Defacing the Monument
Susan Briante
Published by Noemi Press
Reviewed by Jacqueline Balderrama
In Defacing the Monument (Noemi Press, 2020), Susan Briante highlights monuments in numerous forms—as the physical border wall one might expect but also the written monuments of court documents, immigration papers, and other records that have always shaped society and currently influence perceptions of migration across the U.S.-Mexico border. Here, she invites us to reassess these records in “monumental tasks” of inquiry and, in her words, to “write back through them or into them, to fill in what’s been left out or suppressed.”
This invigorating book stands between genre, intertwining images, documents, erasures, and lyric essay. And this multimedia approach proves to be one of the book’s many strengths. Readers move from annotations over court documents in Operation Streamline funneling unauthorized migrants into the criminal record, to Google Maps of border crossings over the Sonoran Desert, to the din of courtroom language overlaid again and again until the lines form dark smudges as Briante highlights the words: “Illegal,” “Citizen,” “Understand,” “Consequences.” These defacements recognize the absence of human stories within frameworks of power, calling into question the policing and the astounding simplicity made of complex circumstances involving those seeking asylum.
While it certainly embodies documentary poetics, Defacing the Monument also equally pursues immersive discussions on the ethics behind the poetic practice. Here, Briante’s deep personal reflections move the book forward. She also skillfully examines innovations by documentary predecessors such as Muriel Rukeyser, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Abe Louise Young among others. In many ways, she models and reminds us:
[D]ocumentary poetries offer a tradition and a space in which a writer can situate events or experiences within broader histories and fields of reference, without the burdens of mainstream journalism’s anxiety over “balanced coverage,” its obsession for presenting “both sides” to issues that are matters of fact…, its tendency toward representing opinions that favor middle-class white stability.
Defacing the Monument occupies an ever-evolving space of what it means to witness and what it means to write about stories, especially when they are not your own. Like many studying journalism or poetics of witness, Briante too recognizes her own initial desire to “give voice.” But she also assesses this temptation, writing:
But eventually I began to wonder: Who walks that field with me? To whom does it belong? Whose voice can be heard over each step? The grasshoppers take to the air before my footfalls in waves, as if to make the prairie grass into water. How can I continue on my path without harming any potential you?
Through this questioning and transparency in tracing her own significant distance from the experiences she writes on, Briante pursues an awareness of her whiteness, privilege, and participation in frameworks that may perpetuate the same injustices she seeks to challenge. She very much meets us as writers and as readers in the process of defining what the next documentary poetics will look like. “As witnesses, as researchers, as those who possess an ‘imagination enlarged by compassion,’” Briante writes, “we need to understand our documents as well as ourselves within the web of power and processes that produce them.” This in combination with her pointed lyric lines—such as “Systems monster. Data stories us,” and “Can a poem be a flag/ staked like a claim to the future?”—at once serve as a check-in to the documentary poet and a call to thoughtful action. Moreover, blank worksheets at once juxtapose the confined forms Briante defaces and point beyond the book to personally engage her reader and their prospective project. One might easily pick up a pencil and reflect on the question: “Does your name become a seed in the mouth of the document? What grows from it?”
Defacing the Monument accomplishes the important work of demonstrating the same self-examination it asks of its readers, offering a way to critically think through written forms of power and into poetic practices. The book’s inquiries allow for the firm but engaging discussion on the challenges so many writers face when moved to respond to issues beyond their own experience. With a deep sense of shared discourse, Briante positions us for a more inclusive, attentive, and active future, addressing her reader, “Dear documentarian, dear poet, what will you renovate?”