Raquel Gutiérrez Reviews Darrel Alejandro Holnes' Stepmotherland
Stepmotherland is the 2022 Andres Montoya Prize winning collection by the Afro-Panamanian American writer, performer and educator, Darrel Alejandro Holnes.
Organized in four parts—”Foreigner,” “Inmigrante,” “Citizen,” and “Patriot”—Stepmotherland is a wide-ranging series reminiscent of snapshots clipped on the string of diasporan longing and tacked on the wall to remember. Remembrances that in Holnes’ hands become balms of resistance to anti-Black violence that permeates the hemisphere the characters that people the world of Stepmotherland endure. Readers of Holnes’ new collection will encounter the occasional beam of pride that shimmers in the intergenerational cultural transmissions as well as in the avowed renewal that comes with surrendering to the unabashed desire for love and pleasure.
Stepmotherland offers the multivalent apparitions of suffering that will be familiar to those who have been forced to leave the isthmus otherwise known as Central America. For those unfamiliar, Holnes makes known one such Central American country with its own unique historical wounding, most notably through the fraught infrastructural histories that undergird the construction of the Panama Canal. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the Canal, destroying more than 150 square feet of jungle and severing the land bridge between the North and South American continents. By 1914 the Panama Canal bridged the world divided by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, becoming essential to global trade with 140 maritime routes to over 80 countries (according to the Journal for Shipping and Trade)[1]. In 1990 just as its neighboring countries fought decade-long civil wars and endured genocidal campaigns against indigenous groups, the U.S. invaded Panama to oust Manuel Noriega, a former CIA operative turned drug trade insider.
These are the geopolitical realities that make the heart both sink and race in Stepmotherland, Holnes’ second full-length poetry collection. Holnes most embodied critiques of imperialism live in the first section of the book, “Foreigner.” There he has crafted images that have emerged from the negative space of memories that index the traumatic histories experienced by the speaker of these poems at various ages. What are rites of passage for the young and questioning navigating imperialist violence? What does a child make of U.S. intervention in Central America? In one of the collection’s opening poems, “Scenes from Operation Just Cause,” Holnes opts for a cinematic approach to the end of childhood innocence in the era marked by “strong man” politics. The piercing plot twist in this bit of dialogue where a mother insists the bombardment of Panama is a sign of divine intervention:
MAMA
God wanted them to be American.
The lamp smashes on the floor and broken piece misses my eye and slices
My left cheek.
I see my own blood for the very first time.
BOY
Are the good guys here to get the bad guys, mommy?
MAMA
Let’s hope.
Holnes continues to paint complicated scenes in “20 de Diciembre: When the U.S. Invades Panama,” as he locates the moment of spiritual surrender to the imperial forces behind the “largest US combat operation since the Vietnam War.”[2] The poet delivers a series of unsettling rendered conundrums for a family tested by national bonds yet helmed by a patriarch with ties to the U.S.
Our desperate knocks on their chests echo
a pulse back into their chambers. Then,
a rush of blood shoots into their hands
as they pull triggers to save our father from Noriega’s firing squad
for being too friendly with Uncle Sam.
“Bread Pudding Grandmama” is a poem that doesn’t entirely pivot from the chaos of military intervention as it floats into the ethers of familial memory. Here the poet shepherds the reader into the quieter, domestic space dominated by the figure of the doting grandmother. For many poets of a diasporan experience the foods that occupy the respective ethnic milieu becomes a rhetorical site of contention as it is often the representative object stand-in for a people versus one person’s encounter with phenomena like history or familial intimacy. But here Holmes includes a bread pudding recipe, a dessert created from the impulse to use every scrap of food. One would surmise traveled to various Western hemispheric kitchens from Europe. The kitchen is a scene for bonding over recipe yet the intimacy between grandchild and grandmother is made ambivalent by the overwhelming sense of economic scarcity.
We mix torn apart bread-loaf backs into the batter—/always missed in a ceramic bowl—and watch them
move like tectonic plates.
Holnes manages to turn the mundane into an act of cataclysm.
The second section titled “Foreigner” opens with the poem “Tú,” which features a romantic encounter crackling with energy fueled by the helix of trauma and longing. Holnes makes known the insidious way imperialism animates interpersonal dynamics by revealing a language of desire that is often shrouded in similar registers of imperialist seizure.
So, devour my body as you need,/ breaking into the garden,/ part the wall that keeps our home countries,
my Panama,/ your Rwanda, out on the other side.
The last two sections of the collection, “Citizen” and “Patriot,” feature a range of ekphrastic poems that respond to artists like Kehinde Wiley and Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as films such as the Mexican film “Angelitos Negros.” These compositions pull at intertextual dynamics that salt the cultural memory of Blackness in the Americas with critical gestures towards the white supremacist logics lodged in the project of Latinidad. This is most evident in “Angelitos Negros,” a poem that begins with a scenic description of the much beloved matinee idol and interpreter of Mexican ballads, Pedro Infante. Infante sings inside a chapel to a painter asking that he paint on the walls angels who look like his young Black daughter, a child who has been rejected by her own mother. To that the poet responds:
Tonight, I sing the same song for my morenos absent from my cathedral walls:
O painter, painting with a foreign brush to the rumba of its old world bolero,/
Listen to our angel’s chorus of inocentes morenos muertos.
We morenos in the barrio cook a gumbo quilombo, our little taste of heaven/
Matches and propane and coal stones under a pot of cabra y culebra.
We morenos are brown turned black,/ burnt by fire fired from guardia guns
Here Holnes offers a critique of quotidian melancholy of the mestizo tyrannies of a Spanish-language América that force Black people into the margins, the prisons, or onto the soccer fields. Holnes is also calling attention the poverty of imagination that plagues mestizo artists in their inability to exalt Blackness. How difficult is it to paint the powerful image of Black angels after all. And that the song that Infante had made popular in his version is upended by the version Eartha Kitt sings, and that brings comfort to the speaker in the poem.
Now, Eartha Kitt sings Pintame Angelitos Negros,
the same Andrés Eloy Blanco poem Infante set to song
on thrift store vinyl playing in homemade YouTube clips,
Through my headphones I hear Kitt raise her voice high enough
to swallow Evening if it does not give her a sky
with dark-skinned angels in its clouds
tonight.
Raquel Gutiérrez is an arts critic, writer, poet, and educator. Their first book Brown Neon is out now on Coffee House Press. Gutiérrez is a 2021 recipient of the Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism and a 2017 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. They are faculty for Oregon State University–Cascades’ Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing. Gutiérrez calls Tucson, Arizona, home.