Margin Notes

What I was reading: 

The rhetoric surrounding immigration has been prevalent in recent years. Having Latin American family, I’ve always seen how intrinsically connected Latin America is to the United States — what happens there matters to all the smaller nations south of it. The way Latin Americans are talked about is often through a negative, destructive lens, which can reflect certain realities. However, this narrative blinds the world to the beauty of Latin America — home to some of the most hospitable people in the world. A few weeks ago, I came across the poem Citizenship by Javier Zamora, a native of El Salvador.

Citizenship

it was clear they were hungry
with their carts empty the clothes inside their empty hands

they were hungry because their hands
were empty their hands in trashcans

the trashcans on the street
the asphalt street on the red dirt the dirt taxpayers pay for

up to that invisible line visible thick white paint
visible booths visible with the fence starting from the booths

booth road booth road booth road office building then the fence
fence fence fence

it started from a corner with an iron pole
always an iron pole at the beginning

those men those women could walk between booths
say hi to white or brown officers no problem

the problem I think were carts belts jackets
we didn’t have any

or maybe not the problem
our skin sunburned all of us spoke Spanish

we didn’t know how they had ended up that way
on that side

we didn’t know how we had ended up here
we didn’t know but we understood why they walk

the opposite direction to buy food on this side
this side we all know is hunger

Credit: Unaccompanied Copper Canyon Press, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Javier Zamora. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 20, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

What moves I noticed the author making:

• Title is the only word capitalized – this stresses the importance of having/needing/wanting official citizenship
• No use of punctuation – it seems to be assumed or can be interpreted. It leaves ambiguity.
• Enjambment everywhere
• Repetitive use of words or phrases to emphasize meaning and emphasize displacement (empty, their hands, booth road booth road, etc.)
• Mimicry of form and content, for eg. “fence fence fence” is on one single line and imitates how long this fence (likely the border fence is), “on this side” is one line and “this side” is on the following line – the poem mimics two different sides. The side of the fleeing people and the border fence
• Irony – the word “beginning” is at the end of a verse
• Italicized of “the” and “that” to suggest alienation
• Third last verse starts with “we” – changes to the communal.

Possibilities for Writers:

• Try using minimal or no punctuation
• Take a copy of this poem and add where you think punctuation would go
• Mimic the form and content of an object to emphasize the meaning (where the physical layout of the poem mirrors the subject — like a long, narrow poem representing a fence or scattered words symbolizing broken systems.)
• Repetition of words in a phrase in close line or verse to each other
• Use italicized words to create subtle shifts in meaning or voice.
• Experiment with enjambment — breaking lines unexpectedly to create double meanings or a sense of unfinished thought.
• Focus on small, everyday objects like shopping carts, fences, or dirt to tell a bigger story.
• Describe these objects without naming them — let their presence imply hunger, displacement, or survival.

Michael Clubine is always on the run from Southwestern Ontario and a B.Ed student at UNB. However, one of the few things he enjoys in Ontario is gazing into the summer sunsets at the lake and dreaming about everything under the sun in Muskoka.