (1994): 6; Fred Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” African Identities 11, no. 2 (2013): 240. 4 I feel a wariness of ground-­claims, perhaps oriented to painful years of reading Martin Heidegger, and to my alignment with Ira Livingston’s shade thrown at the gravity of scientific realism. See Ira Livingston, Between Science and Literature: An Introduction to Autopoetics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 149 – 50. With that being said, this is part of what the genre of preface is for. Moreover, in “All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race,” Spillers writes that “any investigator must attempt to illuminate the ground as the premier statement of a theory rather than its ‘blindness,’ to state systematically why it is so important to do so” (386). What I hope to be illuminating is how the ground of this study moves, and is broken in different ways, requiring different methodological and sensory orientations. The “ground” is a prevalent motif in Spillers’s (Taurean) writings on American literature, most notably to me: at the end of “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” as the “insurgent ground” of self-­naming black femaleness (228 – 29); and in “Black, White, and in Color,” as “the assumptive ground” for any rigorous conversation about a community of black texts to suppose the dynamic of traction and fatal gravity underfoot the running, historically situated “fugitive poet” who speaks against the unlawful prerogatives

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of dominant law (299). Because relation does not mean everything under the sun, and because it must, from my simultaneously variably white and poc positionality, be enacted in thoughtful relation to black thought, I position these grounds as some measure of mine. All three noted essays collected in Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Leticia Alvarado, Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 5. Joshua Javier Guzmán, “Brown,” in Keywords in Latina/o Studies, ed. Larry LaFountain-­Stokes, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, and Deborah Vargas (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 28. Guzmán, “Brown,” 28. Yomaira C. Figueroa, “A Case for Relation: Mapping Afro-­Latinx Caribbean and Equatoguinean Poetics,” Small Axe 24, no. 1 (March 2020): 28. Figueroa’s book, Decolonizing Diasporas, is forthcoming (as I write this) in the fall of 2020. Sandy Plácido, Petra Rivera-­Rideau, Dixa Ramírez, and Omaris Z. Zamora, “Expanding the Dialogues: Afro-­Latinx Feminisms,” Latinx Talk, November 28, 2017, https://latinxtalk.org/2017/11/28/expanding-­the-­dialogues-­afro-­latinx-­feminisms/. Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 4. Dixa Ramírez, in “Expanding the Dialogues.” Joshua Javier Guzmán, “Beside Oneself: Queer Psychoanalysis and the aesthetics of Latinidad,” in Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious, ed. Patricia Gherovici and Christopher Christian (New York: Routledge, 2019), 177. Guzmán, “Beside Oneself,” 175. Guzmán, “Beside Oneself,” 173. See Frank Wilderson III on the “radical incoherence” of the “Black American subject.” Frank Wilderson III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Social Justice 30, no. 2 (2003): 21. Antonio Viego, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 2, 120 – 21. Hortense Spillers, “Who Cuts the Border: Some Readings on America,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 321. Ronald Judy, Disforming the American Canon: African-­Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 83. Judy, Disforming the American Canon, 83 – 84, my emphasis.

Introduction

Epigraph: Hayden’s lyric poem evokes the horror of the kkk and a white supremacist’s perspective on the lynching and castration of a black man. I would encourage the reader to consider this poem beside the perspectives of white vigilantes in the US south, Arizona, Texas, and southern California today, and in relation to the lib172  Notes to Preface

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eral economic policies that buttress and benefit from white vigilante violence. The cry, I argue, exceeds white capture. Gil Cuadros, City of God (San Francisco: City Lights, 1994). Tsitsi Jaji, “Sound Effects: Synaesthesia as Purposeful Distortion in Keorapetse Kgositsile’s Poetry,” Comparative Literature Studies 46, no. 2 (2009): 287 – 310. Jaji discusses synaesthesia as “inter-­sensory detour” on pp. 293 – 94. See also Daniel Heller-­Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007). Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 8. José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs 31, no. 3 (2006): 677, my emphasis. Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” 679. Hortense Spillers, “All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Spillers, “All the Things,” 403. In “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” Muñoz states clearly that “Brownness is not white, and it is not black either” (680). But as a practice of “self-­knowing,” it is “identified with the public life of blackness,” and in how he conceptualizes it in that one essay, brown needs black meditations on and critiques of psychoanalysis (680). What I cannot make sense of is, why is brown necessarily nonblack? And how it makes sense that to claim something is nonblack is in no way identitarian. It does not make sense to me that black people would not have “brown feelings,” whether we mean by those “the blues,” “antinormative,” or otherwise antagonistic feelings. Semiotically and philosophically, why are brown feelings not (also, if not specifically) black feelings? Moreover, I wonder, partly as a Caribbeanist, and partly as a queer formed by a white supremacist Cuban family, why in Muñoz’s desire for a third way other than the US binary of African American/white, which informs his attachment to queer of color critique, he would not characterize his yearning, whether in Wynterian or Glissantian or some other Caribbean modes, as relational? Brown, as a sign, would get some relief, it seems to me, through relation rather than requiring simultaneously an antiliteralist sense of color and a distanciation from black. Chapter 4 meditates on some of this in its study, and I continue to give thought to his quandary. Fred Moten, “Manic Depression: A Poetics of Hesitant Sociology,” talk at University of Toronto, April 4, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ2k0dsmIJE. Quiebre signifies variously as: a break, a crack; going bankrupt; in sports, both in basketball and fútbol, to get past your opponent/defender, is to break their ankles. Ataques invokes both ataques de nervios and guerrilla attacks. For more information around Rompeforma and 1970s – 80s Puerto Rican dance and performance, see the artist profile for Viveca Vazquez in the Hemsipheric Institute at New York University’s digital library, accessed July 25, 2018, http://hidvl.nyu .edu/video/003679659.html. Notes to Introduction  173

11 See José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (1996): 5 – 17. 12 On el monte and the cited passage, see Dixa Ramírez, “Mushrooms and Mischief: On Questions of Blackness,” Small Axe 59 (July 2019): 152 – 63. Experimental farmers have been and continue to be vital actors in the unruliness of the Puerto Rican archipelago. On maroon or Creole gardens, see also Édouard Glissant in One World in Relation (2009, dir. Manthia Diawara). 13 Christina León has written a thorough and pleasurable essay about Xandra Ibarra’s fml , Fuck My Life cabaret performances and persona, La Chica Boom. In her essay, León historicizes and explicates Ibarra’s retiring of La Chica Boom, and how that was accompanied by iterative misreadings of brown camp by white audiences. Christina León, “Forms of Opacity: Roaches, Blood, and Being Stuck in Xandra Ibarra’s Corpus,” asap /Journal 2, no. 2 (May 2017): 369 – 94. 14 This line channels thesis VI of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (or, “On the Concept of History”): “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.” Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 255. 15 The counterpoint to this artificial museal behavior seems to have erupted at Ibarra’s performance of Nude Laughing at the 2019 Hemisférica conference in Mexico City, where the artist was accosted early-­and mid-­performance by several other artists and critics gathered in the audience. To my knowledge, scholars Iván Ramos and Hentyle Yapp are writing about that performance and its both physically and sonically invasive audience members. 16 See David Eng and David Kazanjian’s introduction, “Mourning Remains,” to their essay collection Loss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). See also David Eng and Shinhee Han, “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 10, no. 4 (2000): 667 – 700; and Michael Stone-Richards’s chapter “Painful Time: A Reading of Poetic Experience in the Sorrow Songs,” in his Logics of Separation: Exile and Transcendence in Aesthetic Modernity (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2011), 192 – 266. 17 Read Wendy Brown’s theory of “wounded attachments” and critiques of woundedness in discourses of identity politics in her States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 18 See the following on race, abjection, and questions of pleasure: Wayne Koestenbaum, Humiliation (New York: Picador Press, 2011); Nguyen Tan Hoang, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010); and Leticia Alvarado, Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). In her book’s conclusion, Alvarado descriptively reads one of Ibarra’s collaborative performances, “Untitled Fucking.” 174  Notes to Introduction

19 Xandra Ibarra website accessed July 25, 2018, http://www.xandraibarra.com/nude -­laughing/. 20 My use of kinship is attuned to the work of Richard T. Rodríguez (Next of Kin, 2009), David Eng (The Feeling of Kinship, 2010), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Tendencies, 1993), Joshua Chambers-­Letson (After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life, 2018), and Joseph Pierce (Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890 – 1910, 2019). 21 On “perceptual cramps,” read Hortense Spillers’s chapter, “Changing the Letter: The Yokes, The Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 176 – 202. 22 For more on molting, and specifically in Ibarra’s “Spic Ecdysis” photographs and performances, read León, “Forms of Opacity.” León shows how “Ibarra certainly favors the senses over political programs” (376). See, also, Iván Ramos’s essay, “Spi(c)y Appropriations: The Gustatory Aesthetics of Xandra Ibarra (aka La Chica Boom),” ar ar a : Art and Architecture of the Americas 12 (2016), which theorizes “sensorial overload” and the “gustatory” via Ibarra’s aesthetic, visceral deployment of Tapatío hot sauce in several performances. 23 “Auto-­affection” is a Derridean term. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 166. 24 In imagining the aesthetics of hysteria, I recall many scenes in Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinema, especially in La Avventura and L’Eclisse, where surreal throngs of men suddenly pursue a woman (played by Monica Vitti). Their thronging pursuit makes any movement by the woman appear exaggerated, frightened, incoherent, and, at times, infectious of their psychic desires, while she is being involuntarily objectified in the visual scheme. Yet, to my eye it is the normalized, mobbing, heterosexual male gaze that appears pathologically hysterical. In La Notte, a hospitalized woman grabs Marcello Mastroianni’s character with sudden, thrashing desire, and he responds eagerly. A nurse busts the two of them kissing, and slaps the woman hard in the face while wrestling her down with another nurse. The woman is the one hospitalized, whereas the man walks off, returns to his middle-­ class home and wife (played by Jeanne Moreau), who is not interested in his repetition of what he says happened. Moreau’s way of doing wife refuses to hear the man’s iteration of female hysteria as his to feel disturbed by. Her refusal to listen to him repeat what happened, as if it only happened to him, troubles whose body we imagine as off in the film: it seems to be his. 25 Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 20. 26 William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, quoted in Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 24. 27 On white structural attempts at overdetermining nonwhite aesthetic forms and emotions, see Jennifer Doyle, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 28 Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 24. Notes to Introduction  175

29 On nonperformance before the law, read Sora Han, “Slavery as Contract: Betty’s Case and the Question of Freedom,” Law and Literature 27, no. 3 (2015): 295 – 316. See also “Blackness and Nonperformance,” Fred Moten’s talk on Betty’s Case at moma New York, September 25, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =G2leiFByIIg. 30 My thanks to Joseph Pierce for pointing out the simultaneous interplay of feminized receptivity and eruptiveness in how I describe Ibarra’s performance of walking and retching, which a masculinist diagnostic ear would hear as infectious. 31 Drawings were also made of Charcot’s feeble-­turned-­somatically-­excessive patients. A little less than one hundred years later, French artist Louise Bourgeois cast the aesthetically and medically repeated arching back of the hysteric in bronze in her hanging sculpture Arch of Hysteria (1993). Bourgeois beheaded the figure and cast a male model, making an androgynous body the hysteric. Arch of Hysteria messes with the gendered expectations of the hysteric as female. But Bourgeois’s repetition in smoothed bronze is unmarked; the shape heaves, but shows no signs on its surface of what I sense via Ibarra’s marked and markable skin. 32 My thanks to Matthew Garrett for his rearticulation of the hysterical symptom as “the eloquent body assuming expressiveness,” or, in a Lacanian idiom near to Viego’s, assuming symbolization, that is, the “symbolic efficacy of soma.” Noted from correspondence, January 2019. 33 “Brainwashing” is an enmeshed example of a US military term that names a projected fear that becomes a pseudo-­diagnosis of what could have happened to US American soldiers fighting against Korea. Too much time over there would brainwash soldiers, rewiring their cognition into thinking communism is a good system. 34 See María Josefina Saldaña-­Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas in the Age of Development (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). See also her scathing critique of narratives of development around nafta, in “In the Shadow of nafta: Y tu mama también Revisits the National Allegory of Mexican Sovereignty,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (September 2005): 751 – 77. 35 See Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 36 See Frantz Fanon, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 249 – 310. 37 See Michael Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), for a discussion of male hysteria among post – World War I soldiers as trauma and not inherent biology. What varies in the US – Puerto Rican story of hysteria is that the medical officers treating the soldiers/ patients are also representatives of the US colonial, invading structure of governance. This is relevant in chapters 2 and 3. 38 Patricia Gherovici, The Puerto Rican Syndrome (New York: Other Press, 2003), 34. 39 Gherovici, Puerto Rican Syndrome, 29. 40 Gherovici, Puerto Rican Syndrome, 42. 41 Gherovici, Puerto Rican Syndrome, 35. 176  Notes to Introduction

42 Jacques Lacan asked, rhetorically, in a 1977 lecture, “Has hysteria not been displaced to the social field?” Lacan quoted by Gherovici in Puerto Rican Syndrome, 28. 43 Antonio Viego, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 137. 44 Édouard Glissant, Poetic Intention, trans. Nathalie Stephens (N.S.) (Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books, 2010), 41. 45 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. 46 Gherovici, Puerto Rican Syndrome, 43. 47 See “Xuxa, Medusa,” my exhibition catalogue essay for Cristina Tufino’s 2019 solo show at Galería Agustina Ferreyra, “Dancing at the End of the World,” written in partial homage to Medusa, Lorena Bobbitt, and Donna Haraway, accessed September 29, 2019, https://agustinaferreyra.com/wordpress/wp-­content/uploads/2019 /09/XUXA-­MEDUSA-­FINAL.pdf. 48 On a poetics of refuge, see Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159 – 65. On the violence of liberal homo oeconomicus and poetics, see Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, Its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-­)Cognition,” in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles, ed. Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 194. 49 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 67. 50 See Jonathan Sterne on hearing as distinct from listening; “Hearing,” in Keywords in Sound Studies, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 51 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1 – 14. 52 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 6. 53 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 73. 54 Glissant, Poetic Intention, 37 – 39. 55 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 9. 56 Proprioception is a phenomenological word-­concept. Its root implies individual perception — for example, “knowing” where your hand is, not via pure cognition, but physiological and sensorial orientation to one’s body, and from historical memory of movement. Literary critic and memoirist Christina Crosby discusses this term in A Body, Undone: Living On after Great Pain (New York: New York University Press, 2016) in relation to physical, perceptual, and neurological disorientation after a personal catastrophe. I am blowing up the term’s scale here in relation to this particular passage, where Glissant imagines marronage, and a collective sense of movement and embodied knowing. 57 Glissant, Poetic Intention, 37 – 39. 58 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 165. 59 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 77. 60 At the cited moment of In the Break, Moten reads and listens to Derrida across several texts and genres, including interviews, talks, and Memoires: For Paul de Notes to Introduction  177

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Man, works published between 1965 – 92. See Moten’s endnotes 76 – 81 to chapter 1 of In the Break (“The Sentimental Avant-­garde”), where he shows readers that he’s engaging various sites of Derrida approaching and retreating from and re-­ approaching improvisation. The exact quote from Derrida’s Of Grammatology is: “It is in the context of this possibility that one must pose the problem of the cry — of that which one has always excluded, pushing it into the area of animality or of madness, like the myth of the inarticulate cry — and the problem of speech (voice) within the history of life” (166). Viego, Dead Subjects, 137. My critique of Latinx studies structurally thinks with Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s of the black Atlantic in “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 14, nos. 2 – 3 (2008): 191 – 215. Also relevant to my rethinking of Caribbean and Latinx studies is Nadia Ellis, Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). My orientation to the Caribbean Americas emerges from my years of reading Édouard Glissant’s poetics, which imagines the islands of the Caribbean as “radiating a lived example” of small countries in strange relation to capital, and in relation to something lost that was before, as discussed in Manthia Diawara’s film, One World in Relation (2009), and early in Glissant’s writings, in L’Intention Poetique (1969). I discuss small countries in chapter 3. I also draw inspiration from Dixa Ramírez, Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2018), and her argument for reimagining the hemisphere through the Dominican Americas. We have focused in Caribbean studies on islands where capital accumulated precisely because of the slave trade and sugar cane, mono-­crop plantations (e.g., Cuba and San Domingue/Haiti). There are other, small island ecologies and maroon approaches from which to imagine life. My phrasing, ecological field of besideness, draws on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s discussion of drag in Touching Feeling (2002) as “less a single kind of act than a heterogeneous system, an ecological field” (8 – 9). I also hear Deborah Vargas’s “Ruminations on Lo Sucio as a Latino Queer Analytic” (American Quarterly 66, no. 3 [September 2014]) as a call for an ecology of visceral, embodied, and sometimes para-­verbal relation. Vargas’s ruminations position readers beside her memories of the seedy spaces on and off the dance floor at the now defunct, San Francisco –  based queer club Esta Noche. “Ruminations’ ” visceral analytic revels in the gush, smells, and sounds of queer nightlife — its capacity to hold in close spatial proximity intimacy, bankruptcy, joy, and loss. Bombas signifies variously: as explosives; as the Puerto Rican musical form that is historically citational of Haitian musical forms, as Sara Johnson discusses in The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); as loud sounds; and, when someone “drops a bomb,” colloquially, their speech act has the last word — a kin to dropping the mic; bombardeo, a bombing of a “plain” surface or a painted one, is a graf-

178  Notes to Introduction

fiti and street art term signaling a re-­territorializing disturbance of whatever was visible before, one that implies impermanence. 67 See John Alba Cutler, The Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 68 Miguel Algarín, Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings (New York: William and Barrow, 1975), 15 – 16. 69 Johnson, The Fear of French Negroes.

Chapter 1: “¡Anormales!”

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Epigraph: Héctor Lavoe. “Mi Gente,” La Voz (LP, Fania Records, 1975). Epigraph: In the verses of the track “Soy Peor” [I’m Worse] (2016), a song that incorporates affective and musical elements of Dominican dembow and merengue into trap, and was later remixed with Dominican singer Omega, the Rican trapero Bad Bunny (who has been embraced, if not claimed, by queer Rican island and diasporic communities) invokes reggaetonero Héctor el Father, who was popular in the early 2000s, and his track “Vamos pa’ la calle” [Into the street] (2004). Héctor has resurfaced of late as a born-­again Christian preacher, following a sinner-­saint trajectory not unlike Vico C’s. But Bad Bunny also knows salsa, which he signifies on various tracks and in his Instagram stories, where he often depicts himself listening to different musical genres, including salsa. I extend Bad Bunny’s invocation of the sign of Héctor to Lavoe, who invoked anormalidad in recordings and performances before el Father. This does not mean I am calling Lavoe the og anormal because his invocations of anormalidad are effects of Afro-­Caribbean errant feelings of rupture and ritually gathering around rupture. Relevant to my citational play is the tense and generative historical relationship between salsa and reggaetón, which Petra Rivera-­Rideau theorizes descriptively at the opening of Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). I began this chapter in the fall of 2016, before Hurricane María in September 2017. Many of the places invoked here continue to exist, and many do not. Pedro Pietri, “Puerto Rican Obituary,” line 59, accessed May 30, 2019, https://www .poetryfoundation.org/poems/58396/puerto-­rican-­obituary. “Translocality” is Marisol Negrón’s term for how Fania-­label salsa pulls inspired reference to Puerto Rico through urban ground. See Marisol Negrón, “A Tale of Two Singers: Representation, Copyright, and El Cantante,” Latino Studies 13, no. 1 (2015): 50. Pedro Pietri made an audio recording of poems called Loose Joints (Smithsonian Folkways Records, 1979). In another vein of sonic, sensorial solidarity, read Shana L. Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sounds of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2013). Listening is not an individual enterprise, even when done alone. See Brian Hyung Lee’s master’s thesis on Arthur Russell, “Hiding Your Present from You: Relating the Musical and Queer Contexts of Arthur Russell” (master’s Notes to Chapter One  179

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thesis, Wesleyan University, 2018). He enacts a queer reading of music theory, and performs a revaluing of listening, which canonical music theory reduces as (pathologically) feminine, purely receptive, and not rigorously theoretical. Frances Aparicio, Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 190. Quintero Rivera, ¡Salsa, sabor y control! sociología de la música “tropical” (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1998), 80, my translation. Quintero Rivera cites the Roberto Roena song “Los caminos de mi gente” [My People’s Paths] among his book’s epigraphs. The song interpolates certain folks as sin sabores. Sin sabores are those who can’t move/dance, as well as those who do not like salsa. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa, 188. Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 29. See Arlene Dávila, Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility across the Neoliberal Americas (New York: New York University Press, 2012) on neoliberal exploits of Latin American culture. See also Marisol Negrón, “Fania Records and Its Nuyorican Imaginary: Representing Salsa as Commodity and Cultural Sign in Our Latin Thing,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 27, no. 3 (2015): 274−303. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 48. Licia Fiol-­Matta, The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 9. Fiol-­Matta quotes from Peter Szendy’s Listen (2008), where he is reading Freud’s metaphor of the analyst as a telephone receiver and the analysand as a telephone microphone. A psychoanalytic and musical mode of listening is imagined through “wavering listening,” or coming in and out as a form of being actively receptive. The analyst as receptor inverts the gendering of listening (historically passively feminized). Fiol-­Matta, The Great Woman Singer, 15. Fiol-­Matta, The Great Woman Singer, 15. See Claudia Milian, Latining America: Black-­Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 111; Roy Pérez, “The Glory That Was All Wrong: El “chino malo” Approximates Nuyorico,” Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory 25, no. 3 (2015): 277 – 97; Tina Campt, “Adjacency: Luke Willis Thompson’s Poetics of Care,” Flash Art, October 8, 2019, https://flash-­-­-­art.com/article/adjacency-­luke-­willis-­thompsons-­poethics-­of-­care/; Tao Leigh Goffe, “Sugarwork: The Gastropoetics of Afro-­Asia after the Plantation,” Asian Diaspora Visual Cultures and the Americas 5 (2019): 31–­56; Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). On en clave, see Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 106 – 12. Around the phrase en clave, Rodríguez is writing with El Gran Combo’s famous song, “Sin Salsa No Hay Paraíso” [Without Salsa, There’s No Paradise]; and David Peñalosa, The Clave Matrix: Afro-­Cuban Rhythm: Its Principles and African Origins (Redway, CA:

180  Notes to Chapter One

20 21

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Bembe Books, 2012). The Puerto Rican, electronic, new wave, and synth pop band Buscabulla’s music has reoriented my percussionist sensorium to salsa’s phonic details, those that are atmospheric, “on top” of tracks, and those other than drums. Buscabulla translates as troublemaker, and, as my student Barbara Yupit Gómez recently told me, it also signifies those in search of noise. Live At Yankee Stadium, Vol. I, online liner notes, https://www.fania.com/products /live-­at-­yankee-­stadium-­vol-­i, accessed May 4, 2020. My emphasis. José Quiroga, “Salsa, Bad Boys, and Brass,” in None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era, ed. Frances Negrón-­Muntaner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 233. Dolores Inés Casillas, ¡Sounds of Belonging! US Spanish-­Language Radio and Public Advocacy (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 3. Vulnerability is the underside of being high out of your mind and is audible in the musical form of salsa, which surged mutually with the Fania label and the drug trafficking of cocaine, particularly between Colombia and New York, and politically forced Latin American migrations. See Christopher Washburne, “Salsa y drogas en Nueva York: estética, prácticas performativas, políticas gubernatales y tráfico ilegal de drogas,” in Cocinando Suave, ed. César Colón Montijo (San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2016), 73−102. Body-­up is slang used in basketball, meaning that to play, you have to bang your body on/against/with those of others. Moten, Black and Blur, 33. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 68−75. Alexandra Vazquez, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 38. Vazquez, Listening in Detail, 38, 133, 139. On racial performativity and brown feelings for Latina excess, read José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and Other std s),” Theatre Journal 52, no. 1 (2000): 67 – 79. The attunement I describe here responds to a different scene of audition from that which Roshanak Khesti theorizes in Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (New York: New York University Press, 2015), for example, which seeks to appropriate or incorporate the racialized other’s “aurality” into a stable (and white female) “listening self.” In contrast, I describe a listening-­with done by bodies that are the racialized other for white womanhood, and who signify intramurally and interculturally beyond her. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 67. Will González notes in “Yankee Stadium Fielded a Memorable Night of Music in 1973,” espn, September 22, 2008, http://www.espn.com/espn/hispanicheritage 2008/news/story?id=3596100: “There is no consensus among salsa historians as to how many of the songs in those albums were recorded at Yankee Stadium. Harlow refused to admit that the albums contain material that was not recorded at YanNotes to Chapter One  181

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kee Stadium.” I feel frustrated accord with this in my research. And from repeatedly watching video footage of the concerts and listening to sound recordings, the recording of “Mi Gente” on the Yankee Stadium albums sounds like what we see-­ hear Lavoe perform in video of the San Juan concert. These different audio-­visual parts of the archive must be sensed together, not for a “complete” narrative, but to deviate from the exploitative one officially given. This is relevant not only for scholars interested in salsa or Latinx music, but also for minoritarian thinkers studying devaluations of the aesthetic and the role thereof in political binds. I have gleaned this range of crowd numbers from several sources (Negrón, Melanson, and González). Jim Melanson, “Fania Concert Is Success as an All-­Star Delight,” Billboard, September 8, 1973, 18, https://books.google.com/books?id=IwkEAAAAMBAJ&pg =PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=jim+melanson+fania+concert+is+success+billboard +september+1973&source=bl&ots=Bah59XZ2PS&sig=exA6gSjJgpehg9BrPsVkuc 4tRoc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj7vbLBx_zcAhWCK3wKHXi4DwQQ6AEw AHoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&q=jim%20melanson%20fania%20concert%20is %20success%20billboard%20september%201973&f=false. Melanson, “Fania Concert.” My emphasis. González, “Yankee Stadium,” 2008. Negrón, “Fania Records and Its Nuyorican Imaginary,” 282 – 85. Quiroga, “Salsa, Bad Boys, and Brass,” 235. González, “Yankee Stadium.” See José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). I cite from his reading of the Puerto Rican-­Haitian artist Jean-­Michel Basquiat’s disidentifications, 42 – 52. For another “sonic imaginary,” read Deborah Vargas, Dissonant Divas: The Limits of La Onda in Chicana Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), x. Also, I use the verb claim here in the spirit of Jennifer Doyle’s “claim” of a queer sense of speed made by the South African runner, Caster Semenya. This claim refuses “evidence” that has been and continues being used against Semenya’s body for gender segregation. See Jennifer Doyle, “Introduction: Dirt off Her Shoulders.” glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 19, no. 4 (2013): 419 – 33. On veering, I am drawing on Nathaniel Mackey’s poetics writ large, particularly the serial poems Songs of the Andoumboulou, and Katherine Brewer Ball’s essay “The Veering Escapology of Sharon Hayes and Patty Hearst,” wsq 44, nos. 1 and 2 (2016): 33 – 51. For lingering as a methodology to approach emotionally and politically difficult aesthetic objects, see Joshua Javier Gúzman and Christina León, eds., “Introduction: Cuts and Impressions: The Aesthetic Work of Lingering in Latinidad,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 25, no. 3 (2015): 261 – 76. I discuss hysteria in relation to Puerto Rico at length in the introduction, and the hysteric’s position recurs in chapter 3. See Patricia Gherovici, Puerto Rican Syndrome (New York: Other Press, 2003), and Antonio Viego, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), for

182  Notes to Chapter One

42

43

44

45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53

complex and Lacanian reorientations to (racialized) hysteria not as pathology but cultural barometer, and as a particular power of Latinx usages of bilingualisms. In the song “Timbalero” [The Timbales Player], Lavoe — high on santería’s Afro-­ futurism — sings out that he’s taking off to the moon in a choo choo train: “Voy pa la luna en un chu chu tren.” Unboundedness, the desire to break out of the limits of this world, is more than a motif: it is a mark of the pleasure of imaginative survival. To clarify, this is not a transcription of already transcribed lyrics. I am recording here what I can sense from the vocals as a repeated close listener, including outbursts, ad libs, and vocals that have not been recorded (in a logo-­centric sense) anywhere that I have seen. ’Ño is an abbreviation of coño, which literally means cunt, but in Puerto Rican and Cuban Spanishes it is an expletive that can be said to indicate exuberance. Something like “Wow” or “Damn” when registering being overwhelmed by just how rad something is. These and all other translations in the essay are mine. Ed Morales, The Latin Beat: The Rhythms and Roots of Latin Music from Bossa Nova to Salsa and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003), 66 – 67. Indeed, there would be more rioting in the Bronx in 1976 during the blackout across New York City. The songs “Aguanile,” “Rompe Saraguay,” “El Todopoderoso,” “El Malo,” and others, openly invoke rituals, terms, and codes of santería. With the invocation of romance alongside lyrical eruptions of slavery, I am thinking of Afro-­Colombian Joe Arroyo’s epic song “No le pegue a la negra” [Do Not Hit the Black Woman]. After the opening lines that set the story of the song in the 1600s, this song is sung from the perspective of an African male slave in Cartegena, addressing the overseer to not beat a negra who is his lover. Note that the title uses the command form of the verb pegar, to hit or strike. The song uses a combination of history and romance to articulate and sound out defiance. With the invocation of descarga and trombone flourishes calling for freedom, I am summoning the Nuyorican composer and musician Eddie Palmieri’s song “Revolt La Libertad Lógico” [Revolt Freedom Logic], which is on the album Vamanos Pa’l Monte [We’re Off to the Mountains]. Palmieri’s music is a combination of salsa and jazz. The lyrics do not establish a narrative, as in Arroyo’s song. Instead, they begin with refusal, which is also to say in conflict: “¡No, no, no, no me trates así!” and, again, with the command form of the verb, here tratar [No, no, no, do not treat me that way!]. Arroyo’s and Palmieri’s salsas operate differently from each other, but they both release cries for uprising against slavery and capitalism, and relay sonic gathering places for diasporic feelings of defiant connection. Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues” (1926), lines 1 – 3, accessed May 20, 2019, https:// www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47347/the-­weary-­blues. Moten, In the Break, 85. Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 239. Pietri, “Puerto Rican Obituary,” lines 77 – 112. Pietri, “Puerto Rican Obituary.” Notes to Chapter One  183

54 Pietri, “Puerto Rican Obituary.” 55 See David Marriott, “On Decadence: Bling Bling,” e-­flux 79 (February 2017), https://www.e-­flux.com/journal/79/94430/on-­decadence-­bling-­bling/. See, also, my essay on trap, “Soy Peor,” Terremoto: Contemporary Art in the Americas, July 9, 2018, https://terremoto.mx/article/soy-­peor/. 56 The difference between Bad Bunny’s rendering of heartbreak and Lavoe’s in the aforementioned songs is that he doesn’t blame a woman or feminized figure for being reminded of having feelings, which Lavoe’s and other salsa lyrics do lugubriously. 57 Bad Bunny invokes anormal again on the track “Tu no metes cabra saramambiche” (2017). 58 Albert Maysles shot footage of one of Yoko Ono’s performances of Cut Piece in 1966 at Carnegie Hall, and, with his brother David, made the 1970 music documentary Gimme Shelter, and the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens. I contend that the detail of Maysles’s involvement in shooting footage of the 1974 concert in Kinshasa is a reminder that the musicians who played with Fania were also in relation to avant-­ garde, camp, and queer aesthetic and living practices. It is important to me that we see that these signifiers party together in the same zeitgeist, even as the “sonic color line” was vigilantly invested in. See Jennifer Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016). I care about how we — Latinx studies, performance studies, Caribbean studies, black studies, and sound studies scholars in particular — feel compelled to listen to what a given musical genre’s listeners stimulate, and how we socialize (with) them in writing. 59 YouTube is one of the formats — in addition to mechanisms such as shitty laptop speakers, poppy club speakers, good jbl external speakers, and sorta exquisite while heavily interiorizing Beats headphones — by which I am listening to/sensing this music. Which means I am also listening to these mechanisms. On listening to sound mechanisms, read Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-­Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Roshanak Khesti, Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet Books, 1999). 60 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 79. 61 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 77 – 79. 62 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 68. 63 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 69.

184  Notes to Chapter One

Chapter 2: “I have been forced to hear a lot”

1



2 3 4 5

6 7 8

9

10 11

12 13 14

Epigraphs: Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 73; Roland Barthes, “The Struggle with the Angel,” Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 127. While I am thinking of specific acts of defiance in the 1940s and ’50s (with Lolita Lebrón and pnpr actions), in the 1970s and ’80s (with the faln and Los Macheteros), and in the late 1990s and early 2000s (with uprisings in Vieques and Culebra), I do not want to imply that defiance observes these dates or operates only at intervals of decades. Puerto Rico is defiant all that time. And there are specific historical ruptures that unequivocally exfoliate daily forms of defiance of the US and its categories for freedom. My thanks to Sofía Gallisá Muriente for questioning the potential implications of annotating Puerto Rican defiance at neat temporal intervals. Saidiya V. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 3. Hartman, “Venus,” 13. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 70. Anne McClintock, “Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib,” Small Axe 13, no. 1 (2009): 50 – 74. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 73. See Jacques Attali, Jennifer Stoever, Gustavus Stadler, and Lilian Radovac on noise and race. I am using the sign of “trespass” in the spirit of Sylvia Wynter’s and Sarah Jane Cervenak’s iterations of it: it is what the colonizer did and does, spatially. See Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1995): 5 – 57; Sarah Jane Cervenak, Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (New York: New York University Press, 2014). Marina Reyes Franco, “The Visitor Economy Regime,” Independent Curators International, January 2, 2018, http://curatorsintl.org/research/the-­visitor-­economy -­regime. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 4 – 5, 50, 70. Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 97. Also, dancer and performance artist nibia pastana has explored this dynamic in her piece “Liquid,” which crosses what Jasbir Puar calls tourist “circuits of mobility” via the cruise ship industry and the history of the US Navy in the archipelago. pastrana performs getting fucked up the ass, but how she grinds on the “penetrator” solicits a refusal of sovereignty. I think with her choreography and performances in my next book project, Liquid. Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, 76 – 87. M. Jacqui Alexander, Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: Feminism, Tourism, and the State in the Bahamas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, 69 – 76.

Notes to Chapter Two  185

15 Mark Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the ‘Peculiar’ Status of Native Peoples,” Cultural Critique 73 (Fall 2009): 88 – 124. 16 Billy-­Ray Belcourt, “Indigenous Studies beside Itself,” Somatechnics 7, no. 2 (2017): 183. 17 Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-­Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 18 Weheliye, Phonographies, 71. 19 Ellison, Invisible Man, 8, quoted in Weheliye, Phonographies, 53. 20 Weheliye, Phonographies, 53. 21 See Viviana MacManus’s forthcoming work on gender dynamics in Latin American “Dirty Wars” and the erasures of insurgent Latin American women. 22 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 13. 23 See Desafiar in the Real Academia Española, https://dle.rae.es/desafiar, for a sense of connection between defiance, being desafinado, and decomposing/undoing:   1. tr. Retar, provocar a singular combate, batalla o pelea.   3. tr. Afrontar el enojo o la enemistad de alguien contrariándolo en sus deseos o acciones.   7. tr. desus. Deshacer, descomponer. 24 I have taught The Masses Are Asses three times in recent years in literature and theory courses. But it was not until Katherine Brewer Ball encouraged me to invite several former Wesleyan theater majors to perform a live reading of the play that I registered sensorially just how many sound effects pop off in the play. My thanks to KBB, Daniel Maseda, Miranda Haymon, and Anthony Dean. 25 Susler, “Women’s,” 34. 26 Pedro Pietri, The Masses Are Asses (Kobenhavn: Green Integer Press, 2003), 6. 27 I can imagine, say, Young Jean Lee staging the play and precisely messing with audience presumptions of actors’ skin color, genders, and sexualities. 28 Pietri, The Masses, 9. 29 Pietri, The Masses, 12 – 13. 30 Pietri, The Masses, 45 – 47, 49 – 52. 31 Pietri, The Masses, 15 – 16. 32 Pietri, The Masses, 16. 33 Pietri, The Masses, 17. 34 Moten, In the Break, 39 – 40. 35 Pietri, The Masses, 19. 36 Pietri, The Masses, 20 – 21. 37 Pietri, The Masses, 21 – 22. 38 Pietri, The Masses, 26 – 27. 39 Pietri, The Masses, 29. 40 My thinking on the patronymic and domesticity are indebted to Spillers. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 72. 41 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 73. 42 Pietri, The Masses, 30. 43 Pietri, The Masses, 40 – 43. 44 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 51. 186  Notes to Chapter Two

45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52

53

54

Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 51. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 104. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 82, my emphasis. Pietri, The Masses, 62 – 63. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 82. See Sandra Ruiz, Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance (New York: New York University Press, 2019), and her descriptive close reading and theorization of The Masses Are Asses in chapter 3. She discusses “Brown existentialism” in chapter 4 (see pp. 137 – 38). Cited in Sora Han, “Slavery as Contract: Betty’s Case and the Question of Freedom,” Law & Literature 27, no. 3 (2015): 413. See the artist Virginia Colwell’s moving and generous archive of faln literature and texts on her website. I draw on the sources she has archived there, for example, rather than directly citing the state’s archives in this chapter. Virginia Colwell, accessed June 1, 2019, http://www.virginiacolwell.com/print/. Lolita Lebrón was radicalized by the Ponce Massacre of 1937, where US-­appointed governor of Puerto Rico, Blanton Winshop, ordered a police shooting of peaceful protestors. The protest organized around a commemoration of the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico. Police killed nineteen people, shooting many of them in the back and wounding hundreds of others. Lebrón moved to New York City several years later and was active in the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. After other acts of defiance against US invasion of Puerto Rico, on March 1, 1954, Lebrón traveled to Washington, D.C., with Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irvin Flores, and Andres Figueroa Cordero. Lebrón and her comrades entered the visitors’ gallery of the United States House of Representatives and opened fire, wounding five congressmen. In a hasty trial, Lebrón was sentenced to fifty-­seven years in prison. She was incarcerated in the Alderson, West Virginia, facility where other radical women prisoners were detained and tortured. The US legal system and media portrayed Lebrón as a madwoman terrorist. For a much more complex narration of the main act for which Lolita Lebrón is known, read Irene Vilar, The Ladies Gallery: A Memoir of Family Secrets (New York: Vintage, 1996). Vilar is the child of Lolita Lebrón’s daughter Gladys, who suicided while her mother, Lolita, was still in prison. López’s sentence was commuted in 2017 by President Obama after thirty-­seven years in prison. (Jan Susler was López’s lawyer.) Carlos Alberto Torres was released in 2010 after thirty years in prison. Torres was enlisted in the US’s invasion of Vietnam. He returned to the colonial power broken, and became a community activist in Chicago, in part, to intervene in housing crises and the prevalence of drug addiction among poor Afro-­Latino and African American former soldiers. I note the US military invasion of Vietnam as a source of Torres’s history with munitions to re-­invoke the Puerto Rican soldiers of the US’s war in Korea discussed in my introduction. I imagine the Puerto Rican soldiers’ undiagnosed hysteria, renamed by imperial US medical officers as “hyperkinetic seizures” and “Puerto Rican syndrome,” as a mode of manifesting unruliness within their conditions. That sensorial history shadows this one. Notes to Chapter Two  187

55 Enacting multisensorial poetic listening with the court’s recording of Beltrán Torres’s creative nonparticipation in what she called an “Illegal Trial” of her and other members of the faln changed how I listened to Lady’s bizarre participation in her captivity, or quasi-­captivity. In reading with the overriding desire for her to break free, I initially missed the nuances of defiance. 56 Jan Susler, “The Women’s High Security Unit in Lexington, KY,” Yale Journal of Law and Liberation 1, no. 1 (1989): 33. Susler’s writing also performs a politics of citationality. For example, she cites the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueño’s progr ams and ideology of the movimiento de liber acion nacional puertorriqueno 35 (July 3, 1987) in footnote 12. That source cites the language of William Webster’s 1987 confirmation hearing for director of the cia regarding Puerto Rico as the “US’s Achilles Heel.” Susler does not cite Webster directly; her information about his utterance is channeled by way of a radical text’s recontextualization of it. 57 “Seditious conspiracy,” accessed May 28, 2019, https://www.law.cornell.edu /uscode/text/18/2384. 58 In Bad Bunny’s song “Tu No Metes Cabra (Saramambiche)” [You Don’t Scare Nobody, (Sonofabitch)], Daddy Yankee raps: “Psicópata a la vista, poder imperialista / El Yankee, el verdadero terrorista” [Psychopath at first glance, imperial power / El Yankee, the for real terrorist]. In addition to anormal, discussed in chapter 1, another sign of resignified pathology erupts here. There is ambivalence in this eruption. Daddy Yankee’s wordplays in the bars preceding this section of verse claim that his lyrics are corrupt, something he’s learned from the government, so he is going to become a lyrical dictator to fight their corruption, saying not that he is like but that he is the Mussolini, Stalin, and Fidel Castro of music. His invocation of government corruption encapsulates the corrupt Puerto Rican government as instrument of the invading US colonial government. He situates himself through a set of signs that signify very differently in terms of world history, but they all signify as enemies of the US. Daddy Yankee’s bars play with signifiers of terror and pathology. 59 Susler, “Women’s High Security Unit,” 31 – 41. 60 For Moten on lawlessness of law, see “Jurisgenerative grammar (for alto),” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, ed. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 128 – 42. 61 US law addressed Beltrán Torres only as Torres in 1980. By her 1996 appeal, she went by Beltrán only. I claim her names before marriage and after divorce for the sake of readerly consistency. 62 Torres v. United States. One can read the 1998 appeal decision, and many other state documents of surveillance of the faln, on the latinamericanstudies.org website, maintained by Dr. Antonio de la Cova and available since 1997: http://www .latinamericanstudies.org/faln.htm. One can also read here: Torres v. United States, accessed May 28, 2019, https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-­2nd-­circuit/1097419.html. 63 Torres v. United States. 64 Torres v. United States, accessed May 28, 2019, http://www.latinamericanstudies.org /puertorico/marie-­torres.htm. 188  Notes to Chapter Two

65 66 67 68 69

Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 4; 51; 68 – 69; 111. Susler, “Women’s High Security Unit,” 34, n31. Susler, “Women’s High Security Unit,” 34, n34. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 73. Example taken from Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s film with Jan Susler, Oneiromancer (2017), discussed in the coda. 70 Fred Moten, “Manic Depression: A Poetics of Hesitant Sociology,” April 7, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ2k0dsmIJE.

Chapter 3: Sensorial Errancy in Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s Cinema

1 2

3 4

5

6

7

8

Epigraphs: Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, trans. J. Michael Dash. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989). Derek Walcott, The Bounty (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1998), section 36, 77. Anne Eller, We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 10. The Admiral is to say Columbus, and it is to say the figure of the US Admiral’s perspective lording over Vieques, and it is to evoke an aerial visual schema about which Santiago Muñoz writes in A Universe of Fragile Mirrors (2016). Dixa Ramírez, Colonial Phantoms (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 9, for the Admiral’s monumental “history from above.” My language here channels Santiago Muñoz’s cinematic critiques of spatial designs oriented to the Admiral’s gaze into Sylvia Wynter’s diction, semantics, and thinking on the “gaze from below,” which is a way of saying blackness and of saying terrestrial, as opposed to the celestially oriented and enslaving Christian paradigm of homo sapiens. See Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, Its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-­)Cognition,” in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology, ed. Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 185 – 252. This is general knowledge in Puerto Rico. For North American readers, note the economically manipulative slant leveraged by imperial journalism: Associated Press, “After Closing of Navy Base, Hard Times in Puerto Rico,” New York Times, April 3, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/national /after-­closing-­of-­navy-­base-­hard-­times-­in-­puerto-­rico.html. Until the fall of 2018, the ferries launched from Fajardo, Puerto Rico, to Vieques and Culebra, in an intentionally dysfunctional system of transport where inhabitants of the islands had to share their needs and wants with the seemingly wayfaring but actually scripted incursions of tourists. Associated Press, “Navy Attributes Fatal Bombing to Mistakes,” New York Times, August 3, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/03/us/navy-­attributes-­fatal -­bombing-­to-­mistakes.html. See Beatriz Santiago Munoz’s language regarding the record jacket to Ceiba/Faslane in “Post-­military Cinema,” accessed September 17, 2017, http://fabricainutil.com /index.php/project/ceibafaslane/. Notes to Chapter Three  189

9 Javier Arbona, “Vieques, Puerto Rico: From Devastation to Conservation and Back Again,” tdsr 17, no. 1 (2005): 42. 10 Cesar Ayala, “Del latifundio azucarero al latifundio militar: Las expropriaciones de la marina en la década cuarenta,” Revista de Ciencias Sociales (January 2001): 1 – 33. See also Ayala, “From Sugar Plantations to Military Bases: The U.S. Navy’s Expropriations in Vieques, Puerto Rico, 1940–­45,” Centro — Journal of the cuny Center for Puerto Rican Studies 13, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 2 – 4 4. 11 María Josefina Saldaña-­Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 58. 12 See Abderrahmane Sissako’s film, Bamako (2007) and its trial of the World Bank and imf in an everyday courtyard setting. See also Aimé Césaire’s argument in the Discourse on Colonialism regarding the West’s a posteriori justifications of its invasions and destructions of African cultures in the name of progress. 13 Arbona, “Vieques,” 41. 14 Sarah Jane Cervenak, Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 9. See Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1995): 5 – 57; Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory and Re-­Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project,” in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-­American Studies in Theory and Practice, ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006), 107 – 69; Sylvia Wynter, “The Re-­Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter,” Small Axe 8 (2000): 119 – 207. 15 Arbona uses the term “camouflage” to describe the many ways the US disguises the damage it has done over the years in the Puerto Rican archipelago. The filmmaker Julie Dash uses the metaphor of “camouflage” in a different sense: for the symbols and signifiers that she situated in her film Daughters of the Dust, in homage to and evocation of African diasporic tactics of hiding gods within gods, encoding spiritual references within quotidian objects as strategies for surviving, making systems of meaning, and making an aesthetics amidst enslavement. Angelica Jade Bastien and Julie Dash interview, March 2, 1017, https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/we -­have-­a-­lifetime-­of-­stories-­to-­tell-­julie-­dash-­on-­daughters-­of-­the-­dust. Dash uses the term, then, in a Glissantian vein, when in Caribbean Discourse (20–23) he discusses “camouflage” as the modes of diversion, resistant and encoded humor and play, in black Caribbean and black US uses of language, creoles, babble, the dozens, etc. 16 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 205. 17 Gina Ulysse, ed., “Caribbean Rasanblaj,” emisférica 12, nos. 1 and 2 (2015). 18 Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, “I am going to describe a ritual,” in A Universe of Fragile Mirrors (Miami: Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2016), 29 – 74. 19 After Hurricane María in September 2017, the Puerto Rican and US governments did not aid Vieques or Culebra. 190  Notes to Chapter Three

20 Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, “Radical Form, Radical Content,” accessed May 1, 2017, https://fabricainutil.com. 21 Ira Livingston, Magic, Science, Religion (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2018). 22 I have just begun to read Tiffany Lethabo King’s notion of “errant grammars.” I look forward to thinking with her book in relation to Santiago Muñoz’s errant cinema. See Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 23 The aesthetic of La cabeza mató a todos evokes that of Camilo Restrepo’s La Bouche (2017). 24 Thanks to Agustina Ferreyra for her anti-­Cartesian insights on this film. 25 Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” 5 – 57. 26 From La cabeza mató a todos. 27 Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-­Monde (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1997). I translated the English from the Spanish translation: Tratado del Todo-­Mundo, trans. María Teresa Gallego Urrutia (Barcelona: El Cobre Ediciones, 2006), 26. 28 Santiago Muñoz’s cinema channels Julio García Espinosa’s “imperfect cinema,” and the varied Latin American, Caribbean, radical black US American, experimental feminist, and West African aesthetic projects that think about ethnography and experimental cinematic form, such as “A Cinema of Hunger,” Third Cinema, L.A. Rebellion, and the oeuvres of Jean Rouch, Ousmane Sembène, Dziga Vertov, Michelangelo Antonioni, Maya Deren, Sarah Maldoror, Agnés Varda, Trinh T. Minh-­Ha, Chantal Akerman, Sara Gómez, and Chris Marker. 29 See Ren Ellis Neyra, “ ‘Being Ready for What You Don’t Know’: A Conversation with Beatriz Santiago Muñoz,” asap /Journal 4, no. 1 (2019): 1 – 22. 30 See Ellis Neyra, “The Mind’s Eye,” Artforum, March 23, 2016, https://www.art forum.com/film/rachel-­ellis-­neyra-­on-­the-­art-­of-­beatriz-­santiago-­munoz-­60147. 31 Olga Casellas and El Tiguere Corp. designed the book, A Universe of Fragile Mirrors. The exhibition “A Universe of Fragile Mirrors” traveled to El Museo del Barrio in 2017. 32 Arbona, “Vieques,” 37. 33 This scorched earth looks surreally like what Michelangelo Antonioni painted to appear like post-­military, postindustrial disaster in the film, Il Deserto Rosso (1965). 34 Nelson Maldonado-­Torres’s book Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008) is on my mind here, particularly his theorization’s entanglement of master morality, a warring set of values, and racism as crucial to modernity’s operation, and in the name of “good.” 35 Antonio Viego “argue[s] for a more Lacanian psychoanalytically literate approach, in particular, as opposed to a psychoanalytic object-­relations approach, or an ego psychology approach, or a Kleinian approach, or a social psychological approach to theorizing ethnic-­racialized subjectivity within Latino studies . . . because of the significantly more complicated and less psychologistic picture it potentially promises” (Dead Subjects, 27). 36 Sylvia Wynter, “Toward the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black,’ ” in Hispanic Issues 23, Notes to Chapter Three  191

37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51

52

ed. Mercedes F. Duran-­Cogan and Antonio Gómez-­Moriana (New York: Routledge, 2001), 30 – 66. See also Demetrius L. Eudell, ‘“Come on Kid, Let’s Go Get the Thing’: The Sociogenic Principle and the Being of Being Black/Human,” in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology, ed. Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 184 – 252. Viego, Dead Subjects, 137. Viego, Dead Subjects, 137. Hortense Spillers, “All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 382. Spillers, “All the Things,” 402. Spillers, “All the Things,” 403, 401. Spillers, “All the Things, 382. Spillers, “All the Things,” 402, 403, 427. Gherovici, Puerto Rican Syndrome, 8, 9, my emphasis. Showalter (1993), quoted in Gherovici, Puerto Rican Syndrome, 30. “Errance” is a Glissantian variation (in Poetics of Relation) on the psychoanalytic theme of wandering. Text dated “22 Marzo 1989,” in Prisoner’s Cinema (2014). The vejigante would be best experienced through an image. It is a folkloric creature that comes out during Carnivals in Ponce and Loíza, Puerto Rico. The word derives from blown-­up cows’s bladders, used as surfaces for paintings. During festivals, folks don masks of green, yellow, red, and sometimes blue; the masks bear multiple protruding horns; the costume of the vejigante is clownish, colorful, and the sleeves appear like a bat’s wings. They’re a materialization of something familiarly scary, phallic, uncanny, and playful. José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and other stds),” Theatre Journal 52, no. 1 (2000): 79. Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect,” 76. Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect,” 70. I have not entirely resolved, as of now, if for black to “feel good” in Muñoz’s late, and, of course, unfinished, theoretical schema of brown, it must feel nonblack, and if, to feel bad, it must opt to feel something by another name than black. If that is so, then we must encounter in (Afro)Latinx studies this tension between brown affect and black being (as negative feeling of non­generative negative being). There looms a detour of black feeling about being into brown affects of utopian longing that cannot help (itself) but retrace the problems with the schema that brown as affect, as I understand it, writes so hard to break from: mestizaje. In other words, why, in a world without white people, is the magical feeling not black? Or some other (kind of) sign? Such as Viego’s iteration of the hysteric. Being aware of white middle-­class subjectivity and its performance of itself as island-­hopping is unpleasantly relevant. (See the Fyre Festival phenomenon, for example.) If white affect looks weird to some of us in professional settings, where it’s comporting with its own fictions of normativity in a pretty tight role-­play game,

192  Notes to Chapter Three



53 54 55 56

57 58 59

60 61

62 63

64

then things can get really weird when it goes on vacation. Historical consciousness often goes out the window with the desire to transform through briny relaxation, if only to return to a hyper-­attachment to an insane mode of productive protocol. See Jasbir Puar, “Circuits of Queer Mobility: Tourism, Travel, and Globalization,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, nos. 1–2 (April 2002): 101 – 37. Glissant, Poetic Intention, 147. Arbona, “Vieques,” 36. Arbona, “Vieques,” 44. One of the phrases that captures Puerto Rico in tourist media is “la isla del encanto,” the island of enchantment; it’s also engraved on the license plates of Puertorriqueñxs on the islands. Teddy Roosevelt Jr. is credited with that phrase in a 1938 Home and Garden interview in the form of a travel guide to Puerto Rico. One of the cruel jokes of US empire is that (Teddy) Roosevelt’s Roads were the planet’s oceans. As President, the former “Rough Rider” mounted the Pacific and Atlantic fleets, of which “The Great White Fleet” emerged as the pageant demonstration of Teddy’s flexing Navy blues. “The Great White Fleet” charted a course to the US’s dominant naval presence in the islands of the Caribbean and South Pacific. The United Fruit Company bought some of the ships that constituted “The Great White Fleet.” These vessels went on to alternately transport bananas and North American tourists, those who bought voyages from the United Fruit Steamship Company to sail their golden, venereal romance to Jamaica, Cuba, and the recently acquired Panama Canal. See the Wikipedia entry on Puerto Rico, note 37 on “isla del encanto,” accessed May 30, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto _Rico. Cervenak, Wandering, 2. Cervenak, Wandering, 14. See Macarena Gómez-­Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), in which she theorizes and describes “submerged perspectives” in relation to artists and thinkers of blackness and indigeneity of the Américas, such as Carolina Caycedo, Francisco Huichaqueo, Glissant, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others. I am drawing on Arbona’s research and Santiago Muñoz’s “Post-­military Cinema” text, printed on the record jacket of Ceiba/Faslane, 2014. Read the conversation between Arthur Jafa and Tina M. Campt, “Love Is the Message, The Plan Is Death,” e-­flux, April 2017, https://www.e-­flux.com/journal /81/126451/love-­is-­the-­message-­the-­plan-­is-­death/. Arthur Jafa, “Black Visual Intonation,” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998): 267. Read Joshua Javier Guzmán for a queer, Latinx aesthetic reading of Lacan’s future anterior. “Beside Oneself: Queer Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetics of Latinidad,” in Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious, ed. Patricia Gherovici and Christopher Christian (New York: Routledge, 2019), 173 – 74. Language from Santiago Muñoz’s website, fabricalinutil.com, accessed March 30, 2019 (emphasis added). Notes to Chapter Three  193

65 Arbona gave a talk on Esto es un mensaje explosivo at the mla in New York in 2018. He situates her cinema in an undertold history of explosives and explosiveness, and asks questions about “what or whom is considered combustible” and “how it might or might not be possible to ever grieve under such conditions of ultra-­exposure” (2). I am keen to his recurrent questions about how the state “camouflages” our senses from its violences, and vice versa, and his wording around “ultra-­exposure” as another way to think about the sensorial overload of Ricans living in the archipelago in relation to US military and corporate weapons/toxic chemical “testing.” Talk cited with permission of the author: Javier Arbona, “Explosive Cultures: Puerto Rico’s Bombscapes and the Spatial Order of Law — Notes for mla 2018,” unpublished conference manuscript, January 5, 2018. 66 Jafa, “Black Visual Intonation,” 266. 67 Santiago Muñoz, A Universe of Fragile Mirrors, 41. 68 Dixa Ramírez, notes from talk given at Barnard College, New York, February 2019.

Chapter 4: Slow Lightning, Ecstatic Mourning, and Migratory Refuge

Epigraphs: My transcription from the YouTube video of Fred Moten’s talk, “Blackness and Nonperformance,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, September 25, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2leiFByIIg. I have spliced phrasing that happens circa 1 hour and 55 mins. Robert Hayden, “The Ballad of Nat Turner,” lines 27 – 35, accessed October 21, 2019, https://www.poetryfoundation.org /poems/43075/the-­ballad-­of-­nat-­turner. 1 The “intramural” is Hortense Spillers’s term. With inter-­“intramural,” I am evoking besideness, relations that can move across differences. Not as in conflate, collapse, and so forth. Meaning, approximate and seek convergences that may already exist, about which we do not know. This is part of the sensorial poethics I have been discussing throughout the book. Read Hortense Spillers, “Black, White, and in Color, or Learning How to Paint: Toward an Intramural Protocol of Reading,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 277 – 300. 2 I draw from various sources on Veracruz as maroon, as part of the Gran Caribe and Circum-­Caribbean, and heterogeneous beyond, and before, the nation-­state’s narrative thereof. See Jesús Moreno Arriba, “El municipio de Pajapan en la Sierra de Santa Marta (Veracruz, México): Un caso de resistencia indígena en la defensa del territorio y los recursos naturales para la sustenabilidad de los pueblos originarios del Gran Caribe,” Memorias: Revista Digital de Historia y Arqueología desde el Caribe 26 (2015), http://rcientificas.uninorte.edu.co/index.php/memorias/article /viewArticle/7423/7389; David M. Davidson, “Negro Slave Control and Resistance in Colonial Mexico, 1519 – 1650,” in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 82 – 103; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 121 – 32; Jane Landers, “Maroon Women in Colonial Spanish America: Case Studies in the Circum-­Caribbean 194  Notes to Chapter Three

3 4 5

6

7

8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15

from the Sixteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries,” in Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Robert Hayden, “Runagate Runagate,” lines 6 – 7, accessed May 4, 2019, https:// www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52947/runagate-­runagate. I count the enjambed, two-­line title as the first two lines of the poem, to clarify my numbering of verses. Eduardo C. Corral, “In Colorado My Father Scoured / And Stacked Dishes,” in Slow Lightning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 9 – 10. See Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the US-­ Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Alicia Schmidt Camacho, “Hailing the Twelve Million: US Immigration Policy, Deportation, and the Imaginary of Lawful Violence,” Social Text 28, no. 4 (2010): 1 – 24; Noam Chomsky, “The Unipolar Moment and the Obama Era,” talk at Nezahualcoyotl Hall, National Autonomous University of Mexico (unam), University City, Federal District, Mexico, on September 21, 2009, https://chomsky.info/200909211-­2/. On vigilance committees, read Ken Gonzales-­Day, Lynching in the West: 1850–1935 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Nicole Guidotti-­Hernández, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping US and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); and Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-­Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 2018). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 395. Regarding migrant melancholia, see Schmidt Camacho, “Migrant Melancholia,” in Migrant Imaginaries, 283 – 313; Iván Ramos, “Slow Encounters: Chantal Akerman’s From the Other Side, Queer Form, and the Mexican Migrant.” asap /Journal 2, no. 2 (May 2017): 423 – 48. I shift away from the terms of a Chicano literary criticism that relies on uncritical readings of the Chicano nationalist romanticization of the indio, demonstrated, for example, in Rafael Pérez Torres, “Alternate Geographies and the Melancholy of Mestizaje,” in Minor Transnationalism, ed. Francoise Lionnet and Shu-­mei Shih (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 317 – 38. Jennifer Doyle, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), xv – xvi. “Eduardo C. Corral by Yezmin Villareal,” interview by Yezmin Villareal, bomb Magazine, April 23, 2013, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/eduardo-­c-­corral/. See Ralph Rodríguez, Latinx Literature Unbound (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). Chapter 4 engages Corral’s poetry and Latinx lyric. Robert Hayden, “The Diver,” Collected Poems, ed. Frederick Glaysher (New York: Liveright, 2013), 3 – 4. Gil Cuadros, “Sight,” in City of God (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001), 96. Notes to Chapter Four  195

16 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999): 52. I am specifically disturbed by the (dead) black [body]-­obsessed rhetoric of our times. I do not think of Kenneth Goldsmith reading the state’s autopsy report of Mike Brown’s body as a poem, his poem, the same way that I do certain black studies emphases on black death. I worry about how knelling repetition services the white supremacist state, in the first instance, whereas it antagonizes it in the second instance. 17 Corral’s book is too phenomenologically mindful of itself for us not attend to its materiality as an object. Slow Lightning was also the first selection published under Carl Phillips’s editorship of the Yale Younger Poets Prize series. 18 Corral, “Our Completion: Oil on Wood: Tino Rodríguez, 1999,” Slow Lightning, 3, lines 7 – 9. 19 The movements and figures in Corral’s “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” poems call to my mind José Lezama Lima’s poem “An Obscure Meadow Lures Me,” where the “I” is poised in a meadow, and deer, antelope, and snakes appear in baroque relation to other imagery. See José Lezama Lima, Selections, trans. Ernesto Livon-­Grosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 3. 20 Corral, “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome,” Slow Lightning, 5, lines 27 – 32. 21 Corral, “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome,” Slow Lightning, 72, lines 31 – 35. 22 In the book title’s transformation at the end of the second “aids” poem, from lightning to stars, my mind flashes to Dante Alighieri ending each of the three books of the Divine Comedy looking up at the stars. The stars give him footing, orientation back to his own living body among the dead and transformed. 23 In The Blood is the title of a book of poems by Carl Phillips. It holds a poem called “X,” another chi, but it does not operate through chiasmus. Enjambed two-­liners pull the eyes down to where nourishment, sexual pleasure, love, and loss converge and break apart. Carl Phillips, In The Blood (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992). 24 I am channeling Lisa Cohen’s wording for her friend and sound editor, Jim Lyons, regarding “acute, attenuated hypersensitivity.” See Lisa Cohen, “Acute Attenuated,” in Animal Shelter 4, no. 4 (2016): 64 – 79. 25 Corral, “Our Completion: Oil on Wood: Tino Rodríguez: 1999,” Slow Lightning, 3, line 1. 26 “Monologue of a Vulture’s Shadow” also reminds me, in lyric history, of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem, “Carrion Comfort.” Corral’s tendency in Slow Lightning to make compound words, I associate in the body with the presence of Hayden, and his double-­words (e.g., “blue-­black cold”). Hopkins was also inclined to compounds: “bell-­swarmèd,” “lark-­charmèd,” “rook-­racked,” “dapple-­eared” occur in “Duns Scotus’s Oxford,” and, my favorite, “Cloud-­puffball,” begins “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection,” The Complete Poems (London: Harper Collins, 1996), 64, 37, 72. 27 Corral, “Monologue of a Vulture’s Shadow,” Slow Lightning, 74, line 27. 28 Carl Phillips, “X,” In the Blood, 3 – 4, lines 22 – 33. 196  Notes to Chapter Four

29 See Sedgwick’s discussion of enjambment alongside spanking, constraint, anal training, and (female as male homosexual) anal eroticism in “A Poem Is Being Beaten,” Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). I take this up in an essay on “Queer Poetics” for The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies, ed. Siobhan Somerville (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2020). 30 Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 31 Corral, “Monologue of a Vulture’s Shadow,” Slow Lightning, 73 – 74, lines 25 – 26. 32 Cuadros, “Sight,” 96. 33 I am mixing together imagery from Juan Gabriel’s song “Ya lo sé que tú te vas” [I Already Know You’re Leaving] and the opening of another of Corral’s poems named for Gabriel’s song, “Se me olvidó otra vez” [I’ve Forgotten Once Again], 20. 34 José Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 154. 35 Quiroga, “Tropics,” 155. 36 Corral, “Velvet Mesquite,” 66, lines 7 – 13. 37 Corral, “Velvet Mesquite,” 66, line 25. 38 Corral, “Border Triptych,” 14, lines 13 – 14. 39 Corral, “Border Triptych,” 14, lines 10 – 11. 40 Corral, “Want,” 17, line 17. 41 Corral, “Immigration and Naturalization Service Report #46,” 16. 42 Corral, “Se me olvidó otra vez,” 20. 43 Hayden, “Runagate Runagate,” line 12, accessed September 5, 2017, https://www .poetryfoundation.org/poems/52947/runagate-­runagate. 44 Corral, “To the Angelbeast,” Slow Lightning, 55, line 1. 45 Corral, Interview, Poetry 199, no. 3 (2011): 262. 46 Hayden, “Bone-­Flower Elegy,” Collected Poems, 185, lines 7 – 10. 47 Hayden, “Bone-­Flower Elegy,” 185, lines 15 – 17. 48 Hayden, “Bone-­Flower Elegy,” 185, lines 23 – 26. 49 Corral interview, Poetry, 262 – 63. 50 Hayden, “An Inference of Mexico,” part 1, “Day of the Dead (Tehuantepec),” in Collected Poems, 17, lines 1 – 2. 51 Hayden, “An Inference of Mexico,” 17, line 8. 52 Hayden, “An Inference of Mexico,” 17, lines 18 – 22. 53 Hayden, “An Inference of Mexico,” 17, line 22. 54 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 38. 55 Corral interview, Poetry, 262. 56 Corral, “To the Angelbeast,” Slow Lightning, 55, line 8. 57 Corral, “My Hands Are My Heart: Two-­Part Cibachrome Print: Gabriel Orozco: 1991,” in Slow Lightning, 57, line 30. 58 Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 290. 59 Corral, “Immigration and Naturalization Report #46,” in Slow Lightning, 66, lines 11 – 12. Notes to Chapter Four  197

60 Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries, 290. 61 For clarity, I am counting the title of the poem, which enjambs itself into two lines, as part of the poem. My verse count begins with the title as verses 1 and 2. The line where the boy invokes his father as an illegal is line 13. 62 Corral, “In Colorado . . . ,” 9 – 10, line 14. 63 There is another valence imaginable in what “Illegal-­American” does in Corral’s poem uttered from the (grown) child of a migrant’s perspective: it exposes what belies the claim of being flatly “American.” Believers in US American sovereignty in Arizona are structurally closer to something “illegal” than people of Mexican descent in the region, and are constitutively unethical subjects in practice. 64 Corral, “In Colorado . . . ,” 9 – 10, line 9. 65 Fred Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” African Identities 11, no. 2 (2013): 237 – 45. 66 Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” 240. 67 Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” 240. 68 Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” 240. 69 Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries, 290. 70 Sarah Jane Cervenak, Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 10. 71 Cervenak phrases a kindred notion in Wandering in her readings of Ursa’s bus ride in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora (1975), published a few years after Rivera’s novella: “fleeting drifts of philosophical possibility hover in the opaque terrain next to the visible word” (2). 72 Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries, 299. 73 Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries, 285. 74 Corral, “Border Triptych,” part 2, 13, lines 10 – 14. 75 Hayden, “Runagate Runagate,” line 33. 76 Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries, 293. 77 I am drawing on Hayden’s poem “Frederick Douglass” in my thinking and diction. Robert Hayden, “Frederick Douglass,” Poetry Foundation, accessed May 14, 2019, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46460/frederick-­douglass. 78 See also Anne Eller, “Rumors of Slavery: Defending Emancipation in a Hostile Caribbean,” American Historical Review 122, no. 3 (June 2017): 653 – 79. Her essay expands the map, and thickens the archive, of what I am imagining here in the US southwest, across the US south, and into the Caribbean, with focus on the threats of Spanish annexation of the Dominican Republic as attendant to “rumors of slavery” which, her thorough narration shows, “traveled just as news about rebellion did,” but as structural threat to nonwhites, and emancipation (658). The performance of antifugitivity in the US southwest has been important to fending off rumors of affiliation with nonwhites. 79 hb-­2281, quoted in Schmidt Camacho, “Hailing the Twelve Million,” 2. 80 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 83, quoted in Jared Sexton, “People of Colorblindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text 28, no. 2 (June 2010): 31 – 56. 198  Notes to Chapter Four

81 Sexton, “People of Colorblindness,” 36. 82 Ken Gonzales-­Day, Lynching in the West: 1850–1935 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 83 Schmidt Camacho, “Hailing the Twelve Million,” 2. 84 Schmidt Camacho, “Hailing the Twelve Million,” 3 – 5. 85 Lisa Marie Cacho, “The Presumption of White Innocence,” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (December 2014): 1085 – 90. 86 Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect,” 68. 87 Brady, “Razing Arizona,” Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies, 13. 88 Brady, “Razing Arizona,” Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies, 13 – 48. 89 Josefina Saldaña-­Portillo, “ ‘Wavering at the Horizon of Social Being’: The Treaty of Guadalupe-­Hidalgo and the Legacy of its Racial Character in Americo Paredes’ George Washington Gomez,” Radical History Review 89 (Spring 2004): 147. 90 Saldaña-­Portillo, “Wavering,” 146. 91 Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 215. 92 Menchaca, Recovering, 225. 93 Saldaña-­Portillo, “Wavering,” 148. 94 Saldaña-­Portillo draws from Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 95 Saldaña-­Portillo, “Wavering,” 158 – 59. 96 Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Social Justice 30, no. 2 (2003): 18 – 27. 97 I am mindful of a broader black studies conversation about analogy in this chapter. I have invoked Frank B. Wilderson III’s arguments that are concerned with reckless analogue made to the specific ontological negation of black people and black life. In Moten’s essay “The Subprime and the Beautiful” (2013), he cites a conversation between Saidiya Hartman and Wilderson, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13 (2003): 183 – 201. Moten draws from the Hartman-­Wilderson interview, citing Wilderson here: “obviously I’m not saying that in this space of negation, which is blackness, there is no life. We have tremendous life. But this life is not analogous to those touchstones of cohesion that hold civil society together” (Hartman and Wilderson, 187). Moten comes into the invocation of tremendous black life thus: “What remains is some exploration of the nature of this antianalog, which is more accurately characterized as an ante-­analog, an anticipatory project of celebration that pessimism must always disavow . . . a social and historical paraontology theorized in performance . . .” (240, my emphasis). I am interested in the ante, the before, that Moten conjures here and elsewhere, and the para, the beside, as disruptions of firstness, primacy, and wholeness claimed by imperial colonialism in the western hemisphere, as I discuss in the preface, introduction, and chapter 3. 98 Corral, “Variation,” 40, line 135. 99 Corral, “Variation,” 35, lines 35 – 47. 100 Corral, “Variation,” 34, lines 19 – 26. 101 Hayden, “Runagate Runagate,” lines 1 – 12. Notes to Chapter Four  199

102 Hayden, “Runagate Runagate,” line 66. 103 Corral cites Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved in the title to his poem about Josefa Segovia, “All the Trees of the Fields Shall Clap Their Hands,” Slow Lightning, 51. 104 Hayden, “Runagate Runagate,” line 13. 105 Hayden, “Runagate Runagate,” line 32. 106 Corral, “Variation,” 36, lines 62 – 63. 107 Hayden, “Runagate Runagate,” line 21. 108 Corral, “Variation,” 39, lines 128 – 30. 109 Corral, “Variation,” 39, lines 112 – 27. 110 Corral, “Variation,” 36, lines 58 – 68. 111 Corral, “Variation,” 41, lines 154 – 61. 112 Corral, “Variation,” 39, line 111. 113 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext[e], 2012), 22. 114 Corral, “Variation,” 39, line 118. 115 Fred Moten, The Feel Trio (Tucson, AZ: Letter Machine Press, 2014), 51. 116 Corral, “Variation,” 35, lines 30 – 32. 117 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 395. 118 Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” 242. 119 I am channeling Brent Hayes Edwards’s essay, “Notes on Poetics Regarding Mackey’s ‘Song,’ ” Callaloo 23, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 571 – 91. 120 Corral, “Cayucos,” Slow Lightning, 29. 121 Corral, “Cayucos,” 29, lines 10 – 11. 122 Corral, “Caballero,” Slow Lightning, 45 – 47, lines 1 – 34. 123 After giving several talks on parts of this chapter, and feeling myself perform this bibliography with and without the sign of “the illegal,” I have chosen to situate the strain and re-­signification that Corral’s synesthetic poetics effects on it. This all may sound obscene. But I find something disturbing for standard American English in how “illegal” only makes sense to the settler civic and liberal integrationist property imaginations. 124 Hayden, “Runagate Runagate,” lines 11 – 12.

Coda, in Three

1 2 3 4 5 6

Epigraph: Eduardo Corral, “Self-­Portrait with Tumbling and Lasso,” in Slow Lightning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 22, lines 36 – 40. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, with Jan Susler, Oneiromancer (2017), 8:24 – 9:00. Oneiromancer, 11:32 – 12:06, my translation. The “Other” speaking in the film is voiced by the Puerto Rican artist Pablo Guardiola. “Enrique ‘Hank’ Lopez; Attorney, Activist,” Los Angeles Times, October 25, 1985, http://articles.latimes.com/1985-­10-­25/local/me-­14459_1_lopez. Hank López, Afro-­6 (New York: Dell, 1969), 230. López, Afro-­6, 131. López, Afro-­6, 134.

200  Notes to Chapter Four

7 See Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. Anna Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan, Heather Swanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 8 Corral, “Self-­Portrait,” 22, lines 36 – 37. 9 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1963), 409.

Notes to Coda  201

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Sound Recordings

Bad Bunny. “Soy Peor.” Hear This Music. b01n7g97ht, 2016. mp3. Colón, Willie, with Héctor Lavoe. “Que Lío.” Crime Pays. Fania Records, slp 00406, 1972. lp. Fania All-­Stars. Fania All-­Stars Live at Yankee Stadium, vol. 1. Fania Records, b01hjrevcy, 2016. cd. Fania All-­Stars. Fania All-­Stars Live at Yankee Stadium, vol. 2. Fania Records, b01hjr4jk8, 2016. cd. Fuete Billete. “Bien Guillao.” Música de Capsulon. Fuete Billete, b00gyfq9mi, 2013. mp3. Fania All-­Stars. “Ponte Duro.” Fania All-­Stars Live in Africa. Fania Records, b007zu6gs8, 2012. cd. Lavoe, Héctor. “Mi Gente.” La Voz. Fania Records, slp 00461, 1975. lp. Lavoe, Héctor. “Periódico de Ayer.” De Ti Depende. Fania Records, jm 00492, 1976. lp. Bibliography  215

Lavoe, Héctor, with Willie Colón. “Triste y vacia.” Vigilante. Fania Records, slp610, 1983. lp. Gabriel, Juan. “Ya lo sé que tú te vas.” Cosas de Enamorados. Ariola, lan-­4 47, 1982. lp. Macha Colón y los Okapí. Tanquecito de Amor. Mark Underwood and Music Dorks, 2016. cd. Residente. “Somos Anormales.” Residente. Sony Music Latin, b06xhv x1z4, 2017. mp3. Rodríguez, Joel, and Bradley Davies. Ceiba/Faslane. Galería Agustina Ferreyra, 2014. lp. Rodríguez, Joel, and Ren Ellis Neyra. “La Buzo.” 2018. Soundcloud. mp3.

Films

Dash, Julie. Daughters of the Dust (1991, 35mm; 117). Deren, Maya. The Living Gods of Haiti (1983, 16mm; 52). Gast, Leon. Fania Live in Africa (1974, 16mm; 83). Gast, Leon. Our Latin Thing (Nuestra Cosa) (1972, 16mm; 102). Jafa, Arthur. Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016, hd; 7:30). Santiago Muñoz, Beatriz. Black Beach/Horse/Camp/The Dead/Forces (2016, 16mm; 8). Santiago Muñoz, Beatriz. Esto es un mensaje explosivo [This Is an Explosive Message] (2010, hd; 11:00). Santiago Muñoz, Beatriz. La cabeza mató a todos [The Head Killed Them All] (2014, hd; 7:30). Santiago Muñoz, Beatriz. La cueva negra [The Black Cave] (2012, hd; 20:00). Santiago Muñoz, Beatriz. Ojos para mis enemigos [Eyes for My Enemies] (2014, hd; 14:14). Santiago Muñoz, Beatriz. Oneiromancer (2017, hd; 26:00). Santiago Muñoz, Beatriz. Otros usos [Other Uses] (2014, 16mm and hd; 7:00). Santiago Muñoz, Beatriz. Post-­military cinema (2014, hd; 11:00). Santiago Muñoz, Beatriz. Prisoner’s Cinema (2014, hd; 30:00). Sissako, Abderrahmane. Bamako (2006, hd; 115).

216 Bibliography

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures and plates. abjection and shapes of pleasure, 8, 17, 65, 67, 174n18 ad libs, 20, 29, 41, 42, 47, 52. See also “Mi Gente” [My People] Admiral’s eye, 91, 94, 189nn2 – 4 African diasporic: archives, xii; pleasure, 119; poetics, 15 Afro-­Caribbean: actor Mapenzi Nonó, 101 –  3; characters in novel Afro-­6, 25, 167 – 68; musician Gisela Rosario, 14; poetics and the cry, 18 Afro-­Latinx conceptions of aesthetics and blackness, xii – xiv aids (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome): and synesthesia, 1, 133, 137; in “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” (poems, Corral), 136, 196n19 Algarín, Miguel, 23 “All the Things You Could Be By Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother,” 2, 108 Alvarado, Leticia, xii Anormales [Abnormals], 23, 27, 28, 39, 54; See also Lavoe, Héctor anti-­Cartesian magic, 101. See also La cabeza mató a todos [The Head Killed Them All] (film, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz). See also portals

anticolonial sensoria, xvi, 12, 13, 22, 34, 37, 54 – 57, 62, 75, 80, 95, 131, 132, 152 Antilles, xv, 111, 116 anti-­subjectivity, 56, 58, 59, 61, 65, 73, 74, 76, 89 Aparicio, Frances, 30 Arbona, Javier, 95, 106, 112, 190n15 Arizona sb-­1070 (Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act), 150, 151; and Fugitive Slave Acts, 151; and hb-­2281 and banning of ethnic studies, 152 ataques, 3; as anticolonial strategy, 12; in bad conscience, 89; de nervios, 10. See also “Puerto Rican syndrome” audition, 14, 23, 45, 84, 89; as collective act, 18, 20, 21; as unruly and potentially insurgent mode of listening, 24, 27, 29, 31, 37; as rehearsal, 30 auscultation, 13, 16; of archives of marronage and of the plantation, 17 Bad Bunny, 27, 179n “Ballad of Nat Turner, The” 131, 162 Barreto, Ray, 37, 50, 51 Belcourt, Billy-­Ray: and indigenous “nonsovereignty,” 61

Beltrán Torres, Marie Haydée, 64, 78; and incarceration and sensory deprivation, 82, 86, 87; and nonparticipation in “illegal trial,” 56, 84; as part of explosive ensemble of faln, 81; trial for allegedly bombing Mobil Oil Building, 76, 78, 83 – 85, 88. See also the faln beside(ness), xi, xii, xvi, 16, 32, 101, 106, 135, 139; in Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s camera positions, 98, 126, 164, 166; an ecology of, 21; and Glissant’s “relation,” xv; a poetics of, 2; and slowness, 95 “Black, White, and in Color, or, Learning How to Paint: Toward an Intramural Protocol of Reading,” 194n1 Black and Blur, 33 blackness: and incoherence, xiv, 66, 156; and indigeneity, 94, 132; in Hayden’s and Corral’s poetry, 130, 156, 157, 159, 160; and marronage, 147, 162; and ontology, xiii, xiv, 21; and property, 147, 152, 153; and sound, 20. See also maroon, refuge bomba, 22, 178n66; as Caribbean musical form, 23, 28, 33, 43, 52; as bombs on US claims of sovereignty, 5, 23, 25, 55, 56, 58, 61, 65, 67, 70, 75, 76, 81, 89, 122, 123, 124, 163, 166 – 69. See also Johnson, Sara, the faln bombings by US Navy of Vieques (Puerto Rico), 96, 101, 106, 112, 115, 116, 118, 121 Brady, Mary Pat: on Arizona as mistake, 154 – 55; on the senses, xiv brownness, xii – xv, 2, 110; and questions of its mestizaje and ethical readings of black studies, 173n7, 192n51 butching up as work, 49 – 50 Butler, Judith: on white defilement and the bent posture in Western philosophy, 59, 72 – 74, 85 captivity, 57 – 59, 63 – 65, 86, 88, 111, 151, 158 Caribbean, xii, xv, 3, 5, 94, 98, 99, 104, 109; cinema, 118, 126; poetics, 14; and Puerto Rico, 21, 29, 43, 52, 56 – 59, 63, 95; and Relation, 96, 111, 112 Caribbean Americas, xi, 11, 21, 37, 92, 158 Caribbean Discourse, 91, 95 Ceiba/Faslane (album), 113, 114, 118 Cervenak, Sarah, 112, 198n71 close-­reading and listening, 8; in method of 218 Index

multisensorial poetic listening, 13, 17, 32, 38. See also multisensorial poetic listening Colón, Willie, 27, 53 Corral, Eduardo, 24, 129 cruise ships, 5, 121 Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 49 – 50 cry, 6, 16, 21, 161; to anormales, 39, 40, 42, 45, 50, 51, 53; as bomba, 22; of Caribbean poetry, 18; of marronage, 19, 20; as paradigm of book, 23; as political sound (el grito de), 18; of the plantation, 18; the problem of the, 10, 20; as unruly (le cri), 18 Cuadros, Gil: on synesthesia and aids, 1, 133, 138 – 39 Dash, Julie: on “camouflage” in Daughters of the Dust, 190n15 defiance, 55, 56, 58, 59, 62, 72, 73, 74, 85, 89; in Culebra and Vieques (Puerto Rico), 92, 96; and the faln, 63; as multisensorial 62, 63; and Puerto Rican women radicals, 55, 58, 81, 187n53; as urgent decomposition of ties, 64 Derrida, Jacques, 20; and the “problem of the cry” in Of Grammatology, 178n61 Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, 37 Doyle, Jennifer, 132, 175n27 ecstatic mourning, xvii, 132, 135, 136, 142 Eller, Anne: on rumors of slavery in post-­ emancipation Caribbean, 198n78 Ellison, Ralph, 31, 61, 62 enjambment, 138 – 39, 141, 161, 196n23 Enlightenment, 16, 55, 89, 94, 101, 131, 146 ezln (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), 155 – 56 faln, the (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña), 55, 75, 77, 165, 166; and bombings of US sovereignty, 22, 65, 77, 78, 81, 89; and disparate sentencings of members in US prisons, 80 – 83, 164, 187n54; and nationalist ideology, 63; and Oneiromancer (film, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz), 163 – 66; and torture by US state, 86, 87, 109; and Safehouse (film, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz),

166 – 67. See also Beltrán Torres, Marie Haydée, seditious conspiracy, Susler, Jan Fania All-­Stars, 27, 29, 32, 41, 43; at Roberto Clemente Stadium, 36, 37; at Yankee Stadium, 34, 35, 37; at Zaire ’74, 49 – 51 Fania in Africa (film, Leon Gast and Albert Maysles), 49 – 51 Fania Record Label and exploitation, 31 – 35, 52 Fanon, Frantz: and anticolonial war, 11; and the racist epidermal schema, xvi, 107. See also Wynter, Sylvia: “The Sociogenic Principle” “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and Other std s),” 110, 192n51 “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” 2, 173n7 Feel Trio, The, 160 Ferreira da Silva, Denise, xi, xv Figueroa, Yomaira, xiii Fiol-­Matta, Licia, 32 “Frederick Douglass,” 130 Free Associated State, 16, 58, 60. See also Puerto Rico, unincorporated territory Fugitive Slave Acts, 150, 151, 154, 159 Gabriel, Juan, 140, 141 Gadsden Purchase (1853 – 54) (La venta de Mesilla): and Arizona as “error,” 154, 155 Gherovici, Patricia, 11 – 14, 109. See also “Puerto Rican syndrome,” ataques Glissant, Édouard, xv, 106, 147; and maroon cri, 21, 22. See also individual works Goldsmith, Kenneth: and white US poetic obsessions with black death, 195n16 Gómez-­Barris, Macarena: and “submerged perspectives,” 114 Guzmán, Joshua Javier: on “Brown,” xii, xiii; on Whiteness and psychoanalysis, xiv Haiti, xii, 22, 43, 81, 91, 126, 127. See also Marché Salomon (film, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Hartman, Saidiya: on African women’s captivity and “the afterlife of slavery,” 57, 63; on the application of slave law, 152 – 53 Hayden, Robert: and desire, 142, 143. See individual poems

Homo modernus, xvii Homo oeconomicus, 43 Homo sapiens, 96, 101 hurricane, xv, 3, 4, 5, 15, 18, 60, 63, 92, 102, 103, 115 hypersensitive reading, 129, 132, 138, 139 hysteric, xvii; and anticaptivity 64; and eloquence, 176n32; getting off on expressive refusal to say, 85; and “hysteric’s arsenal” (Viego), 107, 112; and Louise Bourgeois’s Arch of Hysteria, 176n31; and Man, 175n24; as Puerto Rico 88, 109; in Puerto Rico 11, 13; and Spanglish as “hysteric’s mother tongue” (Viego), 21, 22; and Xandra Ibarra’s Nude Laughing, 6, 10, 16. See also “Puerto Rican syndrome” Ibarra, Xandra: at Quiebre Performance Festival, 3, 6; Nude Laughing, xvi, 6 – 10, 13, 17, plates 2 – 4 incoherence of blackness, xiv, 66, 156; of Latinidad, xiv, 37, 42, 66 individuation, xi, 59, 82, 152, 155, 165 “Inference of Mexico, An” 143 In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, 20, 70 intra-­Caribbean, 22, 43, 60 “island of enchantment,” 193n56 Jafa, Arthur: on “black visual intonation,” 118, 119 Jaji, Tsitsi: on synesthesia as “inter-­sensory detour,” 1 James, C. L. R.: on Puerto Rico and the Caribbean Sea, 169 Johnson, Sara, 178n66, 179n69 Jones Act (1920), 5 Judy, Ronald, xv La cabeza mató a todos [The Head Killed Them All] (film, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz), 101 – 4, plate 10 Latinx studies: and Afro-­Latinx critique and questions of ethics, xiv – xv; and this book’s interpolation of itself into and out of, 21; and hysteria (Viego), 14, 107; and identitarian excess, 46; and Latinx position as riotous, 42; and poetics, 23, 32; and Spanglish (Viego), 13, 22 Index  219

Lavoe, Héctor: and the Fania All-­Stars, 27, 28; and los anormales [the abnormals], 39, 50, 51; and lyrics of “Mi Gente,” 39 – 42, 53, 54; as “el poeta del barrio,” 44; and Ponce (Puerto Rico), 43; and Willie Colón, 28. See also Anormales [Abnormals] listening: and auscultation, 13, 14, 17; in Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s film practice, 118, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127; “in detail” (Vazquez), 34; as mode of close-­reading, xii, 13, 17, 133; as an orientation, 31, 50; as repetitive and active, 30, 32; as sensorial re-­attunement to place and knowledge, 8, 84, 89, 97, 106, 112, 114; vs. hearing, 177n50. See also multisensorial poetic listening Listening in Detail (Alexandra Vazquez), 34 Listening to Images (Tina Campt), 1 Lebrón, Lolita, 187n53 Livingston, Ira: and “joyful apocalypse,” 169 López, Enrique “Hank”: and Afro-­6, 167, 168 lyric poetry, 129, 133, 144, 161 Macha Colón y los Okapí, 3, 14, 16, 17, plates 5 – 6. See also Quiebre Performance Festival “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” 57, 75, 87 “Manic Depression: A Poetics of Hesitant Sociology,” 89 Marché Salomon [Salomon Market] (film, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz), 125 – 27, plate 15 maroon: cry (Glissant), 18, 19, 20, 22; gardens, 4; fugitive in “Runagate Runagate” (Hayden), 130; and Marronage, xiii, 116; and musical forms, 33; and Puerto Rico, 94; and refuge, 130, 131, 135, 136; and Veracruz (Mexico), xv, 156, 194n2 Marrero, Nicky, 50 Menchaca, Martha, 155 “Mi Gente” [My People] (song), 39 – 42, 53, 54 Monroe Doctrine, xv, 93, 130 Moten, Fred: on the “ante-­analog” and “antianalog,” 199n97; on the “ecstatic” and “terrible” in black poetics, 129, 130; on the “ensemble of the senses,” 34; on “kinetic refuge,” 147; on the lawlessness of the law, 80; on para-­ ontology, xii; on poetry as regurgitation and generative upheaval, 89; on the “problem of feeling” and Western philosophy’s colorline, 220 Index

20; “your ass is in what you sing,” 70. See also individual works multisensorial poetic listening, xv; and ethics, 21; and reorientation to different audio-­ visual shapes of insurrection, 34; 188n55. See also listening Muñoz, José, on “brown feeling,” xiv, xv; on disidentificatory strategies, 37; on “displaceable attentiveness” in Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 2. See also individual works nafta (North American Free Trade Agreement) (1994), 131, 145, 147 Negrón, Marisol: and commodification of salsa musicians, 35 “Night, Death, Mississippi,” 1 Oneiromancer (film, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz), 163 – 66, plate 16 Operation Gatekeeper (1994), 131 Organic Act (1850): and whitening of Afro-­ mestizos for US citizenship, 155 Otros usos [Other Uses] (film, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz), 96 – 100, plates 7 – 9. See also Vieques Sound Pacheco, Johnny, 50, 51 performance, 13, 16, 17; and the Fania All-­Stars, 29, 30, 41, 42 Phillips, Carl as Editor of Yale Younger Poets Series, 195n17; “X” (poem) 195n23, 195n28 Pietri, Pedro, 29, 78; “Puerto Rican Obituary,” 46 – 48; The Masses Are Asses, 64 – 74 Poetic Intention, 19, 20 poetics, 2, 13, 18, 20, 130; of anticolonial place, 118, 167; of besideness, xv; and division, xii, 11, 129; of “kinetic refuge” (Moten) and migratory refuge, 147; migratory, 134; and sensorial errance, 112 Poetics of Relation, 1, 17, 18, 96 portals, 8, 11, 97, 100, 104, 109, 119, 126. See also senses, anti-­Cartesian magic Post-­military Cinema (film, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz), 113, 116 – 18, plate 13 “prisoner’s cinema” (condition), 121 Prisoner’s Cinema (film), 109, 110, 120 – 22, plate 11. See also sensory deprivation

property and white vigilantism in the transborder corridor, 131 – 32, 147, 152, 153. See also Arizona sb-­1070 proprioception, 177n56 psychoanalysis and race, xiv, 11, 108, 109. See also Fanon, Gherovici, Guzmán, Spillers, Viego “Puerto Rican syndrome,” 4, 11, 12, 108, 109, 110, 115 Puerto Rican Trench, 170 Puerto Rico, as “Achilles heel of US,” 79; and decomposition of ties with US, 63; and defiance, 55, 56, 62, 64, 85, 89, 92, 95; and deposition of the US, 21, 69, 61, 78; as hysteric, 88, 109; as part of Caribbean, 95; as unsovereign, 61, 87 Quiebre Performance Festival (Puerto Rico), 3, 4, 6, 173n9, plate 1 Quiroga, José: on the Fania All-­Stars, 36; on the histrionics of heartbreak in bolero, 139; on the thickness of salsa, 33; on control in salsa, 38 radical women, 56, 78, 87, 88. See also insurgency Ramírez D’Oleo, Dixa: regarding Afro-­Latinx aesthetics beyond representation, xvi; on “el monte” [“the hills”], 4; and the Dominican Americas, 178n64 Ramos, Iván: on Xandra Ibarra’s “gustatory aesthetics,” 175n22 rational Man, 13, 43, 54; as perceptually stuck, 8 refuges, xvii, 131; affective and imaginative, 17; and blackness, 159; given in defiance of laws and customs against nonwhite movements, 152; as “kinetic” (Moten), 147, 160; as migratory, 25, 136, 147, 149; as maroon, 130, 142, 145; on the pages of Slow Lightning, 135, 141; in poetic form, 161 representation: Afro-­Latinx and nonblack Latinx approaches thereto, xii – xiv; and falsely coherent Latinidad, 23; Ibarra retching against representation in Nude Laughing, 10; refused by Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres on trial, 83 – 85; and visuality’s traps, 40, 45, 46, 48, 100, 103, 126, 165 Río Piedras (Puerto Rico), 3, 5, 14, 105. See also

“Puerto Rican syndrome,” Quiebre Performance Festival Rivera-­Rideau, Petra: on reggaetón and salsa, 179n Robinson, Cedric: and marronage in the Americas, 194n2; on primitive accumulation, xii Rodríguez, Joel “Jojo,” 52; and Ceiba (album) and sonic ataques on US imperialism and sonic exorcisms of the Vieques Sound, 113 – 16 Rodríguez, Juana María: on control and dancing to salsa, 38; on the breakdown of the imperial penetrator in the Puerto Rican story and sexual sovereignty, 60 Roena, Roberto, 49, 50 Roosevelt Roads Naval Base (Ceiba, Puerto Rico), 92, 94, 97, 113 “Runagate Runagate,” 145, 149, 157, 158 Safehouse (film, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz), 166, 167, 169 Saldaña-­Portillo, María Josefina: on the era of development, 94; on the Treaty of Guadalupe-­Hidalgo’s distortions of blackness and indigeneity, 155; on no analogy between colonized mestizos/Chicanos and nonblack-­ indigenous and Afro-­indigenous peoples, 156 Salsa (film, Leon Gast) and surge of Fania All-­ Stars’ audience at Yankee Stadium in 1973, 35, 36, 37 salsa (musical form), 29, 30, 32, 33, 38 ¡Salsa, sabor y control! (Angel Quintero Rivera), 30, 31 Santamaría, Ramón “Mongo,” 35, 37 Santiago Muñoz, Beatriz, on Caribbean “chimerical ecology,” 94, 95, 107 Schmidt, Camacho, Alicia, 150, 154 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky: on drag as an “ecology of field,” 178n65; and enjambment, 139 seditious conspiracy, 62, 76, 86; and Puerto Rico, 79, 80, 89. See also the faln senses: as collective, 62; colonial order of, 91, 109, 132; in critique of the hyper-­optical, 34; as multiple and uncontrollable, 75; plantation order of, 16; and smell, 139 sensorial errancy, 24, 101, 104, 106, 107, 109, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 122 Index  221

sensorial solidarities, xvii, 16, 21, 22, 24, 25, 37, 38, 49, 86, 131, 132 – 33, 154, 161 sensory deprivation, xvi, 24, 82, 100, 101. See also Prisoner’s Cinema sensory overload, xvi, 24, 100 Sexton, Jared, 152 Slow Lightning, 134, 135, 139; and elegy, 156; and magic word-­sounds, 140; and migratory poetics, 146; refusing individuation, 152; unbinding freedom from US, 149 solidarity, 37, 151, 152; and losses, 156; slow down with, xv; as unruly, 28. See also sensorial solidarities Sonoran Desert, xvii, 130, 149, 153, 157 Spillers, Hortense: on black female insurgency, 57; on the Caribbean, xv; and the grounds of critique, 171 – 72n4; on the “perceptual cramp” of seeking recognition from Man, 8. See also individual works “Subprime and the Beautiful, The,” 146, 147 Susler, Jan: and the faln, 80, 164, 165; on US torture of radical women, 65, 87. See also Oneiromancer synesthesia, 1, 31 Torres v. United States, 82, 83. See also Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres, the faln torrid zone, 57, 91 tourist invasions, 5, 59, 60, 61, 94 transborder corridor, 132, 147, 149 Treaty of Guadalupe-­Hidalgo (1848), 154, 155 unincorporated territory, xi, 59. See also Puerto Rico, Free Associated State unruliness: of audience who “rioted” at Yankee Stadium and ended the Fania All-­Stars’s 1973 concert, 34 – 38; of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s

222 Index

cinema, 98; of the elements, 92; of the hysteric, 107; of the imagination, 66; of Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres, 84; and salsa, 30, 31; of Vieques (Puerto Rico), 94 unsovereignty, xvii, 59, 61, 87, 166 US, as enemy of the Caribbean, 21, 56, 59, 63, 110; as the Enlightenment’s idiot-­offspring, 146; as invasive sovereign, 99, 104, 122, 151 Vargas, Deborah, 178n65 Viego, Antonio, xiv, 11, 13, 21, 107 Vieques (Puerto Rico), 92, 94, 99; as part of the Caribbean, 95; and US Navy invasion and “weapons testing,” 93, 106, 112, 113 – 15; and uprising against US Naval occupation, 92 Vieques Sound, 96, 97, 99, 113; See also Otros usos [Other Uses] (film, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) vigilantism and the white supremacist US, 131, 146, 147, 153, 154, 195n7 Walcott, Derek, 91 Warren, Calvin, xii Weheliye, Alexander: on “visual subjection” and “sonic subjectivation,” 61, 62 white womanhood: as violence, 8, 10; and “patriarchialized female gender” (Spillers), 71, 87 Wilderson, Frank B., III: on no analogy to black being, 156, 199n97. See also incoherence Wynter, Sylvia: and “The Sociogenic Principle,” xvi, 107; on Man, 101 Young Lords, 78 Zaire ’74 (music festival), 38, 49

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