The literary awards season is well underway and the spotlight has again found Tucson.
Walking a red carpet similar to the one traveled by Tucsonans Lydia Millet and Lissie Jaquette, both finalists for National Book Awards last year, University of Arizona Professor Susan Briante has received the 2021 Pegasus Award from the Poetry Foundation.
Briante was honored for “Defacing the Monument,” a remarkably unique look at the human drama unfolding every day along America’s southern border … and how the words of earlier poets, addressing other dark moments in U.S. history, still echo in and around Nogales.
The Pegasus is one of the Poetry Foundation’s top annual awards, honoring the best book-length work of poetic criticism published in the United States the previous year.
“Monument” is Briante’s fourth book, three being collections of her own work and this one a collection of selected excerpts by other poets, connected and re-illuminated by Briante’s own personal essays.
She would probably have published more poetry by now, but she spends too much time doing … poetry. When she isn’t writing it, she is teaching it. Then there’s this: she’s married to a poet, Farid Matuk.
“I think poetry has had a special place in my heart since I was in high school,” Briante said. “At some point I wrote a poem, not thinking much about it, and my friend liked it so much she started carrying it around in her wallet. That made such an impression on me. I liked writing fiction. I worked for a newspaper for awhile, but I kept hearing the poet in me.”
The genealogy of “Monument” traces to 2017, when Briante began taking graduate students to Mexico as part of the Southwest Field Studies in Writing program. The program encourages students to learn the importance of observation and research when exploring complicated topics. They sit in on deportation cases. They meet with would-be immigrants and asylum-seekers. They talk to immigration officials. They watch. They write.
“It wasn’t my intention to write a book about these things at all, but as I began asking these people questions I began asking myself questions, too. Who am I to speak for them? How can I adequately represent people whose life experience is totally different than mine … who don’t look like me … and whose suffering is beyond anything I could possibly imagine?”
She soon realized other poets had asked themselves the same questions, and “Monument” was born.
“I began looking for other poets who might be models for me,” Briante said. “Honestly, they had many of the same questions I did. And none of us came up with very good answers. This is a book of questions.”
One of them? How has a nation of immigrants continued to demonize immigrants for 400 years, before and long after our famous forefathers sat down to write the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights?
Be they Black, Jewish, Chinese, Irish, Italian or Cuban, each new wave of immigrants has felt the wrath of “decent people” committed to “good, old-fashioned American values.”
Today’s victims are predominantly brown, from Latin America and the Middle East, but government policies and judicial precedent — even the language in the statutes themselves — have already hard-wired the system against the defendants.
In her book, Briante introduces us to her great-grandparents, who immigrated to the U.S. from Italy in the early 1900s. During World War II, they were forced to carry “Enemy Alien Identification Cards” even though they had lived in this country more than 35 years.
They graced Briante’s mother with the gift of American citizenship. Similarly blessed, Briante still wears her mother’s ring. “Not because I like it,” she writes in her book, “but because when I look down I see her fingers in my hand.”
These things may help Briante feel some of the pain she sees at the border, but she bristles at the suggestion her own heritage gives her the right to tell these stories or “give these people voice.”
“They have a voice, all of them do,” Briante said. “The challenge is to find people who will listen.”
She is trying to do her part. The poet donated half her cash prize from the Pegasus award to the Kino Border Initiative, a group of nonprofits working to assist, educate and advocate for migrant peoples on both sides of the Nogales border.
With the remainder of her prize, Briante made donations to the Florence Refugee Project and No More Deaths.
“Defacing the Monument” has only 152 pages, but it is hardly a one-night read. Filled with readings, graphics, photos, charts, worksheets, and Briante’s carefully reasoned text, it is a book worth living in for awhile.
Even the title deserves some grey matter. Early in the book, Briante mentions Muriel Rukeyser and her poem “West Virginia.” Rukeyser includes the words from the historic marker at the site of John Brown’s hanging. In doing so, the poet interjects some of her own words to better document what actually took place that day.
“’Defacing the Monument’ seemed to be a good metaphor to an approach artists might adopt when documenting injustices,” Briante said. “It’s not just documenting what’s there; but contesting it, challenging it, providing it context.”
If this is “poetic justice,” Your Honor, the defense rests.
FOOTNOTES
Winners of this year’s National Book Awards will be announced Wednesday afternoon, Tucson time. The awards ceremony will be streamed live at 5:00 p.m. on the National Book Foundation website: nationalbook.org
The Tucson Festival of Books’ annual writing contest attracted a near-record number of submissions this year. Contest coordinator Meg Files said there were 705 entries, second only to the 747 received in 2019. Winners will be announced next month.
The book festival will begin announcing its list of authors for 2022 next weekend. The festival will return to its traditional format March 12-13 at the UA.
