The Phoenix Indian School closed its doors in 1990 after nearly a century of facilitating the theft, abuse and forced assimilation of Native children. Today the majority of the existing grounds consist of a recreational park, a Native community center, and a Veteran’s medical complex, where I received treatment for mental illness and autoimmune disorders over several years. I wrote this poem while reflecting on the fundamental unlikelihood of achieving wellness in physical and ideological spaces established and maintained through settler colonial violence.
Saretta Morgan on [the zen garden is nice on the weekends but the door will lock behind you] |
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"A Conversation with Hala Alya"
"Thinking about the relationship between exile and erasure, usually, very few people are exiled without there also being concerted efforts to erase the histories and the places that they came from. Part of exile, part of dispossession, part of the very conscious policy and effort behind that is to dispossess people from their lands, their homes, their villages. You see this with Palestine. You see it in other communities as well. Then they also erase and try to erase the lineage or any relationship or any possibility of return."
via THE RUMPUS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Lloyd Wallace on Language as Form
"As the poet attempts to bring their past into the present, into the poetic medium, attempting to make it a keepable artifact, we can see it being buried by the world, by outer artifice, just as the past is buried by the present. The key pathos—the beauty—of this poem is that as we see the poet speaking, we also see them disappear. So, to amend a previous statement: yes, the poem is full of evidence that the poet has lived. But it’s also evidence that she is disappearing, too." |
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