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1. 1 2020-03-26T20:38:55+00:00 Craig Dietrich 2d66800a3e5a1eaee3a9ca2f91f391c8a6893490 Nikki Darling Craig Dietrich 1 plain 2020-03-26T20:38:55+00:00 Craig Dietrich 2d66800a3e5a1eaee3a9ca2f91f391c8a6893490

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• 1 2020-03-26T20:38:55+00:00 Nikki Darling 1 plain 2020-03-26T20:38:55+00:00 Nikki Darling is a writer, artist, and performer based in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from CalArts and is a PhD candidate in USC’s literature and creative program. Darling’s music criticism and essays appear regularly or have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Art Book Review, Tomorrow Magazine, and Public Books. She is also a columnist at KCET Artbound. Her essay “Appropriate For Destruction” was included in Best Music Writing 2010. 
  
  

  The trauma of racism is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self and has always seemed to me a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis- strangely of no interest to psychiatry. 

  -Toni Morrison 
  
  Out of this narrative will emerge a chalk outline. It is the body of a woman.
   – Kate Zambreno, Heroines 
  
  W_h_e_r_e_ _I_’m_ _F_r_o_m_ _
  
  They say she’s crazy, Fedelina, she walks the streets in a small knit cap and blue western bandana wrapped around her once long black hair, now lightning white and tucked beneath. She stops me on my route to the post office, on errand to send postcards to friends in Los Angeles. Mi’jita, she calls, I turn. My mother has told me about Fedelina, that she wanders and walks, that she was raised in Wagon Mound by a Comanche family that found her on the llano. That’s the plot of Dances With Wolves, I snarl, the heat turning my brain into scrambled eggs. No estupida, she says, smacking the back of my head lightly, that’s the story of Fedelina. Every day it’s a getting closer, going faster than a roller coaster, love like yours will surely come my way, eh eh eh. Every day it’s a getting faster everyone says go on and ask her, love like yours will surely come my way. I have come here to this place to write. It smells like Christmas and rain and I sit in the large backyard garden cross legged on an old wooden chair, or “Indian Style” or “crisscross-apple-sauce” as the small politically correct pre-schoolers that my blonde godson, who I co-parent, know it. But I’m here in the Land of Enchantment, not the land of Los Angeles, PC Montessori. Giant red and black ants the color of licorice and twizzlers, cover my flip-flops like a swarm in a horror film. Scurrying below my Indian styled feet, there is a mob, waiting to devour me. Historically this is accurate and I laugh out loud at my own clever word play, which is all I do really, in this strange endeavor of constantly trying to be alone to “write.” There is no explaining to those who don’t write, the mysterious alchemy that must take place in order to turn these riddles into puzzles that can be solved, stretched into the ribbon called ‘sentence.’ The bow we call language. I cannot “schedule” this ennui- and that’s what it is, a passive sadness pushing words onto a page like a fast moving train- no matter how many books I read on procrastination or time management, or how often I promise a friend I will be done by 5. If the ennui strikes at 4:50, I must follow it to the end, until it unravels into meaning. I’ve been at this since the day I learned to tell stories and I know myself the writer, quite well. It can be a selfish life. I am surrounded on all sides by the light green mossy color of cacti, the deep rich purple of wild flowers and fuchsia from the Holly Hocks that grow like weeds from every plot of orange earth. In the close distance are the Firs, stoic and patient, hawks and whippoorwills, nose-diving in silence. I am also surrounded by books, most of them ransacked from my Tia’s bookshelves. The Best of Walden, and Civil Disobedience, Kate Zambreno’s electric Heroines, which I purchased a week earlier in an art bookstore in Chelsea, when I took an impromptu trip to visit friends, with the money I was given by USC, to finish this project.
  
  There is an old beat copy of something called Forgotten People, A Study of New Mexicans by a man named George I. Sanchez, who was born and raised in the North Valley, where my people come from, and Voice’s, An Anthology of Nuevo Mexicano Writers edited by Rudolfo A. Anaya, whose own stories of New Mexican life were all I had at one time to connect me to a past I’d never known. Last October while knee deep into my novel, Fade Into You, and was given this grant to finish, I suffered a Bi-Polar relapse, throwing off my equilibrium. It became a struggle just to communicate in a sane and rationale manner, no less continue the book in any sense-making way. During this period I experienced an upswing in work. Suddenly, a decade worth of submitting, applying, grant writing, reading, hosting, came to roost. I had projects commissioned for me, I found myself courted by editors I’d previously stalked. It was, in all, a radical turn or events, most definitely in need of celebration. However I could not have been less prepared mentally to accept these fine rewards of labor. I turned down much of the work, unable to commit to the rigors of deadlines. Instead I dove headfirst into my experimental non fiction, which I’d been toying with for close to two years, yet had never gathered the courage to attack. Essay’s patched together like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I discovered the work of Lynd Ward, specifically his beautiful 1929 wood cut novel God’s Man and it’s simple, elegant profound way of communicating the artist’s struggle, without a single word. I had taken up issue with Language and the very nature of its definition, if it was in fact, even a consistent thing. I looked suspiciously at my copies of Strunk and White. Bibles commissioned for an imagined established entity; Language, another concept to be learned, lest one do it the “wrong” way. Ward’s book itself is comprised entirely of images, and I felt them reverberate inside me in a way I hadn’t experienced in many years. My mother’s name is Fedencia, I was born on the llano in 1935, I don’t know how old I am, but that’s what my bracelet says, this one here, the plastic one that’s brown and tattered, it’s from when your mamma was a wee mi’jita. They took me away, on a yellow stretcher. They told me my son had stuck a gun inside his mouth and pulled the trigger but this I don’t believe because my mi’jito eats dinner with me every night. I had a husband once and then he was lost to the war, the one in Europe with the little man with the black moostach and blonde men like fantasma’s, white skin and blue eyes, ice of night. Oh, see that Pepsi can mija, grab it for me, I take them to compadre Alfredo, he gives me a nickel each. I knew your grandma Mary, she used to pull my hair in class, but she was playful, she went away too, to be with your abuelo in La Junta, that’s in Calaratho. I knew a boy he was my son, he was my mijo and he died. He was in the other war, the green war, he was buried on the llano near the fort where he was born. He put a gun inside his mouth and pulled the trigger. I am also surrounded by women, my mother, my 43 year-old sister, and my Tia Lia, who was my mother’s childhood best friend. My mother and sister have also planned a visit to my aunt’s large New Mexican adobe, where our family has lived for hundreds of years- literally. It must always be kept and maintained by a family member and it must always be open to each member of the family. After my tia retired from thirty years of working in The ABQ as a social worker she inherited it from her mother, my great tia, and it is hers now until she chooses someone in her will, to pass the torch. Of all our family I come the most often, spend the most time. Lately she asks me things like, ‘you like it here, mija? No?’ I want to say yes but my fear of not being able to keep it as warm and meticulous and blooming as she has, leaves me shrugging most often. My mother and sister have descended on the home with their bickering, late night sangria and beer drinking, my aunt clucks her tongue and asks them to get fire wood, pull weeds in the lush and flowering garden, which also grows our families marijuana, which my great great tia sold to men passing through town during the depression, along with homemade choke cherry wine and ham sandwiches served with warm pinto beans. My tia says as a child her mother told her that during the night the bottles would often explode under the bed where they were kept and she’d step down to use the outhouse and land on shattered glass. As a result she diligently made her children put on slippers each time they stepped out of bed. Even now she places a pair at my bedside whenever I visit, even though choke cherry wine hasn’t exploded in the house for nearly eighty-six years. In the morning my mother and sister rush the chicken coop to kill a bull snake that’s been stealing eggs. My sister points her handgun at the snake, and my Tia a shotgun. That is the way of this land, still and it seems always.
  
  A week before I arrive, a young man, hardly twenty, walked into a Big R, a local chain that carries riffles, hunting equipment, farming material and other such items, asked to see a gun from the counter, loaded it with his own bullet, held it to his head and pulled the trigger. It made the local news and not much else. My Tia grows her own marijuana in the garden, separate from our family cache and late at night her friends gather from the nearby homes. All three hundred of the town’s residents are interloped with one another’s histories. My sister, who is ten years my senior, and I have quiet passive aggressive battles, my mother who sweats profusely while cooking decadent traditional meals; fry bread, red chili potatoes, calabacitas, bitches and moans about the heat, that only breaks when the sky cracks open in late afternoon, sending down a handful of Zeus rockets and thunder filled with rain. They have come it seems, unconsciously to this place, as it pulls it’s descendants near, a continuous babbling matter of ghosts, holding tight with spindly wrists, not ever fully letting go. I am here trying to hermit away, as I have always been known to do. It is my life’s ambition to be invited to the busiest party, only to spend the evening on a pile of coats staring at my phone. The people in my life seem to know this, that my deepest desire is to disappear from their prying eyes, I cannot read a book inside my grandmother’s house unless I want it hidden the next morning. Like so many of the stories that I am trying to write, huddled away beneath a tree, searching for a secret corner, I can’t seem to untangle from this past. For once, perhaps, that’s the story to be told. I think sometimes of all the Christmas cards I never saved. This was a real bustling town, I used to have some pretty teeth. The Wig Wam was my most favorite bar. Sometimes I go inside and have a drink. I come from Springer not far off, my padre was from the Boys Reform School, he saw mi mama at a dance in Roy. Do you know about Kenny McHoon? Oh Springer is full of gringos, they chased my padre out, the cowboys, and we came to Wagon Mound because it was friendly to the Ranchero. Kenny and some boys from town rode up the mesa in a truck with different wheels, they were wild boys, oh they could dance. Kenny, see he liked me, he passed a note in class and then your Mary passed it back to me, she smiled real silly cos I think she knew Kenny had written something sweet, he was like that, always doing little things. I opened it and inside was a seed. I laughed I did, I looked at him, sitting up front, and raised my shoulders and he blushed. Holy Hock, he whispered. And I remembered. His mother had the most beautiful red, blood red Holy Hocks and I always said, Kenny, when are you going to give me one of those? So he brought the seed. Each photo album yields more treasures than the last. My tio’s in Raiders and Ozzy shirts, hamming it up in late seventies Polaroid’s, small cousins playing air guitar in Nuevo Mexico alley’s covered in gravel, long dark curly hair falling over deeply tanned shoulders. The men in my family like heavy metal, they are vain and beautiful. Chiseled cliché’s of what’s envisioned when one envisions a handsome Injun, even though we are Mestizo, or “home grown American’s” as my tia Lily likes to say. Arms crossed, pillowy lips and steely black eyes. But they are also goofballs, and drunks, artists and deep currents of spirit, the kind that come from never having lived away from the land. From having to grow food and pull a plow, whack a chicken and steal its eggs, or leave an animal fur in the barn, for a new litter of kittens, that arrive each winter and spring with alarming regularity. We’re stuffed into my sister’s rental car driving out to the city of Roy, which is somehow even smaller than Wagon Mound, we are irritable and unused to one another’s eccentricities. We are going to see the canyon between the two small towns, which opens its mouth like a green and purple tortoise, mossy teeth gumming the edges of the river that cuts through the valley below. Turquoise silt veins run along the orange and red walls of the Mesa on either side.
  
  The road has been carved into the stone, bright wildflowers of every shape and color dot the highway where the asphalt meets the dirt. We stop and take pictures, posing before the behemoth of nature, trying to blend in, like we belong here, and we do. My mind started to unravel at an early age, or I guess you could say I became aware of its unique way of processing information and emotion. I’ve always felt a bit like a kite with a too long tail, whipping circles in the wind. Pictures of the men in my family cover the walls, dating back until the birth of photography, the women too, but they possess a more pulled together look of dignity. In our family women die from old age, men die of tragedy. My cousin Cristobal, who was killed by a drunk driver in 2009, along with a car of three other teenagers, coming home from a dance, is the latest boy to fall. The driver got off with probation. An uncle who went mad, according to the stories, and drove his truck into a bed of water, the lungs filling into darkness. The stillness of the after rain. A puddle to make its way back to heaven, until it rains down again. On one of our nightly walks toward the rainbow colored mesa, my tia informs that almost everyone in the town, “Gets a check” for bi-polar. Drunks or loonies. I nod my head, having been to rehab in 2006 at the behest of my undergrad university, I too am an alcoholic crazy. My sister eats from a bag of bbq pork rinds and sips a Pepsi, she laments in the gossipy tradition of our familia, that everyone we are related to is either a product of inbreeding, or crazy. Oh yeah, she smirks, we’re all nuts. At first I roll my eyes at what I presume is her resident of Phoenix, Arizona, casual classism, which coats her ever so slightly. Although now amongst closer research I find that there is more truth there than I’m willing to admit. She has also come searching for answers to her own project, a massive Ancestry.com effort encompassing 500 years of our existence in North America, until there is nothing left but survival and adobes, held only to the tradition of story telling, where no records can be found. She is also two years deep into her endeavors, and although we are both engaged in our family history it is interesting to note that both our research results although the same, bear different meanings to us, showcasing in real time how archival projects are often biased. As a somewhat seasoned journalist weaned on the bible of Didion, I’m familiar with having a story before you have the facts. It’s the Jeopardy way of doing things. I was born on the llano, I don’t know how old I am but my bracelet, this one here, it says 1937, do you know how old that would make me, mi’jita? No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. See that weed there? That’s celicta, wild spinach. It grows for free. Mi mama used to make it with garlic and onion but you blanch it first, then chop it real fine, then toss it with manteca and mustard seed. During the depression our people we were like the cattle, grazing the llano for food. We also ate these things called bird legs. The little kids used to call them that because they look little like bird legs, see? Verdolagas. They have leaves like feet. We ate them too, we’d have to fight the goats. You prepare them with manteca and mustard seed, but first you blanche them and cut them fine. We ate so many beans mi’jita, because we had not anything else to eat, you see? The llano provides. I’m also surrounded by anger and the llano, both of which are petulant and can wail, breaking eerie silence like an emergency horn blaring through the streets. There’s anger here to be sure, it’s sizzling under the roof around noon, when the dust and wind kick themselves into turbulent storms the size of small houses, that dance in gravel lots until they lose power, turning back into easy breezy. The clouds have two colors, white and black. The sky has more colors than words. There are other things to think about. My tia takes me to a town meeting. There is no police presence in town, Wagon Mound gets an occasional Mora County officer who wanders down when one of the local women calls the policia on a drunk husband or boyfriend, tearing things off the wall and delegating purple eyes and busted lips with unyielding impunity. This is discussed, the lack of care the county gives to these people, the lack of recognition even for their existence, a nuisance even to still exist. The town is populated mostly with the ancestors of those who held their fists tight and would not relinquish their land. It was all later taken of course, but most of it has been repurchased through legal channels. These people, my people, they won’t let go. They are a spot on a white map, refusing to unsmudge. The latest assault is a company from Philadelphia, angling to bring in fracking and declare the mountains territory of preservation. A fancy way of removing ownership from the shamans and rancheros who have used the land for centuries, for sacred reasons.
  
  
  There is a lawyer here, a white one, he looks bored, and then he sees me and does a double take. I smile, give a hand up fingers wiggle wave, almost blow a kiss then stop myself. I can be a real snotty bitch; myself livened and emboldened by my father’s white Angeleno blood. Entitlement sits on my white shoulders as it sits on his bored ones. The lawyer looks startled. I’m a new face, an unfamiliar white face. I’m sitting with my ancestors. An old man stands, he’s wearing a John Deer hat and flannel work shirt, his jeans are worn in. He recounts in a clear unwavering voice why the mountains belong to us. To his familia. We all break into applause. Fuck us once, our mistake, fuck us twice, America’s a bitch, try to fuck us three times and well, fuck you. The town is drunk, the town is violent, but the town is scared, the town is liberal, the town is filled with artists and thinkers. Libraries on the edge of town have regular attendance. These are rural clever intelligent people who will not be cast aside. The man in the suit leaves. A small victory for today, but if the town has learned anything, there will be another white man coming soon. Always, the white man is waiting to take, armed with legal documents and degrees bought with blood. So the house stays cool but the heat seeps in, the old adobe mud has been patched and re-patched more times than one can count, and the heat knows all it’s secret crevices and enters like a cat. It rests above our heads when we nap in the afternoon, shades and curtains drawn, dogs inside. Lily starts to tell us about some cousins, there are so many I can’t keep track. It seems my mother raised me on another planet, one where family ties were balloon strings you either could or didn’t have to hold onto, out here on the llano, your story is your map. They came around the mountain, laughing and drinking like wild boys do, hanging off the truck like those Donkey’s in Pinnotchio, I saw that at the Zia in Springer with Jean and Norma, we were so scared we were! No! No! We cried, don’t turn us into burros! I was just a little bug. A woman from the tribe who was my mother took me as a baby from the other side of the mesa and they put the cow brand to my cheek and I am branded now on this spot that no one can see. My sister is at her end though, the heat has rankled her beyond comfort, we are city girls born and raised. She can no longer listen with open ears. As sweat clings to my upper lip and temple, I too, share her desire for silence. I can feel her twisting tighter, teeth clenched. She is a headache without aspirin. We can’t escape though, the outside is rugged and alive, we must it seems, acquiesce. The boys they came flying down the mountain mija, around the mesa, past the canyon, through the valley and there was a pop. The white cross remembers and so do I. Grab that can mi’jita, compadre Alfredo gives me a nickel each. You see I was flying too that night and when I heard about Kenny I planted that seed. He planted that seed in me. Let’s go to the Wig Wam and dance. Love like yours will surely come my way. I say, it’s an ass not glass, so baby, shake it but don’t break it! Look at the smoke from your cigarette, it looks like white clouds covering the black clouds, covering the moon. And behind it, that flash? That’s God, he’s taking a picture. Walk with me awhile mi’jita, there’s so much more to say.
  -Nikki Darling