In the Open Air is a series curated by Aurielle Marie. In this contribution, Southern poet and memory worker mónica teresa ortiz grapples with poetics, memories the South holds, and their relationship to Empire.
Under the Panhandle sky, there is nowhere to hide. I often find myself beneath it, staring at the changing landscapes of prairie grass, tilled soil, rapeseed, and cotton belonging to this open land bald of trees. Every spring I notice wildflowers spilling across the horizon and miss the sprawling magnolias that shaded me during the summers.
I remember the day I left Austin to return here, to the plains. It was March 2020, and I had been furloughed from my job at a local specialty coffee shop near the University of Texas campus. It would be the end of 12 summers spent swimming in the natural springs of Deep Eddy, riding my road bike through the Hyde Park neighborhood on my way to make coffee for students, faculty, staff, and anyone who walked in our doors. I spent my free time organizing and protesting at the capital building and the governor's mansion and writing poems at local coffee shops.
The prairie is a wide open place. And sometimes, the dirt and wind choke it into a silence that can feel overwhelming or alienating if you aren't used to it. But I like that quiet. I had missed it. I packed my few belongings into the car and made the six-hour-long drive to Lubbock, where I'd stay for a couple of weeks to housesit for an uncle while he underwent chemotherapy in Houston. I passed a strip of liquor stores and found myself behind a caravan of Trump supporters. More than 10 pick-up trucks in a line on the Marsha Sharpe Freeway, their flags and bumper stickers declaring who they support. I shouldn't have expected anything less.
Within weeks, my uncle had passed. We watched his funeral on Zoom. More and more people were dying because of COVID-19. By May, Central Park became a makeshift morgue. Everyone I knew had lost someone to the virus. We navigated these deaths and losses, but where were we going? I clock into my service job, often in a daze… My performance a mechanism honed over a nearly 15-year period working in the coffee industry. I check social media constantly for updates, fundraisers, and protests, or just to know someone is still alive. Just to see what I may offer against empire. I thought often about what Colombian artist Doris Salcedo referred to as distortion. In her installation, Unland, she said, "If somebody that is close to you or if somebody that you love has been killed, then your life is distorted. It hasn't ended … and you have to go on…" This is what we are experiencing most days: a distorted sense of survival.
I had a dream in 2015 of my own house burning down, set on fire by local police, and my mother unwilling to flee as flames engulfed us. This is my home, she tells me in the dream, and I won't leave. We burn together. Witnessing the violent destruction of a home is a refusal, an acknowledgment of a moment that will not define our future or alter the bonds of a homeland. I think of those Israeli bulldozers destroying a Palestinian woman's house while she sat in a lawn chair at a distance, watching them. It must have required immense faith to trust her home could be rebuilt, and that the empire would die.
The poetics and dreams I hold in my heart come from workers, organizers, and communities in Texas and across the South who have taught me how to survive and commit. It is from poets I learned that language is also an action. I think about Lucy Parsons, how she met her husband Albert in Waco, Texas, long before she wrote her first essay on worker strikes in an anarchist newspaper and organized white workers in Chicago. I think about the humid summer night I wandered around downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, and found the F.W. Woolworth Department store, where four young Black students—the Greensboro Four—orchestrated one of the most important sit-ins of the 1960s, setting off years of struggle against segregation. I won't call poetry a balm or claim that it fulfills any material need. However, I have found myself more immersed in poetics than ever before. Language grounds me the way that the red clay of the Panhandle soil does, or the gray clouds of a spring thunderstorm rolling over the plains. I wasn't taught these lessons in a Texas public school. Politics and poetics are instead learned on the ground, at a protest, from conversations built through community. They are collective acts and communal dreams.
This could have been a lyric essay or an essay about the pastoral. Instead, I ask for an alchemist's touch to galvanize my tongue. Instead, I find a portal, from Texas to Ferguson, to the Weelaunee forest, to Ayotzinapa, to Sudan, to Palestine. Instead, it is a love letter to the South, to what I have learned about refusal, to the "air around us [that] is not a static witness." The South isn't just a site of burials—or as my friend Margaret Lawson called it, an archive of violence—but also of refusals: a list of those speaking out against the brutality that the state imposes.
Abolition Week: Empire Must Die
This year, our focus is Empire, its endless expansion, and the carceral technologies that make it possible.
Keep readingA beloved poet said to me recently, that "we are surviving empire." I don't know if I am, surviving, but I get up every day as an act of refusal, a way to decide who I will be and how I will live. Poetry allows me to translate myself despite the decaying conditions we are subjected to. When I am asked what I was doing while these nations died out slowly, I will say I was uninterested in craft but invested in commitment, in mobilization, in the aliveness of others. As a poet thinking about place, I have been unable to move these past months. Not from Al-Shifa Hospital, not from Darfur, not from the images, the screams, the distortions, or the destruction of homelands. Place is both a present and future existence, one that we must fight for. Or, as Fargo Nissim Tbakhi wrote in the essay "Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide":
"If we are to consider our writing a space in which to fight, we'd better know who we're fighting, who we're fighting with, and why. "
Texan poet Ariana Brown says, "Countries kill everyone you love and everyone else too—foreign and domestic." As of August, it has now been 10 years since Michael Brown was killed, and Ferguson became a place of possibility. A month later, in September 2014, 43 students were kidnapped and disappeared from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College in Iguala, Guerrero. They were on a bus to Mexico City to commemorate the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, when Mexican militarized forces murdered university students protesting the Summer Olympics. Here in Texas, the land where I was born and raised, Greg Abbott continuously occupies the Texas-Mexico border with Operation Lone Star, allowing the Border Patrol and the National Guard to arrest, detain, incarcerate, and murder migrants. I watch universities replicate border walls to separate students the same way that US border imperialism and Israel construct million-dollar walls and checkpoints. I read about the student encampments popping up globally, resisting police in riot gear, demanding universities' divestment from Zionism. One of the protest chants from the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa 43 is "¡Fue el Estado!" Translated: "It was the state!" This was never an accusation, but rather, a declaration; a truth that we know. It is the state.
The empire uses a shared blueprint. Executions. Massacres. Starvation. Displacement. Genocide. Destruction of land and water. Extraction. Propaganda pedaled by corporate media. What we have witnessed, is linked together under the brutality of colonialism. While revision might be necessary to assuage a settler's conscience, it will never change what we witness—what we know. That the land remembers. That we remember. Our language can be insurrections against these revisions—but what of our actions? The struggle for liberation demands that we move in ways we did not know we could. Yet move we must—like wind or water, like fire. Palestine has invited us to throw whatever we have at the machine of empire. We are not silos, we are not alone. We must burn brighter together. But how?
A few days before my uncle died, I visited him. It was just ahead of one of the hottest summers in the Panhandle since 2011 yet he sat in his recliner, covered by a blanket. We wore masks at a distance from each other. He asked if I was glad to be home again, if I had written anything since returning. Not yet, I admitted. His eyes lit up a little, and he told me that it was okay, I just needed to keep going. I understood in that simple colloquial phrase he signified his own kind of refusal. Even as Death waited for him.
Our lives are opportunities to be clear with our commitments. On our best days, we dream and wake up to new possibilities. On our worst days, together, we can endure. This is what the South reminds me. Liberation is not just a word in a poem, but an action—a commitment to show up and refuse silence, to do more than just bear witness. To tend to everything we harvest. There is nowhere to hide. We have to keep going.