Consent to Witness

I will be reading on Monday, August 25, at the Community Arts Workshop, Santa Barbara, in a benefit for the 805UndocuFund Emergency Assistance Fund (EAF). EAF offers direct financial relief to undocumented and mixed-status families residing in San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties impacted by immigration enforcement, and accepts direct donations on the link above. If you are local, the reading starts at 7pm.

The participating poets have each been asked to contribute an original poem. These last few days, I have been reading widely to learn more about the undocumented—from whom I am only a few papers away.

Here are a few books for those interested in learning more:

• Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal by Aviva Chomsky

• The Cost of Being Undocumented: One Woman’s Reckoning with America’s Inhumane Math by Alix Dick and Antero Garcia

• Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen by Jose Antonio Vargas

• Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora edited by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Janine Joseph and Esther Lin

I don’t know how any of the other participating poets relate to the question of immigration status, and this makes me a little nervous about participating in the reading. I understand this is a benefit, and, the philanthropic model can at times embed itself within eurocentric asymmetries of power. Whose voices are in the room matters. Who gets to speak matters. How it is that we bear witness (with-ness) matters.

How am I—who am I—to write this poem? I couldn’t write this poem without being aware of ongoing conditions of genocide, dispossession, dehumanization. I couldn’t write this poem as a game, as a response to a creative prompt pulled from a deck. I too am (unequally) entangled in the state’s technopolitics of surveillance, enforced exclusion, othering, belonging. I hoped (but cannot be sure) that the poem would not replicate colonial relations. I hoped it would refuse to be consumed by the white imagination. I hoped it would have a paraontological life.

To succeed, a poem must court failure. It must let the ghosts run it off. A new poem is such a suckling, I’ll likely not know who has made it through until the moment I can greet them at the reading.