listen

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/magic-byrd-baylors-literary-odes-nature/"></div>“I used to know an old man who could walk by any cornfield and hear the corn singing. ‘Teach me,’ I’d say, when we’d passed on by. (I never said a word while he was listening.).” This is how Byrd Baylor’s 1978 children’s book, The Other Way to Listen, begins. We meet our curious female narrator immediately and simply, and an old man, who we later learn is not mystical. There was a woman, he tells the narrator, who could hear cactuses blooming. “‘Just tell me how you learned to hear that corn,’” she asks, but, like the impossible advice to let go during meditation, it takes both surrender and intent, and lots of time — nearly 30 pages’ worth — for her to hear the murmuring of the hills, the musings of a lizard. The story is spare and the illustrations, drawn by Peter Parnall, impressionistic, full of negative space and rendered in just three colors (black, deep yellow, and a mustardy orange). Perhaps because it is a book about quietude, its makers have left plenty of room to daydream.
For adults, children’s books are a mnemonic pleasure — the comfort in knowing what happens next, the thrill of reabsorption. But I didn’t read Byrd Baylor as a child. The Other Way to Listen was gifted to me by a boyfriend, who thought its simplicity might quell my anxiety. When I babysat, I read it to kids in my charge. Later, I read it to a different boyfriend, then bedridden with a severe illness. The old man, explains the narrator, “was so good at listening — once he heard wildflower seeds burst open, beginning to grow underground” that he was never surprised by the gentle cacophony: “‘It seemed like the most natural thing in the world.’” Most people have the innate ability to hear — they simply “‘don’t take the time you need for something that important,’” he insists. Because he can’t teach our narrator to listen — only the birds, weeds, and trees themselves can — he instructs her, “‘Go get to know one thing as well as you can.’” Parnall draws her face into branches, the crests of mountains, the wind. A bundle of leaves in her arms elongates toward the preceding page, gigantic. When the hills speak to her, it is both “the oldest sound” and “the most natural thing” in the world.
Baylor has written many books like these, often illustrated by Parnall: The Table Where Rich People Sit (Mountain Girl learns to measure wealth in her access to flowers, her loving arguments with her family, and “the pleasure I have wandering in open country, free as a lizard”), Everybody Needs a Rock (in which rocks are as valuable as necessities), I’m in Charge of Celebrations (a girl celebrates the comforts afforded by the high desert: sleeping outside, dancing in a Dust Devil). In Baylor’s tenderly didactic parables, about time and value and the sentience of the land, her narrators are typically girls, and they are always mystified by and indebted to the desert, which becomes a character worth meeting — the density of its heat, the potentiality of its horizon.
Baylor is 95, herself a desert-dweller in Arivaca, Arizona, where she lives on 35 acres, entirely off the grid (she prefers typewriters). Early in her career, she wrote for adults, but pivoted by the 1960s, <a href="https://azdailysun.com/children-s-author-byrd-baylor-gets-straight-to-the-point/article_a0efa8ed-73cd-5cef-8560-9f3e16447f26.html">explaining</a>, “I like children’s books because in them I can talk about the things I think are important.” If they’d ever felt cloying — well, they are for children, and presumably the sweetness is undercut by the real-life Baylor, whose kindness comes without sentimentality. A 2013 New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/us/group-rooted-in-the-Arizona-desert-looks-out-for-migrants.html">article</a> about No More Deaths — an Arizona-based organization that provides humanitarian aid to immigrants during their perilous crossing between the US and Mexico — mentions that Baylor had been helping migrants for years “by distributing food and water to those who crossed her land.”
In Yezmin Villarreal&#8217;s 2014 story, “<a href="http://www.sprawlr.org/portfolio/the-byrd-of-arivaca-byrd-baylor-the-childrens-book-author-and-the-no-more-deaths-mission-to-provide-humanitarian-aid-for-migrants-in-the-rural-arizona-desert/">The Byrd of Arivaca</a>,” she interviews Baylor and several No More Deaths volunteers, who explain that Baylor&#8217;s door is “always unlocked, so people will help themselves to water or food inside.” When Baylor called the Border Patrol seeking medical assistance for a severely dehydrated woman — then asleep in Baylor’s bed — she was warned housing a migrant was illegal. “You better get somebody to come and arrest me too, because I&#8217;m not putting her out of the house,” she&#8217;d said. In 2004, she permitted No More Deaths to set up a home base, known as the Byrd Camp, near her property, “because ‘we were all doing the same thing, more or less.’”
It’s probably credible that the simplest ideas are the truest, and that the truest declarations come from children, but the idea’s repetition has made it feel like an aphoristic platitude. Still, I wish to inhabit Baylor’s written world: I want compassion to be valuable, for wealth to be measured in ineffable things; I want to devote a full twenty minutes of my concentration to a patch of grass. I want this especially now, when my whole self feels groomed to be financially valuable and consistently busy. Those kinder moments have dwindled, due to both their perceived uselessness and diminishing accessibility: rare, perfect ecosystems are paved over even in Miami, where I live, which is as teeming as Baylor’s desert. I have less time, or I’m made to feel like my time is better directed at generating a better version of myself. Either way, the effect is the same. It’s hard to listen to the quiet singing of a hill, the bloom of a plant. Meanwhile, the actual plants disappear.
Recently, No More Deaths was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/us/scott-warren-arizona-deaths.html">in the news</a>, when Scott Warren, a teacher and an activist, went on trial for providing food and shelter to two migrants: Jose Sacaria Goday, from Honduras and Kristian Perez Villanueva, from El Salvador. For illegally and secretly housing them, said prosecutors, he faced up to 20 years in prison on charges of harboring and conspiring to transport undocumented immigrants. The case ended with a mistrial, conspiracy charges dropped, though prosecutors plan to retry him in November on harboring charges. It’s a mercilessly punishing cruelty that conflates protecting and preventing the deaths of two strangers with criminality. In June, Warren delivered a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/12/scott-warren-year-sentence-hung-jury-aiding-migrants/?noredirect=on">statement to the press</a>, in light of what he described as the “humanitarian crisis” of the targeting of undocumented people and the criminalization of solidarity. “Today, it remains as necessary as ever for local residents and humanitarian aid volunteers to stand in solidarity with migrants and refugees,” he said. “We must also stand for our families, friends, neighbors, and the very land itself, most threatened by the militarization of our borderland communities. I have received enormous support from family, friends, lawyers, and my community. But the other men arrested with me that day have not received the attention and outpouring of support that I have. I do not know how they are doing now, but I desperately hope that they are safe.”
I reread The Other Way to Listen recently, after hearing Warren’s statement, and intuited it differently this time, as if it were a corrective to the collective neglect of the environment, and of each other: the narrator is warned by the old man that if she thinks she’s better than anything — or anyone — she’ll never truly hear them. This, I think, might be Baylor’s truest intention. Decamping from late-stage capitalism by hiding in, say, the desert, feels seductive and youthfully irresponsible. To me, Baylor personifies the best middle ground. She seems to have absconded from only the loudest places, continuing to write beatifically magic books and measurably support her community, broad and borderless. The narrator, surely, learns to listen: “All I know is, suddenly, I wasn’t the only one singing. The hills were singing, too. I stopped.”
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The Magic of Byrd Baylor&#8217;s Literary Odes to Nature

cristine-brache

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/poetry/words-occupy-space-interview-cristine-brache/"></div>In the Spanish language, the word cazar means “to hunt”; the word casar, “to marry.” Cristine Brache, a native speaker, loves this because the humor — and maybe the pain — is immediately felt. Without a regional lisp, the two sound nearly or exactly the same. Commit to me; commit me.
I briefly met Brache, the Puerto Rican and Cuban artist and writer, last year. I’d wanted to speak for much longer, because some of the objects she’s made — a ceramic dunce cap, a handless clock, a keychain soliciting both <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BWEEMlNHkHD/">pain and its cessation</a>, the popular <a href="https://www.etsy.com/listing/505906530/pain-in-women-2017?ga_order=most_relevant&amp;ga_search_type=all&amp;ga_view_type=gallery&amp;ga_search_query=cristine+brache&amp;ref=sr_gallery-1-1">“Pain in Women”</a> shirt — feel delicate and biting, like an ant tickling the skin. I liked her poetry too, its melancholy and how cutting it feels. In “Finding Her Way,” she writes: “staring out the windows she resented all the genitals of the world/and her breath/she resented her hair and her presence on the earth/longing for objectification/and loss of will.”
When we met, we talked for a long time: about our Caribbean matriarchies; about what it feels like to be a daughter of mothers who lived in-between places, felt in-between; about writing poems as children and how they were stupid; about how even now language can feel like a failure, but words themselves — the objecthood of them, their feel — engender playful struggle. “Language fails often,” she told me. “It’s all an approximation, as close as I can get to something that felt meaningful to me.”
We spoke again recently, following the November release of her first book POEMS, through CODÉTTE. In it, Brache sketches words like images: flowers anywhere but a grave (“we lay flowers where people die/But not where people live/Not where hearts are broken/Not on my mother or the months of May or June”), a body worth no more than its exact weight (“men like an hourglass figure/and its cream-colored sand/can exactly calculate/the amount of time it takes/for you to stop paying attention to me”). Women, as told in her poems, are subjected to hegemony and hurt, but Brache laughs at the men, all of them: “It’s what’s on the inside that counts/I should cut my tongue to relax you”; “resistance is just fear/it’s inevitable, like math.”
In February, her solo exhibition, Cristine’s Secret Garden, opens at Locust Projects in Miami. Here she’ll create a kind of simulacrum of a South Floridian backyard, with shrines and statues of saints — often stand-ins for Orishas, deities from Yoruba religions. Her Orishas are matriarchal figures in her life. They’re odes, she tells me, to the coping mechanisms we utilize to function, to stay afloat. Saints and orishas sometimes offer a balm to long-suffering mortals; Brache’s deities are goddesses of self-protection, exhaustion, ancestral trauma. There’s no deliberate through line between her visual art and writing, and it would be reductive to draw one, but here we speak about both.
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MONICA USZEROWICZ: Tell me about the decision to finally publish your work in a book.
CRISTINE BRACHE: Lora, who runs CODÉTTE, asked if I wanted to do a book with her. I’ve been sitting on a lot of poetry, because I’ve been writing since fifth grade. But I am always wary of publishing bad poems — I think there is a fine line between a good poem and a bad poem, and I wanted to have something I could stand behind for a long period of time. It’s important to me, and I wanted to be careful with it.
Upon reading your book, Chris Kraus wrote that you “work dually as a visual artist and poet, and this gives her writing a particular charge. Poetry, for Brache, becomes the default, the last resort, and a means of covert assault in matters of living where language has led.”
I was so flattered; it’s really thoughtful. I cold-messaged her and was surprised she actually got back to me. There are so many more poems I don’t think I’d ever publish, and many of the poems in this book are so old. Getting that feedback made me feel validated. I know that sounds dumb. But I think poems are the one place I allow myself to be really unapologetic about how I’m feeling. Maybe with artwork, I consider the viewer — I don’t compromise what I’m doing, but it’s a different kind of interaction, walking through a gallery space, as opposed to writing for myself. It’s very private.
All writing, I think, especially if you’re writing about your experience and sharing that with people, is the most vulnerable thing. Art and performance can be, too, but my artwork — though I might say it’s diaristic — is very mediated. Reading poems — they’re not mediated at all. I write to feelings I had during a moment that was meaningful to me; to get to the meat of that pain or love or whatever emotion it is, you do it alone.
The poems are places in which to exist differently.
It’s this place for me I’ve always had where I can express myself without being accountable to another person about what I’m feeling or who I am. Because of where you’re born, or who you are — there are so many reasons why some people can’t be seen or heard, so at least I have this. I’m very protective of it.
Intimacy and power often brush up against each other in your poems, the way they do in relationships.
It’s everywhere — even when it’s not there, it’s there. That stuff is inevitable, even if it’s not intended. You can try your hardest to be thoughtful, and still say things that accentuate the inherent power dynamics between people. My work is about these power dynamics, but there’s more, too — I think I focus so much on it because it hurts to be on the bottom when you know you can be on the top. But you can’t be, because society’s not structured that way. There’s always this sense of having someone see you and own your identity, because they’re already projecting whatever cultural associations they have with how you look and who you are — so much that they don’t even let you exist.
There are so many inequalities — in the art world and everywhere else. It’s harder for women and people of color. It is so much harder. And it’s harder still to convey that to someone who doesn’t have that experience. You almost can’t even say it, because they get defensive. But it’s everywhere, and it’s so suffocating, and it’s really hard to endure. But we do it. You find ways to move around these power structures.
I was thinking, also, about the wordplay in your poetry. It’s a really joyous kind of tool.
I’m super-conscious of it. I love thinking about words: what they mean, their multiple definitions, how they cut you a certain way when you lay them against other words. I do it with objects, too — how they’re propped up against each other, how they occupy space. It’s the same process I use when I write. I’ve always been obsessed with language, eager to find where there are atypical connections that have standardized forms.
I love how in Spanish “extraño” means “strange” and “te extraño” means “I miss you.”
Extraño can mean foreign — not familiar to you. It’s something I like a lot about Spanish: to hunt is “cazar” and to marry, “casar.” That would make a good poem, see. I’m sitting on that for something.
Last time we spoke, we talked about family — matriarchy, particularly, and how the work in your show is addressing it.
My grandma and mom were both born and raised in Puerto Rico; my grandma moved to Brooklyn, met my grandpa there, and they eventually had to move back to Puerto Rico. There were a lot of issues with her being brown in the US at that time. I’m trying to observe how people code their oppression so that they can function. I feel like women, and people who are immigrants, or their children — all of them have to deal with the sense of protecting themselves. Santeria became illegal when the Spaniards colonized the Caribbean. So what did people do? They codified their religion with Catholic iconography and language. We do this all the time: women, poor people, basically anyone who’s not a rich, white man — we find ways to codify who we are so that it’s palatable for the culture, for the patriarchy, for where we’re at.
With the show, I want to honor these people and ask, given the variables that we have in an oppressive system, how can we empower ourselves? The exhibition uses Santeria as a template for these very detailed coping mechanisms. There are shrines, each one to an attribute. Like the Orishas in Santeria: they’re gods and goddesses of thunder, health, war. I wanted to give my shrines atypical attributes: vulnerability, vanity, mental illness, sadness, exhaustion. And collective trauma. Do we have gods for that?
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How Words Occupy Space: An Interview with Cristine Brache

Monica Uszerowicz is a writer in Miami, FL. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Hyperallergic, Filmmaker, Hazlitt, The Miami Rail, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/monilaurasimone">@monilaurasimone</a>.