Skins of Columbus

by Edgar Garcia

Overview

Colonial violence is a sticky phenomenon, gumming up the associational matrices of our daily lives and dreamscapes. Edgar Garcia intervenes with a poetic experiment: Every night of the three months of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, Garcia read his corresponding journal entry before sleep. Asleep, his mind sutures displacements, migrations, and restorations into an assemblage of hemispheric becoming.

Edgar Garcia is part of an exciting new cohort of Greater American poets (those who cast a revealing light on the hemisphere from Alaska to the tip of Patagonia) who are working towards decoding & re-coding multi-metrical conceptions of historical space-time with the intent of reinvigorating political agencies. Skins of Columbus is a virtuosic exfoliation of nested chronicles that give voice to the heterogeneous temporalities that make for “the people.” This is a maximalist poetics. Garcia spares no formalistic strategy to explore the chasm between said people and their “story.” If the Greater American, Greater African, Greater European, Greater Oceanic and Greater Asian poetics stay on track and avoid the pitfalls of overt (or covert) ethno-nationalism, while critically flushing out their respective mythical terrains, we might just arrive at a genuinely new understanding of The Globe’s Inherent Potential. And what could be more pressing right now than that? —Rodrigo Toscano

Edgar Garcia comes through with a counter-chronicle of conquest. He shows us how skins are like masks the poet and storyteller puts on and takes off, most especially when engaged with epic histories and the myths therein, changing places, changing times, and of course, changing us. —Michael Taussig

Good morn or evening, friends. You should feel good right now because Edgar Garcia plays the Skins of Columbus inside out, inducing the kind of “speech-like movements of leg and hip” that can get you swallowed and put away, which ought to make you not feel so good. This book is ravishing and ravaging, and/or wants to be, which is troubling, though that is as it should be. Can we dream ourselves inside out of what consumes and abandons us? This question, which bears the world’s disaster, is our nightmare, though we are starving, even abandon having been tainted. Projection, ingestion, rejection and introjection merge in the mirror of constantly midnight, brutally Christian profligacies of diary, conquest, denial and refreshment. Meanwhile, over and over, we sing “Don’t Explain.” We sing it to ourselves, about ourselves. They shit us and they shit on us and we shit ourselves. In this intestine battlefield and looking glass, Garcia sings all that, poetry and criticism haven gotten back together after many broken promises, in the breaking of many more, as the desire for subversion and embrace to get back together, too. Evidently, that reconciliation exceeds human possibility. Criticism affirms this negative condition, as Garcia sings, singing so he can see if—violently, gorgeously, way more than humanly—we can sing our way out of inside out. He’s bone deep, and miles ahead, and just getting started. —Fred Moten

Edgar Garcia is a scholar of hemispheric literatures and cultures of the Americas, principally of the 20th century. His work has explored the fields of indigenous and Latino studies, American literature, poetry and poetics, and environmental criticism. Garcia co-edited American Literature in the World (Columbia UniversityPress, 2016), which examines the transnational contexts of a national literary tradition. He is also the author of Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2019). He is the recipient of a BA in English with honors from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees in English from Yale University. He is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781944380106
Publisher:	Fence Magazine, Incorporated
Publication date:	05/14/2019
Series:	Fence Modern Poets Series
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Edgar Garcia is a scholar of hemispheric literatures and cultures of the Americas, principally of the 20th century. His work has explored the fields of indigenous and Latino studies, American literature, poetry and poetics, and environmental criticism. Garcia co-edited American Literature in the World (Columbia UniversityPress, 2016), which examines the transnational contexts of a national literary tradition. He is the recipient of a BA in English with honors from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees in English from Yale University. He is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago.

Read an Excerpt

These pages you wrote to capture mental colony from its namesake, Cristóbal Colón. But what captivities does that sound, that thing, the name—Colón—hide? Drop its diacritic and you drift like plastic in a sea of erotogenic semiotics: how does the large intestine share a sign with the colon: punctuation preceding explanation, dramatizing the experience of figures and forms? What does a colon do, actually? Is rectum individual style? Is exposition of style colonoscopy? To explain: what follows is a book whose poems explore colonial myth. To explore the burrowing of our colonial myths in real-life experience—wet violence in the tough skin of emblems and instincts—the author spent four months reading the journal of Christopher Columbus before sleep. Later, he transformed his dreams into a poetic record of what his memory, in its half-sleep, had forgotten it remembered: the gash, shock, glamor, and spell of origins. It belonged to that history as intimately as that history belonged to the momentary constellations of a night sky. Its belonging, unclear and unassimilated, anacoluthic but self-instructive, is the shining of dark stars equipped with consciousness. To say simply that you could subvert Columbus and the world he left us only stages the inadequacy of the curse to do away with the accursed object. As usual, reality is contrary. The curse imprecates the curser, the interdict awakens the nightmare, iconoclasts are slaves of icons, and, truisms though these may be, you conjure yourself inside them constantly: to subvert is to crumble to the enterprise of memory overturned, to hurl body over the head of mental colony only to flip back upward, part to an assed whole. So the question, for you at least, is how to flip from realities different than those of the colonial myth—to stay true to the reality of myth, which bakes the crust of your thought with its hot white light, while hitching somehow to new suns and ideas. How do you look inside yourself for its terrible illumination while shedding new light on that light? Could you, with mirror or sword-face even for an instant, blind the gods and their higher powers? To be clear: you are not looking for wisdom, but for a world unfolding for life. In October 2015, soon after moving to Chicago, you came up with a strategy for this. You came to it while browsing the yearly Hyde Park Used Book Sale, which takes place on Columbus Day weekend. In the chaotic pile of 30,000 books separated into 50 sections in Dole, Del Monte, and Chiquita produce boxes—emanations of the United Fruit Company—you came across a hardcover edition of Bartolomé de las Casas’s sixteenth-century Journal of Christopher Columbus. Reading the entry for that day, the 10th, there amid the boxes and browsing shoppers, you saw the rain chop the waves, shake the whole history from inside out, and take you into the storm pulling his ship down the sea. In two days, he would see land. But, at that moment, he was in the darkest kind of sleep. So you decided to awaken with him, to see if you could see what your mind saw in what he saw and, maybe in doing so, to flash a mirror into the bleach-boiled eyes of the colonial sun. That night, and every night for the next three months during which he traveled the coasts, tricking history into his tasks, you read the journal before bed closely to have your sleeping mind think intently on its images, plots, symbols, motives, and feelings. You wished to see what, when left to its matrix of associations, your mind made of the colonial story. Notes throughout the night recorded your dreams. In the mornings, you made new notations to chart closer contacts between you two. You composed the text in the evenings, putting your dreams and the journal together into a new story of creation. What you made you now hold in your hands: the positions, spaces, and temporalities of history are tasks you gave yourself, entanglements warped in a structure that depends on you for its churn, unfolding, and thus instanced to modulate that which discloses itself nights and days. Here is a study about how language is captivated by and recaptures the negativity of the hemispheric experience surging from its southern sources, how its inconsistency and unevenness are stopgaps because in practice a body and its myth are not exclusive of one another, but reciprocal and dynamic, semiotic and aesthetic, signs and the instances in which they unravel themselves. Like a first being looking out from the gauzy green light of a newborn cosmos, you saw the gods then as so many cascading storms. Sunday/Thursday, October 11th Roughest sea so far tube-nosed seabirds on green reeds a cane a stick bobbing carved iron and a small board with marks like lizard hands like little lights at the end of a hall signaling pigs to squeal hopes of land through day we landed and saw the lizards upright like sideways Fs or Ys upside-down crimping their necks to look at us impossible words by force by fish chopping the water around us all My Christ, my surrendering fish I see what you signal: To take the dinosaurs by force Tuesday/Saturday, October 13th To a broken planet came men bellies and long-hair, carved like spears all wet all playing games They are a pleasure to watch so flat so slender so fast they split my world in two into a dead body hiding in my skin Wednesday/Sunday, October 14th The island sick fearful shouts to us coming from heaven for help to us Thursday/Monday, October 15th Anchor daylight free from shoals Hoisted sails, bracelets, legs, and arms Diamond-shaped crystals I touched to make them shudder & look away & I could take what I want bracelets on their arms and legs in their ears noses and around their necks plus some dry sliced leaves they prize Friday and Saturday/Tuesday and Wednesday, October 16th watching an airplane crash feels like Is like what I feel watching their canoes off the coast subtending Making wobbly half-circles inside me Bags of human shit hanging from my lungs I don’t know how to describe it The explosive fire across the water Have you ever seen a plane crash? I haven’t. But I fear what it feels like Seeing all those people dip down Saturday/Wednesday, October 17th Not all people are real; some races missing eyes, missing circles The real people of dreams w circles in their eyes from the walk through widening circles to fall asleep circles that widen from their pupils each of whose edges w many points each of which is the center of another widening w edges are so many centers w the others Like Emerson explained But it’s not a numbering not clean It’s a cloud thickening, thick with rain that eventually you go right through wet with eyes in the world of dreams It has rained every day, more or less, Since we have been in the Indies Sunday/Thursday, October 18th Weather cleared we sailed around stiff, impatient Monday/Friday, October 19th dawn orders midday sleeping so I did so the men told me from the island I named they could smell herbs, spices, dyes becoming like dogs with twitching noses and nothing to do Tuesday/Saturday, October 20th Nobody to talk to I met the king his strange body shallow water the outer rims of his eyes like rings which—slipped over my fingers—the water rippled I didn’t want it to do that Wednesday/Sunday, October 21st touched, lovely, green, fertile lagoons flocks of parrots right in the sun We killed some of them and kept the feathers with the aloe and quintal beads and kilograms of gold; the birds rattled new songs in the jars Thursday/Monday, October 22nd Head is so many Many of which move up and down a spiral staircase, the bottom level of which lives trauma In there people, some naked some painted, throw objects to an incinerator: Abuse events, violence events in there red white hot, heating the whole black machine orange Up the spiral staircase so many made objects a workshop bits of glass, pieced-together cups, figurines, earthenware Above that my business offices junk furniture and dusty items Friday/Tuesday, October 23rd I dream that I am in the 1980s riding around in the back of a van my uncle’s van, the van he bought from a cleaning company whose name is painted on the side, a cleaning company closed down cannot tell you if I should feel bad about it, their enterprise failed At the end of June 2010, shortly before taking your qualifying exams for graduate study, you travel to Guatemala City to inquire whether the particular difficulty of your life has any meaning in the company of extended family. Your cousin has invited you to visit him and his cat in their home in one of the southeastern colonias. It was the start of the rainy season, so you time your daily weave across the city to avoid the storms rolling through in the afternoon and evening. On one of your outings you visit the national university, the fourth oldest in the Americas, where you snap a picture of the provost’s office from across a greenish gauze of wet tropical trees and shrubbery. Lacking the uninterrupted confidence of a picture, a diary is desperate for its trace. It is anxious to make a mark from the pleated rocks, pyramids, personal moods, papers, and airs of the day. The history of Columbus’s journal is awkward. The extant version is a précis—evidently faithful (excluding only navigational minutiae), made by de las Casas—which incorporates first-person quotes from a copy of the original day-to-day log. Its shaky Spanish reflects de las Casas’ editorial commitment to originary dialectic, that is, either the Genoan’s in a language foreign to him, or a semi-literate scribe’s doing his best to write. Garbled tones also complicate who comes first. Columbus is writing to satisfy and elicit royal investments (so invites comparison of his journey to Marco Polo’s); de las Casas is writing a history, and decidedly one to protect natives from exploitation (within the ethical ambits of Sirach 34:18-22); and the scribe was just laboring to keep whatever monad he had made for himself going (pace Leibniz, Deleuze, or otherwise). Damned, then, is the book from the outset; damned, because it is a diary in search of a body, a trace without interior. “Damned,” in the words of Aimé Césaire, “because of the caravan of far-off interiors… Damned in the wake of world discoverers. Damned, because in the ears of the poet is re-attempted the same voice which haunted Columbus: ‘I will found a new heaven and a new earth so wonderful that one will no longer think of who is to be first.’” I don’t keep a diary. But, if I did, I think that what I would have written at that time about that moment looking across the quad at San Carlos Universitywould have been thick with the obvious. Founded, like other colonial colleges, as a nest in which to hatch the doctrine of the cross and sword, by the twentieth century the campus was a natural environment for the violent conflict between popular socialist movements and the military juntas allied with American fruit companies. Nearby is buried the body of a K’iche’ peasant who one day in 1980 protested the decades-long depredation of the Guatemalan Civil War. That night, he was burned, revived, kidnapped, tortured, and hurled from the balustrade of the university president’s mansion. Occult little spot of land, learning, war, and terror, the campus gives no immediate impression that anyone has ever died there. Your cousin is placid about it all. Even though the publicized killing of your shared first cousin once removed—while commanding a squadron of FAR, the Rebel Armed Forces—forced your family to flee to Mexico, the United States, and Cuba, he tells you over drinks that things were bad then, sure… but not as bad as they are now. The wars for control of the fruit trade were nothing compared to those for control of the cocaine routes. In the banana republic there was a semblance of a republic. He says the image is evaporated, and the chaos of not seeing the enemy is much more real and much more terrifying. Going with the devil has its perks—baroque profit is far more the horror. After the war ended, disaffected soldiers, death squads, and secret police abused the permeability of the state into a vast criminal enterprise, glamoring a hollow bureaucracy to serve the trafficking of drugs, arms, and workable bodies. So eviscerated is the civic apparatus today that citizens hire assassins and form lynch mobs to secure justice. While the country doesn’t table as high as other murder capitals of the world (for instance, every year more people are killed per capita in Baltimore or St. Louis, let alone San Salvador or Caracas), it is one of the best places in the world to kill: “ninety seven per cent of homicides remain unsolved,” one investigative journalist writes, quoting a U.N. official, “Guatemala is a good place to commit a murder, because you will almost certainly get away with it.” From this vantage, the distant violence of the conquistadors is somehow akin, complete, condensed, retrograde. You finish your drinks and cruise the Avenida las Americas where you pass the city’s bronze statue of Christopher Columbus. Devoid of subtlety, he perches on a globe wrapped in the Spanish coat of arms, carried by three African and Indian men. His grandeur is so cold, obvious, and sinewy, it is so much less real. Five years earlier in summer 2005, newly graduated from college, you wrote a long erotic historical poem designed to unmask the reality of the conquest. What you called your “mytho-economic epic of the Americas” desired to investigate how deep the lifeblood of the conquest flowed, like a myth or concept, in the everyday pulsing of your veins. In one bit of it you speak to Simón Bolívar—the humanist liberator of Venezuela, Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, and Panama—about the strange gods that preside over the violence of the continent’s Olympus: In the tropical climates of Cuscatlan and Goathemala the sun at midday appears to draw the clouds around itself in serpentine designs, and from these signed snakes come the thunder, lightning, and rain and here I sat with Bolivar, Lord of the Face of Torches, who said to me: And we also have a dirty god about whom I could say nothing that isn’t true; he lies, cheats, and steals; and when we met he was so faraway from everything I’d known I’ve probably hated him as much as I love him. His skin is blackened white from constant exposure to the sun; well traveled, his toothless gums protect those who foolishly wander to unknown wastes. Rather predictably, in the next section of the poem you wander through a smoking hole in the jungle to the underworld, where you speak to underbelly gods paranoid about their ever-slipping control of space and time. One god you meet is Camazotz, Lord of the House of Death Bats, who says, “whoever fights a revolution ploughs the sea.” You are meant to be unsure as to whether he sees himself as ocean or ploughman. Later, listening together to the sound of the sky between its cracking rains, he tells you about his exploits in the Guatemalan earthquake of Christmas 1917—his smile is emerald green in the smoky cellar light—when he covered the moon with a cloud of black wings to steal the head of the statue of Christopher Columbus. This actually happened. But the people had chosen their true god. After the quake, the Genoan’s head was recovered and reattached. And who today knows Camazotz? If you look close, though, you will notice a scar that sutures the statue’s neck in Guatemala City. The crack that circles his throat is the real life terror of myth that secretes from this American Hercules, as de las Casas called him, baffled at how many people the hero killed on a single Caribbean island between 1494 and 1508. A mythic proportion: “over three million from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it.” Witnessing him better that 97th percentile, who wouldn’t want to cut his throat? And yet how burrowed is the peculiar instinct to attach bodies to heads. Saturday/Wednesday, October 24th I dream that I am in the 1980s again in Japan in a museum and my boat is there, its wood creaks across my feet patchy static atmospheres I notice I was never in Japan I am inside a television and someone else is playing my part on TV Sunday/Thursday, October 25th After the sun an octagonal Nine south-west navigation Eight nine times from within each one Five leagues or the length of a cathedral We saw land again all sad, all chest-like, all bruised by rain

Table of Contents

Colonoscopy 1

Journaling 4

University Head 11

Journaling 15

Nahualli Without Organs 17

Journaling 21

Ohmaxac Packs (Tomorrow's Savages) 33

Journaling 40

Diary in the Strict Sense 45

Journaling 46

Bowl-Maker 58

Journaling 63

Diary in the Strict Sense 70

Journaling 71

Diary in the Strict Sense 78

Journaling 79

Notes by Page Number i

Oneirography xvii

Acknowledgments xxiii