The Inheritance of Haunting

Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780268105402
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie

Winner of the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, The Inheritance of Haunting, by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, is a collection of poems contending with historical memory and its losses and gains carried within the body, wrought through colonization and its generations of violence, war, and survival.

The driving forces behind Rhodes's work include a decolonizing ethos; a queer sensibility that extends beyond sexual and gender identities to include a politics of deviance; errantry; ramshackled bodies; and forms of loving and living that persist in their wild difference. Invoking individual and collective ghosts inherited across diverse geographies, this collection queers the space between past, present, and future. In these poems, haunting is a kind of memory weaving that can bestow a freedom from the attenuations of the so-called American dream, which, according to Rhodes, is a nightmare of assimilation, conquest, and genocide. How love unfolds is also a Big Bang emergence into life—a way to, again and again, cut the future open, open up the opening, undertake it, begin.

These poems are written for immigrants, queer and transgender people of color, women, Latin Americans, diasporic communities, and the many impacted by war.

¿Qué somos?, me preguntaste una semana o un año después,
¿hormigas, abejas, cifras equivocadas
en la gran sopa podrida del azar?
Somos seres humanos, hijo mío, casi pájaros,
héroes públicos y secretos.

———

What are we? you asked a week or year later,
ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the big rotten soup of chance?
We’re human beings, my son, almost birds,
public heroes and secrets.

—Roberto Bolaño, “Godzilla in México,”
trans. Laura Healy

PART II

Casi Pájaros/Almost Birds

dis-astre

these events, ourselves

asunder, exiled from our stars,

our guides, sightless night

shorn by our every

miniscule apocalypse, atoms

like planets breaking, misfortunes

tethering regret, the failure of inoculations,

the collapse of disbelief, shredded altitudes

fretting our sense of upward, out

the plundered remembrance

that home was a star that glittered

in shining sounds of fiddlers rustling,

that day was a star, & mother, & prayer,

& every god who fed us

the bursting forth of seedlings under rain,

& also tomorrow, stars, all,

luminescing constellation, out of reach

from beneath the sprouting grasses,

from under earth, from the never-breath lung

until midnight dogs

dirty their jaws, & like howling

feral midwives, endure the hours

heaving the gravel of torments in the

delivery of bones, the birthing of claims,

the gift of illumination

impossible in the stench of withered sockets

under the light of ancient suns

their yet

unannounced & holy extinguishing.

when the machete will sever the ballad
(memory-mourning for El Mozote)

There was one in particular the soldiers talked about that evening . . . a girl on La Cruz whom they had raped many times during the course of the afternoon, and through it all . . . this girl had sung hymns, strange evangelical songs, and she had kept right on singing, too, even after they had done what had to be done, and shot her in the chest. She had lain there on La Cruz with the blood flowing from her chest, and had kept on singing—a bit weaker than before, but still singing. And the soldiers, stupefied, had watched and pointed. Then they had grown tired of the game and shot her again, and she sang still, and their wonder began to turn to fear—until finally they had unsheathed their machetes and hacked through her neck, and at last the singing had stopped.

—Mark Danner, “The Truth of El Mozote,”
New Yorker, December 6, 1993

it is December &

there will be light

somewhere shining

from the god of ravens

& Jesus, maguey, youth,

there will be

light shining

out of the mouths

of moon silversides

defying their slippery gravity

to leap their testimony at the moon,

the others wrestle shrill with

their own endings,

barely she moves

but sings her prayer,

barely she moves

her back to the damp

soil of the hill

turn by turn

these soldiers

invade

scorched earth tarring their hearts,

inviting the vultures to breakfast:

Atlacatl is disgraced.

barely she moves,

but sings amidst the detritus

of broken glass bottles

a battalion rendered weary

guaro stinging her cuts

force of despoilment

rhythming her small body

a hard thunder in her ears,

she sings, she sings

melodies to the clouds above her,

beckoning the wrath of angels

genealogies of pain, traces

of wraiths & torment upon the slumber

of questioning guns,

she sings,

she sings.

barely she moves,

but she sings.

she sings in tongues

the names of grandmothers,

haunts the suspicion of soldiers,

beneath the bullet, the chorus trembling

they call her demon,

again, again,

beneath lead

they aim to assuage fear rising

in their veins, of demons & loss,

nugatory pull in the gut,

memories of their own sisters,

an aching for home, hung

out of reach,

like the children

in the field below,

swaying beneath the blood

of branches sapping

the taste of disbelief.

barely she moves,

but still she sings,

the incantation

that will confess the day

to the wind,

sympathy

of the stars,

still she sings,

until the last moment

when the machete

will sever the ballad,

until the last moment,

she sings,

she sings

until the last moment.

charred skulls of children sleep piled in the earth

in the corner of the sacristy,

housing beetles & the roots of dandelions:

a quiet wrenches itself from hiding.

fog

accumulation

of goats, pigeons, heaped

succumbed to rigor mortis

the gloom of final days,

day is quiet, eerily, fending off

irrevocability

the boughing of trees unescorted by

chirping, streets vending only the

strange light of midday sifted

through dust & the residue of wailing

this child, curled in her father’s arms

who now looks smaller than she has ever been,

who gasped for sky to tell him

“today, it is my sister’s turn to eat,”

before choking on the vacuum of answers

she sleeps the boundless sleep

...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Poems by Ada Limón
• I. EL OTRO LADO/THE OTHER SIDE
• II. CASI PÁJAROS/ALMOST BIRDS
• Notes