Dulzorada Press, 2023. Translated by Vania Milla. Preface by Margarita Saona; foreword by Yaxkin Melchy; afterword by Silvia Goldman. Illustrations by Louise Castillo. 138 pages.
When cancer is born into a poet’s body, who speaks its birth? In Opening Fear, Teresa Orbegoso’s new book-length poem, cancer speaks first, transubstantiating speech into an occupying force. The wrenching call and response that follows shatters the first-person self whose undoing finds communion with the sick, discarded, and erased. From dispossession, the poem accumulates a radiantly scathing critique of the absurdities, cruelties and depredations of racial capitalism, the system that “sweeps away what is no longer useful… All the sick people in the world.”
Part one, “Surgery,” opens with cancer sovereign and giving orders. The victor in a violent takeover, it occupies the top of the page, narrating its own history and invoking its own powers. This intimate coup annexes the first person, singular and plural, leaving the poet’s subjectivity split and othered. The irruption of fear in her body turns her into cancer’s object. Appearing first as an isolated spectacle encased in ice, she is then deposed to the second and third person, an item on an inventory coldly tabulating specimens. “The cold arrested wound exists / with torn out cancer strands exists / Teresa Orbegoso exists.” Along the bottom of the page, the displaced poet’s voice notates its subjugation in italics, a subaltern sotto voce.“There is a war. The good cells lose. The bad cells are hoisting their victory flag upon my chest.”
Alienated too from her powers of naming, the poet addresses some of her experience to Inger Christensen, the Danish poet whose epics explore the limits and power dynamics of language. “Inger, something keeps taking over my organs. It is something… Something so absolute.” Orbegoso acknowledges her poetic lineage with long epigraphs from Christensen’s It and Alphabet along with an injunction to “talk to your cancer” from Chilean poet Gonzalo Millán, a critic of the Pinochet regime who journaled his struggle with terminal lung cancer. Setting out from Christensen’s “ice ages exist, ice ages exist” in an iceberg, Orbegoso’s speaker charts her course by cross-hatching dialogues between south and north. But the white page is not a neutral space. Its vertical axis reproduces the structural violence of colonization, in which cancer “feeds on me so that it can exist as a God I hate.”
Assuming the functions of a divinity, “my cancer” rules the narrative, preaching its own beatitudes: “Blessed be those who strive to exist / to wash the feet of the god of disease / Against which wall we have fallen.” From decaying hospital spaces, the poem probes transformations made by wounding. Saint Rose of Lima, the first canonized saint born in the Americas, presides over stations of women bleeding as fear telescopes time into an overwhelming abbreviation: “From cancer I come and to cancer I go.” Within this foreshortening, birth and death, mothering and being mothered metastasize into one another, doubling and reversing roles. Both a monstrous baby and an atrophied mother, cancer nurses painfully at and inside the poet’s breast and pronounces her an orphan. Its usurpation of power and language sends her reeling back to “the messy memory of my childhood.” And in her fearful isolation, cancer infantilizes and consoles her: “It holds my lung. It rocks it with its incomplete arms.”
Cancer’s births, however, quickly exceed the human. Recursive and fractal, they multiply similitudes backwards and forwards in time. Its metamorphoses rupture the architecture of the catalogue; the interplay of scale and specificity delivers gorgeous cascades of juxtaposition. Bouncing from atoms to galaxies, these eclectic congregations chime with lucidly tender surprise. As cancer’s depredations grow to planetary size, the scale of violation becomes transpersonal and communal, the common substance in which the discarded, displaced, and dispossessed are intermixed in a communion of brokenness. “My cancer says: Capitalism breaks like bread and on any given day, all fears are touched.”
Rather than plunging into individual despair, the poem turns finally to the common, shared nakedness of hunger and thirst.
From the destruction produced by globalization, the poem indicts the violent clash through which the global north dominates, erases, and exploits “the South American continent / where lonesome indigenous people of multiple cultures / have lost their memory / without being able to stop drawing images / that they no longer understand or / that they have also mixed with symbols / of the civilization of brutality.” The zigzagging record of these submerged, deformed, and dismembered mother tongues and mythologies spits back an anti-colonial abecedarium. It makes astonishing music, lapidary and biting.
Inger, did you know that quipus exist?
quipus exist
they are silent marks
sustaining the organs of a submerged culture…
…if the aji Amarillo in Polvos Azules exists the aji Amarillo
above all things exists above all things where the hunger of
the rich exists above all things where the justice
of the Indians exists as peace as rage as minced peace
These omnivorous lists incorporate Babel, Borges, Cortazar, Ino Moxo, Fujimorism, Lispector, Tupac Amaru, the Galapagos, and the whole dying Anthropocene: “Extinction. Inside the chessboard of nature where we are all pawns of the same game.” Yet as the poem obeys cancer’s commandment—“Listen to what exists”—it pushes beyond fear of inevitable collective death built on the daily agonies of systematic scarcity. The second section, “wound,” mounts a denunciation of “the resounding politics of nothingness” and their scandalous inequities. Pinballing litanies repurpose reportage to invoke “the sad holy communion of those who are left over / and always an army ploughing through peoples black people copper people…”
One of the poem’s triumphs is that it makes social criticism deeply pleasurable. It feasts on a glut of ironies: “guanacos and guano the complete picture of Union Construction workers / the proletarians and slum dwellers of Barrio 31 exist the horrible expression / of capital exists with or without Trump.” Like a jester deflating the grandiosity of its own laments, its lists curate absurdity by constantly shifting between hapless specifics and general travesty. This dilation and contraction of perspective lampoons the project of taxonomy by constantly mutating in scale. The effect is a deliciously tactile bewilderment that keeps opening like a kaleidoscope:
the khipu kamayuq exist and lianas exist;
the truths exist, the intense, the catholic,
the ethical ones; the Cyclotron particle accelerator exists
and the white cockroach;
and the carnivorous flowers exist and the graceful walking on the rivers of the Amazon of
the lizard Jesus Christ where
the birdcatchers exist, the birdcatchers exist
in jungles where the people sculpt mermaids on wood
who don’t know the snow that Alaskan children play with.
Beneath this, the counterpoint: “The cancer of need is a giant. It crushes the shacks of the poor. It crushes the flying skirts of women. It crushes. The citizens do not exist.”
Rather than plunging into individual despair, the poem turns finally to the common, shared nakedness of hunger and thirst. The initial “I” frozen in a solo odyssey has melted into the figure of a water spring. The last section, “scar,” heals itself by stitching a heartbeat horizontally, left to right, across the white scar tissue of the page. Read separately, the righthand side of the page forms a pulse repeating “the will” and “the heart.” It is a risky starkness after the lush excess of the previous three sections. And its clarity delivers. In plain, stripped language, the ending peels through layers of social personhood to offer the sustenance of paradox: the scarred, empty chest becomes a font whose power is clear and unwilled giving.
