The axis of dispossession, figure 2--
I had to learn some math to make these.
So this is an aggregate demand.
Dispossession of body-- on the auction block,
the state empties the woman of personhood
through the language of law, and in doing so, invents property.
The state imagines ownership.
Who may own these endless fertile fields and ever
more bodies to yield its yield?
Ever more bodies, ever more tender crop.
Coerce.
Extract.
Export.
Tobacco, cotton, sugar was the need, was the case,
was the perils, was the want, was
the particular circumstance, was the seas, was the cost,
was the could, was the would, was the policy, was the loss,
was the vessel.
Cargo ship at sea, the first for-profit prison.
The plantation, another.
Law is the narrative power to reduce a mother to chattel,
to animal her many labors, to call her daughter stock
and capital, to be sold under colonial domination.
The art of the deal--
a rags to riches.
A people, its plunder.
Dispossession of body.
In the new world, the colonial project
is to disappear the native from time and space,
estrange her from memory.
Land of no one, the continent is emptied by language,
remapped by borders rather than relations.
Half-settler, half-native, I face a different emptiness.
Alone, stranded in time and space,
I have no beginning or end in a land evacuated
of memory, relation, kin.
If not lost to violence, virus, or virgin conquest,
we fall to the forgetting, self-erase,
disappear into whiteness.
Tribe obliterated, women violated,
children assimilated, we disappear ourselves
from ourselves.
You no-tribe, half-blood mestiza,
you cannot reclaim your historical bodies.
You remember no one.
No one remembers you.
No tribe claims you because it no longer exists.
And as it is in the land, the Indian is vanished in me.