geopolitics – silentbroadcast

I’m really honored to be included in this excellent boundary2 collection interrogating race and social difference, edited by Dawn Lundy Martin. This cohort of writers/thinkers has radically shaped my own sense of poetics. My work in this collection examines the psychological effect of globalized geopolitics: I write through the annual spring “Joint Military Exercises” held by South Korea and the US Government in which they “pretend” to siege North Korea. The journal is behind a paywall, but you can order print copies if you don’t have scholarly access. Click on the image to go to Duke University’s (the publisher) website for the journal.

Other contributors include Douglas Kearney, Ronaldo Wilson, Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, Cathy Hong, Bhanu Jacasta Kapil, Tonya M. Foster, Shane McRae, Hoa Nguyen, John Keene, Evie Shockley, Daniel Borzutzky,Vanessa Place, Fred Moten, Lauren Russell, Farid Matuk, Daniel Tiffany,Duriel Estelle Harris, Prageeta Sharma, Jayson Smith, Simone White, Lucas de Lima, Tyrone Williams, Erica Hunt, Zhihui Ang, Lindsay Waters, Eli Friedlander, and Joseph Massad.

Lastly, just wanted to note that the cover image was created by Ronaldo Wilson!

Since February, I’ve been trying to track how the circulating rhetoric between North Korea, the US, and South Korea echoes across the globe to shake even my spirit. Back in February, the DPRK tested another nuclear device and started “saber rattling” in preparation for the ROK/US joint military exercises scheduled in March. I find so many intriguing circuits in this love/longing/fear dance between North/South // East/West. In Underground National, I likened this dance to a dysfunctional love affair.

This new effort, tentatively called Daybook, extends and explores this psychological framework for thinking about these geopolitics. It’s very personal writing, though others may not see it as such. I’m not certain what to call this mode. Perhaps a psycho-geopolitical poetics. Personally, I situate my failed marriage, so many domestic troubles I’ve seen and lived through, in these geopolitical cross-currents, the multi-generational legacies of cultural traumas. I’m trying to understand this dilemma — of bodies and landscapes — through my body. Through language. I’m trying to set myself free. An impossibility. Can I enumerate.

Be black light, Juliette. Furling.
Be a rupture, no cirrus.
Be that torn antler stranded in the snow,
bony finger pointing to the sky. See.
Be that word. Be elsewhere, a presence.
Magnanimous and difficult.
Can you remain.

This writing is a challenge for me, since I’ve never had anything like a “daily” practice.

I don’t know what I’m making. It often aches in the center of my body, where my stomach nestles up against my spine, like a coal there. This project makes me feel small and strangely diaphanous, overwritten, consumed.

**********

from the salient fact repeated early (4/19

We never respond as we should
with comical results
explain educate acknowledge ((frequently
inaction // action

I don’t know for sure
that lack of knowledge
has “low reliability”
no one agrees

already the end?
did it ever begin?

pass
pass on
pass over
pass by
pass the time away
so much to be done
not all of it interesting

~~rain on lens drab & gray pine barren & downs~~

Tag: geopolitics

Daybook: tracing global reverberations