1 essay
I walk in historiographies of my mother as embodied theory of complex refusal which may or may not generate a syntax of possibility for expansive underfuturities wherein my mother shall walk walk walk against the state
LEONORA M. PEREZ
1. That my mother walks walks walks in this state of wake is revelation itself.
2. That revelation itself: geographies in tension. Those geographies in tension: future-memories of narrations. Those narrations: transitions. Those transitions: a parking lot. That parking lot: a destruction of language. That destruction: an accumulation of content. That content: this slow construction of self. This self: a labor. This labor: a nurse. This nurse: Filipina. This slow construction of body in spatial and temporal traffic.
3. Traffic remains metaphor of interior. I walk in the history of my mother. I walk against grain of syllabus. I walk against promise of bibliography. I walk against inclusion. I walk against ruse of relevance. I walk against remaining traffic. And yes, yes, I walk against such metaphor.
4. And there goes my walking mother, a walking volta, in a post-shift trance, in white polyester nursing uniform, in black rubber shoes, in handcuffs covered by black sweater, my walking mother held by a blur of white men, held in violation, held in throat of world progress. I walk for the history of my mother.
5. Here are fragments thrown together—my mother's body is war, my mother's body is threat, my mother's body is collateral. And I, another genre of collateral.
6. Something fishy happening, my mother says. The FBI is here to arrest the suspected serial killer walking walking walking—the delicate crunch of gravel underneath her black shoes, cameras shuttering, slow traffic passing, a crowd of onlookers speculating, the sound of vein against skin, the sound of a history beginning.
7. History becomes black shoes and a white polyester nursing uniform within the context of racial capitalism. History becomes a black sweater draped over handcuffed hands at the mercy of imperialism. History becomes flowers checked for explosives in my mother's delivery room.
8. From which refusal emerges such History?
9. I refuse to follow you into knowing, and I leave you walking, mother, walking walking walking in the irrational.
10. Some stay working here for a sense of home, in fluidities of domination, in serial resistance, in hands undoing settler capitalism, a matter of realism draped over our very knowing. Amidst reporters everywhere, I walk against the ruse of innocence.
11. O, how serial is this crime, this white work in motion.
12. I walk at the history of my mother. And I believe in the disruptive role of her imagination.
13. The violence of news. Do not follow my mother into grave temporalities of racialization. Walk in gravel, walk against contribution, hold my hand as we walk through the history of my mother in the VHS cassette of Michigan, then Illinois, then Michigan again. Of this speculative history, I am suspect.
14. What remains muted in frame are the horrors of working white men just doing their jobs. Come with us, they say. Or we will drag you, they say. The silhouette of my mother passes; she holds in what most will never see. Here is what children do when everything done here is done against presence.
15. While underneath this scene there are alternative outlines, countermemories, underfutures. Here in the replay the ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person. We pray for the ghost. We are prey to the ghost. The underfutures ghost whatever we thought we desired in the first place.
16. What is the material history of the Filipina walking body, walking war, walking collateral, walking ghost?
17. I am a simple figure investigating where history indicts love. Love as roar, love as the ideology of underfire, a site in which I want to die laughing. I do not mourn the white scene. I do not mourn the white discovery of white regret. I suspect my mother does not tell me of the heaviness, of her own imperceptibilities. I'm so over description.
18. I walk against the history of my mother. I walk against legibility.
19. I walk directly alongside my mother, between those white FBI agents, inside the VHS of white Evanston. I walk against visibility, against articulation, and my mother says to me go ahead and smile, go ahead and cross the street: we stay delicate in our walking, perhaps shaking slightly, perhaps we walk through the epistemological break between history and fiction, and perhaps we become fiction someday.
20. We narrate against legitimacy, alongside the brightly archived rewind of image and volume of here not quite here and not quite bright, but open and slow, and my mother, I swear I swear, walks walks walks. There is merely something about you, walking walking walking, in front of a crowded anywhere, an anywhere that needs a theory. And the screen fades to black. Against a whiteness of timelines, against timelines of whiteness. And so I walk against state. I walk within the history of my mother who walks within a history of discrepant settlements, migrations, and fugitivities. We walk relationally, dear relatives. We walk, see, how my mother and I, still walk walk walk, without words, without propertied syntax.
NOTES
This essay reassembles language describing the scene of Leonora M. Perez's arrest as found in Jason Magabo Perez, "Because Love Is a Roar: Sketching a Critical Race Poetics," Entropy Magazine, 2018, personal conversations/oral histories between the author and his mother, and the independent film Yonie Narrates (2009), written and directed by Jason Magabo Perez. This essay is after Chrytos, "I Walk in the History of My People," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color, 4th Edition, edited by Gloría Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 53. This essay samples, reconfigures, and draws its critical-poetic energy from the following lines, fragments, and sentences, and from the larger works within which they appear: "because your mother's body was war", "because love is a roar", and "because it is the destruction of language" from I Was Born With Two Tongues, "Letter to Our Unborn Children," Broken Speak (Asian Improv Records, 2002); "toward a countermemory, for the future" (22) and "The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life" (8) from Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); "The relevation iself may affect the narrator's future memory that happened before" (15), "That past has no content" (15), and "In other words, the epistemological break between history and fiction is always expressed concretely through the historically situated evaluation of specific narratives" (8) from Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); "Geographies in tension" (149), "seeing the world only through meatphors of interior or contained spaces" (6), and "Recognizing this relationship is important for making sense overall of the processes and fluidities of domination as well as the varied forms of resistance required to address the ongoing consequences of mutable colonialisms" (10) from Natchee Blu Barnd, Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism (Corvallis: OSU Press, 2017); "Here are the fragments put together by another me" (89), "A slow construction of my self as a body in a spatial and temporal world—such seems to be the schema" (91), "I wanted to kill myself laughing" (91), "here I am at home; I am made of the irrational; I wade in the irrational. Irrational up to my neck" (102), "hysterical throat of the world" (107) from Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Richard Philox (New York: Grove Press, 2008); "disruptive role of imagination" (77), "what is the material history of the Filipino dancing body?" (58), "descriptors of Filipino/a (racial) imperceptibility" (4), and "I interpret these historical spots of time as temporalities of Filipino/a racialization" (14) from Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire (New York: NYU Press, 2013).
Jason Magabo Perez (he/him) is the author of This is for the mostless (WordTech Editions, 2017) and I ask about what falls away (1913 Press, Forthcoming). Perez’s prose and poetry have also appeared or are forthcoming in various publications such as Witness, TAYO, Eleven Eleven, Entropy, The Feminist Wire, The Operating System, Faultline, Sonora Review, and Kalfou. Previous Artist-in-Residence at Center for Art and Thought (CA+T), Perez currently serves as Community Arts Fellow at Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studies, Associate Editor at Ethnic Studies Review, and is a core organizer of The Digital Sala. Perez is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University San Marcos.