Scattered words and white spaces. That's what it looks like to flip through Dallas Poet Laureate Joaquín Zihuatanejo’s newest book, Occupy Whiteness.
The book is a collection of short poems and essays that Zihuatanejo wrote using a technique he calls hybrid erasure. In this interview, he talks about his process writing the book, using his upbringing in East Dallas as inspiration and what he hopes readers take away from this work.
Could you tell me a little bit about the process you went through while writing this book?
I was on a flight, and in front of me I noticed whoever was there on the flight before me left something in the pocket. I opened it up, and it was just a bookstore bag with a $7.95 novel in it. Rather than alert the stewardess – we were already in the air – I thought, this is the universe gifting me a book.
I saw the “about the author” and the name, and it was a sort of nondescript, white male author. When I looked at the cover and read the blurb on the back, it didn't seem like anything I would ever read or want to read.
I'm going to listen to the universe, and I'm going to start reading this novel from Page 1. And I did, and it wasn't very good. I got to about Page 61 or 62 and then for whatever reason, that page just jumped out at my eye. It had to do with an array of words that jumped off the page. One of the words was the word “obsidian,” which is a beautiful word.
On that same page was the word glass. And on that same page was the word fried, which is an interesting word to be, you know, on a page. My wife, for whatever reason, placed in my backpack a pack of whiteout markers. I tore out that page and I started whiting out words to leave just a handful of words floating on a sea of white space.
I started counting down the number of lines they were in, the number of spaces that were placed on that particular page. I started counting out lines and trying to re-create those words in white space, where they were on the page that I had colonized them from.
This poem, “View From the Fifth Floor of The Adam Hats building,” started forming. It's a poem about the erasure of a neighborhood, the erasure of Old East Dallas.
This poem started as an act of revolution against this act of erasure that happened in my city. Immediately after I wrote the first poem I thought to myself, “Well, there's been an act of brown erasure in our country that’s been going on,” and I wanted to address that.
I wanted this book to move beyond East Dallas and beyond Dallas, but to the entire scope of what a brown existence is, especially a brown existence in a border state.
I had to read countless books by white male authors to look for something to erase, to take something that's maybe not beautiful, to turn into something that's beautiful.
Could you share who some of these white authors were?
I contacted a former professor who worked with me during my master’s program. This is near the conclusion of the book, “A conversation with a native poet at a prestigious MFA program.”
Me: So I've been thinking about whether or not to cite the novels and works of nonfiction by the white male authors I've been destroying to create these hybrid erasures. My gut says no. I just want to make sure I'm doing the right thing. What do you think I should do?
Professor: Joaquin, you have deconstructed the original source in a way that has become something entirely new. This is more than erasure. It's obliteration followed by creation. Twelve isolated words pulled from a 300-page novel does not warrant a citation.
Me: I see your point.
Professor: And again, if the roles were reversed. Do you think a white male author would acknowledge you? And there's something else to consider inside and outside of the literary world. When have you ever felt acknowledged by a white man in your life?
Me: [silent for several seconds.]
Professor: Sounds like you have your answer.
I have the list and I have the original, like, every poem goes through multiple drafts. So my first draft of every one of these poems started with five isolated words on a page, or 12 isolated words on a page, and then became what it was. I have a notation page of all the sources that I pulled from, but I'm not going to share with anyone because this book is not about those men.
In your book, you talk a lot about your life in East Dallas, and it inspired a lot of the essays in there. And, some of those stories are, like, so touching.
Yeah, you know, a couple things about the essays. I will say this, the book has what I'm calling micro essays that are these sort of short, five-word, singular, minuscule essays. Then there's these longer-form essays that are in it as well. This was not my idea. This was the idea of Seb, my editor Sebastián Páramo at Deep Vellum. They said to me, “Joaquin, you know, these hybrid erasures are exciting, and I'm so thrilled to be working with you on the process.” They said to me, “What if we explore hybridity even more and we insert things into this book of poems that are not poems with intent, with purpose?”
I was thrilled at this idea because I'd been writing this collection of essays for a long time, micro and long, that I was calling tentatively on my laptop. It's titled Esé and it's a collection of essays. In my mind, it was a great title at the beginning, but I'm not crazy about it now. I think it's clever. I said, “I've been writing a lot of essays, and I think I could pull a handful that would fit with this collection.” Seb said, “Let's do it.” And, I said, “I'm in on one condition: I want the micro essays and the longer essays to be undocumented. I want them to be unnamed and undocumented in the table of contents, meaning there will be pieces in this book that are undocumented, but they are just as important as the documented poems that have names and have documentation in the table of contents.” I said, “That must happen.” And they said, “We're in.”
Then I called them back that evening and I said, “I have another condition.” And they said, “What's the condition?” I said, “I remember I was at the literary festival one time in Monterrey, and a writer said to me, this work needs to be in your grandfather's language and yours, it should be in Spanish and English.” And that's always resonated with me. And I said, “I'll insert the essays and the micro essays in the book if they can be undocumented and unnamed, and if we can get them translated into Spanish and have the Spanish occur first in the book and then be translated into English.” Seb loved that idea as well.
I like that you mentioned publishing it in Spanish and in English, because when I first was going through the book, I was reading the Spanish side first. And my Spanish is so bad, I'm there, reading it out loud and I don't understand it. And I just flipped it and like, oh, never mind, the English side is right here.
It's funny because someone got the book the other day from me and they said, “Joaquin, I'm using your essays and micro essays to help me with my Spanish.” And this was a Latino who said that to me. And I thought, “That's amazing,” because I struggle with Spanish. My grandfather and my grandmother were fluent. My mom was good. And then I was just OK.
When we got Brian [Duran-Fuentes] to join the team and help us with the translation, I was so proud, you know. I think back to that poet saying to me, “These need to be in your grandfather's language as well as yours.”
I really thought, “I can share this with my mom,” which is such a cool experience that she can read something that I'm reading as well.
One of the things I've been trying to do, as Dallas Poet Laureate, is to cross-pollinate communities and audiences. What a beautiful thing poetry is that it connects us to our shared humanity with one another. I'm hoping that this collection does agitate some people to think, to feel, to move, to act.
I'm also hoping that it connects people, and it makes people realize just how precious life is and how extraordinary life is, and how beautiful brown life is, and how worthy brown life is. That's what I want this book to give to the world.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
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