Small Harbor Publishing, 100 pp, December 20, 2023
With confessional lyricism, exactness, and rigor, MT Vallarta’s 2022 Laureate Prize-winning poetry collection, What You Refuse to Remember, attunes us to the worlds that are in the small moments in time that rest at the limits of memory and apprehension. These small moments, which we often recognize as slowness, delay, and other textures and sensations of chronicity, are often imagined as too “minor” to warrant intrigue, despite also being sites of slow death (to borrow from Lauren Berlant) marked by small quotidian violences. These ordinary violences, which include processes related to perpetual global ecological degradation, also include the mundane and ongoing regimes of duress that come with existing outside ableist white supremacist colonialist cishetero- and homonormative scripts of embodiment minoritized subjects must endure every day. But as Vallarta reveals through their collection’s examinations of gender, sexuality, colonialism, diaspora, and dis/ability, sitting with these “minor” temporal experiences reveal the knowledges that emerge through queer, trans, and crip of color inhabitations of the world. Queer, trans, and crip of color embodiments break down the clear and orderly organizations of hegemonic (which is to say, colonial white supremacist and global capitalist) imaginings of time.
The collection establishes its critique of white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal temporality in pieces like “Ten Confessions.” The second poem in the collection, this piece consists of a series of ten confessions, with each one comprising its own stanza. The sixth confession reads
Everyone comments on how well I am healing but I associate well
with too fast and I associate fast with ending so I sob alone on Sunday
nights and call my best friend and tell him how I wish we were all just
books––just paper and spine––and so I watch scary movies alone and
laugh and laugh as Kiernan Shipka croaks ‘hail Satan’ before being
shot (16).
Virtuosic line breaks (standouts include “I wish we were all just / books” and “Kiernan Shipka croaks ‘hail Satan’ before being / shot”) demonstrate Vallarta’s subtle wit. The casual tone and single-sentence structure, meanwhile, imbue the above stanza with the intimacy of a 3AM talk with a bestie illuminated by the glow of bedroom light. Moreover, this confession reveals feeling “well” and “healing” as specific experiences of time that are connected to capitalistic––which is also to say, normative colonialist white supremacist––demands for efficiency. The prioritization of speed above all else erases the potentialities of “minor” experiences, sensations of time marked by fragility and unwellness. While these experiences of fragility and vulnerability are painful, Vallarta illustrates the fresh wound as another way of being open to the world. The above stanza from “Ten Confessions” asks us to pay attention to the tiny realities of living in the wake of harm and trauma, realities that get obfuscated when we adhere to overly simplistic narratives of “feeling better.” The other poems in the collection pick up on this work by richly and compellingly revealing how western ideologies of “wellness” are inextricably tied to settler colonial formations. Subaltern subjects, within this understanding, can never truly be “well.”
“The Filipino diaspora is a transpacific current of chronic sickness” reads one of the most chilling and earth-shattering moments in the entire collection, a single-line lecture whose insight and truth are so obliterating that it has to inhabit a blank white page all by itself (33). The line is part of the prose poem, “A Gesture Toward,” a standout piece which reveals how, for those of us who inhabit chronically ill racialized-gendered-sexualized embodiments, colonial violence is what makes and keeps us sick. Colonial violence is what dooms us to live as “half-animal[s], half-corpse[s]/ waiting to be masticated,” i.e., Filipinx, short of breath and in bed (59). The word, “chronic,” for Vallarta, signals the simultaneous, inextricable chronicities, as encapsulated in their usage of the phrase, “chronic empire,” to describe the ongoing disabling and debilitating death/work of colonialism and imperialism. Colonial harm, in fact, renders queer, trans, disabled, and racialized bodies incurably ill, both through its impossible standards of wellness and through its everyday practices of violence.
Vallarta’s What You Refuse to Remember is a text that interrogates the intrinsic compulsory able-bodiedness rooted in colonial racial capitalist organizations of time––experiences of time that work to exclude the chronicities of queer, trans, and crip-of-color life. The collection demonstrates how time imprints itself on the materiality of a self, how time weighs upon the body and renders us perpetually sick in order to reveal minoritarian Otherness as a temporal state and, perhaps most mic-droppingly, a chronic ailment in and of itself.