Yes.
Thank you so much.
I feel some responsibility to bring you up to date
as to what's going on here, because I
was the professor across the hall from the demonstration
that happened here when the border patrol came
into the building.
Confine myself to facts.
But right now, we are a Hispanic serving institution.
We make a great deal of that.
Right now, the University Police are
in the process of using technology and interviewing
everybody they can to seek out all of the demonstrators
and serve them with papers one by one.
Now we have three.
They're continuing that process until--
the goal is, the policeman who interviewed
me said, to find all the demonstrators
and to bring them in.
So I wanted you to comment on that particularly since you're
at our sister institution.
And at what point does one--
at what point does one begin to act out?
I'm a veteran of the Act Up demonstrations.
And so just speak to that question if you would, please.
Yeah.
This is, I think, my question.
And I think in a lot of spaces--
there are a lot of groups doing a lot of work.
My partner and I were just talking about that.
And I think sometimes from within the institutions,
at least this is one lens of it, is that we say,
OK, well, people are doing a lot of work,
and I don't want to step on that work or reproduce that work
or pretend that work hasn't been happening.
And so we in some ways insulate ourselves.
But this is one of my big questions
is, what can we do from within the institution?
What kinds of pressures can we put on the very institutions
that are also receiving the monies from these privatized
institutions?
We teach in Arizona, so most of the state money that's
coming through has been touched by these privatized prisons
and detention centers.
I'm fairly new to academia, and this
is I think one of my big questions.
I think it's one of the questions of many
of our young people.
And in some ways, I think we are actually probably looking
more toward people like you who have done some of that--
those initial works when the works were still
new at that time.
That's my biggest question.
Is it enough that I can talk with my students
and give them a different set of lenses then to go out
into the community with?
Or is it more the fact that, no matter
what I do, my institution is large enough
that it can umbrella me and still keep me in my place,
so to speak?
And I also think this for me is one
of the most important reasons why I might be in Arizona, why
I might be back here, why we might all be back here.
One of the ways I think about Arizona
is that it's in some ways like the original--
it's one of our original sins, in a way.
A lot of the policies that happen across our nation
have started in very small ways in Arizona,
whether it's trying out new surveillance technology,
whether it's implementing new procedures on the border,
whether it's a border patrol, whether it's in some ways
just a replication of the ways we built reservations here,
the ways we put internment camps here next to reservations.
This is all the same system.
And for me, again, I don't have the answer what to do
or even if I have--
I think the question I'm asking every day
is, what can my poetry do?
Like some days, I wake up and I think I'm a poet.
Like, what does that even mean right now?
Something my partner and I talk a lot about is language.
That question-- what is the language we need today?
The same way I asked it in regard
to my indigenous language, which is a language
my community needed and needs.
But for me, the thing that I think I am most--
I'm not hopeful.
That's something-- I feel really exhausted by hope.
And I don't mean that in a way to take that--
If hope is something that belongs to you and you need,
I say we keep what we need and use it.
But I think hope, to me, is actually a very pessimistic
word, it seems like.
It seems as if we aren't actually
investing in the future.
It's like, well, I hope, and suddenly there's
this big chasm between action and what
I'm hoping might become of something.
But for me, the constellating of all of these things, I think,
will be the most powerful.
We talk a lot about intersectionality,
and I think not many of us know what it means.
Like in America, it's like we feel
like, oh, it's like that intersection right out there.
Like you show up on the right and they show up on your right,
and suddenly we're all at the intersection.
And I say, OK, you go, and then you go.
And then I go, and then they go.
But it's like that ability to say all of our problems
are happening simultaneously right now.
We are-- I would love to say, get all your asses out of here.
This is indigenous land.
That's not going to happen.
[LAUGHTER]
No, seriously.
I don't believe in reparations, but we're all here right now.
And so what is it that we are all
going to do right now in this place that will make tomorrow
a little bit better?
Or maybe even make the hour better?
The reality is, most of us are going
to go home and do nothing.
We might wonder--
I don't know.
I don't know that the power of anything I've said
or anything Nadia said is actually
going to make you think next week about your own life.
And that's the crazy thing about America.
Unless you can-- unless it makes you think about your own life,
we very often--
or we very rarely think about another life
unless it somehow tracks back to our own.
And I don't mean that to sound pessimistic, because I actually
think the opposite.
I feel like there is work that we are capable of doing.
And I happen to feel like it begins with language, like it
begins with saying words that hold bodies in them.
It begins with--
I really do-- this is crazy.
It almost seems absurd.
But I really do believe if we can get enough people visiting
people in asylum who are being held
in detention because they've sought asylum,
if we can get enough people visiting people
who are incarcerated--
I feel like this is the place we have to build,
is from our own bodies, versus trying to wait and pretend
that our governors and senators are going to represent us
when--
I don't know, maybe there's someone in here
who's got a ton of money in their pocket,
but I think the reality of it is we're
going to have to match money with body.
And I don't even know if we know how to do that in America.
America is one of the few places--
in other countries, revolutions start with poetry.
And that hasn't happened in America.
So even in my own art and the one thing
that I feel like I have a gift of,
I don't even know how to use that to its full potential.
So I don't know--
what was your name, sir?
Fenton Johnson.
Fenton?
So even like ACT UP, that's I think something
we can learn from even.
That was a very long winded way to say I have the same question
and I've started to ask myself that question more
and in a more interrogative way, in a way that doesn't let
me get away with not having the answer yet but saying,
OK, but you need to find something,
whether it's an action or a movement or something.
More questions?
That's the way to kill the Q and A. Just talk for--
[LAUGHTER]
Talk for like 30 minutes.
[LAUGHS]
I have a question.
And it's who do you mainly write for?
When you write your poetry, who do you want to read it?
And what do you want them to take away?
I think first and foremost I'm just trying to build a--
trying to find a way to articulate a question
about the world or my life.
It was very different writing these poems,
especially if anybody knows my work from before.
I write a lot about my brother, my real-life brother,
who's a brother who has suffered a lot.
And it's a, I think, a very American suffering,
a very Indigenous and Latino-American suffering.
And in a way, I feel like that was something
between my brother and me.
But in these poems, it felt a little bit different,
I think because I knew I was writing alongside other people,
and because it was also something--
so I was on another list.
And when you're on a list, you can't
be on more than one list in some institutions
to visit, like on an individual list.
And so I couldn't visit my sister.
It was something Dwayne was actually trying to do,
was to get me to visit my sister.
And we were even thinking about doing a library visit,
like as a writer I would go in and talk
to them from the library.
But because I had already been on another list as a visitor,
I couldn't be on her visitor list.
So there's a way that these poems that I'm writing now--
I think for the very first time I thought about an audience,
but not in terms of whether my audience will
love what I'm writing.
But I think what I'm thinking a lot
of is, what are-- who are the bodies who
I want to hold on my pages who don't ever
get to see themselves?
And that, I think, is why, predominantly, most
of my new poems are love poems, is because I am--
I feel like I'm trying to demand that of not just the larger
like America or the larger audience, but even of myself,
to say that I am demanding that I see the brother, the sister,
my community, my lovers, my friends, my enemies
maybe most especially, as people I can love,
as bodies I can love.
And so that has been a big question for me.
And so in terms of who I'm writing for now,
I think I'm maybe not writing for,
but I'm trying to create a space where someone might find
themselves who maybe hasn't found themselves
on a page before in another way.
Oh, Cynthia.
[INAUDIBLE]
So good to see you.
You too.
Since we were colleagues very briefly,
I do want to just say to this audience
that what Natalie's arrival referred to students at ASU
was a sanctuary, a place to find themselves in their body,
not on the page alone.
But you might just think about the change
that you saw in the students over the couple years
you've been there and think about them going out
in the world changed.
It's a quiet or a gentle revolution.
But what I wanted to ask you about
was your work on language preservation.
How are you balancing the quest to help to preserve the Mojave
language and the integrity of the multilinguality
of your work, and your career, which
is of necessity in English, where so much of your outreach
is directed?
And how do you balance that?
How are you navigating?
I'm a mess.
No.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't-- I'm really lucky, I feel like.
So my language work has shifted a lot.
So I no longer work for my tribe.
I work with Hubert, my one teacher, my first teacher.
And we've shifted a lot.
And we just do little stories and songs by phone now.
And we're working on a couple of children's books.
So it's a very different relationship I have,
not to the learning, but to the responsibility I once, I
feel like, wrongly took on my shoulders,
like I felt like I had to save a language.
And in a way, it kind of crushed me.
I don't know.
I feel like I don't know who I would be
without the work I did there.
I'm a very different person than I was before I began that work.
And I think in some ways, all of the things that I am--
this is, I think, the joy and the gift of poetry,
is that you can be all of the things you are in it.
So the person-- I was built by basketball.
That's first and foremost who I am.
And the way I think, the way I move in a day,
the way I touch everything has been
built with that kind of physicality
and that energetic idea of space, I think.
But yeah, it feels really, really lucky, I think,
to have a partner who is also invested
in language the same way I am, to have teachers--
like Ofelia is sitting here just like nothing, like normal.
[LAUGHTER]
She's just hanging out over there.
But also-- I don't know.
Like the community you all have built here.
Yeah.
I think in some ways, it's such a freaking easy burden.
It's not a burden at all.
Like what a luck to be able to sit up here and do this.
But also, I think something about language
that we all have is we have it, and it's definitely a gift.
And I think sometimes we don't realize that.
We don't realize what a gift it is to read or to write.
And I feel like it's something that
has been offered to me by the things and energies that
made me, and it feels like a lucky easy thing
to step into it.
And like tomorrow, tomorrow I'm going to Palestine.
And now, that's a place that puts everything
into perspective, another occupied land,
another occupied land with a Western model set on top of it,
a place where you have to be careful what books you bring,
a place where--
One of the stupidest questions I asked there was
the first night we were there.
We were in a university which was basically
cut in half by the wall.
And so we traveled on the West Bank.
And there were these incredible poets reading, young, just
full of life, incredible poets.
And I was like, oh, we should bring them back to read.
And everyone just looked at me like, are you--
what's-- they can't go back.
They can't leave.
So just suddenly to put all of those things
into perspective of, again, what's
happening there is what happened to Indigenous
peoples here is what's happening around the world
in many places.
It's just it's happening in a present way
that we've forgotten it's happened here.
And so this actually is probably the easiest, luckiest thing
I could be doing, is just to be here.
I'm actually talking about incarceration,
and I am not incarcerated.
I am not in detention.
And what a lucky thing to be just the person carrying this,
and to carry it in a way that I put it
on the page versus having had to endure it in that physicality.
Yeah, in an emotional way I have with my family,
but not in some of the ways that some of the others we've
heard from tonight have.
How about one more question?
All right.
Thank you so much, Natalie.
[APPLAUSE]