On Saturation
My Lit & Luz Keynote
Since I’m on a tight deadline this week, and also, I love this piece, I thought I’d send out the keynote lecture I delivered for October’s Lit & Luz Festival. I love Lit & Luz so much—it’s a nearly perfect, very weird, bilingual literary/arts festival. It is also biannual: Chicago in October and CDMX the following March, and includes cross-border collaboration and conversation between Chicago and Mexican artists. I’ve loved attending and participating whenever possible, and I was thrilled to be offered the opportunity to keynote the festival in Chicago last year.
While it very clearly is angled towards a specific time and place and audience, I stand by it, even now, after the election, after everything that’s happened since October.
This year’s theme for Lit & Luz is the idea of saturation, saturación. It’s a theme inspired by what it feels like to be a person alive and sort of absorbing media during an election year, the absolute overwhelm and inundation that comes along with it. While Mexico has gotten theirs over with, here in the US we are just about a week and a few days out, and things really feel like they’re reaching total saturation, and that saturation is intense! It feels like every election I’ve been able to vote in has been described as “the most important election of our lifetimes.” And the worst part is—that they are! They have been!
There is so much to care about, so much at stake, both for ourselves and our safety and peace of mind, for our friends and families, but also for the lives of thousands of people we may never meet. Here in the United States, our election season has included discussions of immigration, and whether or not this country should undertake mass deportations of undocumented people, whether we should close our doors to migrants, to people at our doors, asking for our help. There are also questions of resources. How, as a nation, are we spending our money? Are we spending it to make the lives of the people that live here easier and kinder, to provide necessary services to everyone who calls this country home, or to buy bombs that have killed men, women and children across the globe in Gaza?
In Mexico, the issues people voted back in June on were, among others, also questions of migration and of resources—would they continue collaborating with the United States to militarize their borders, to turn back migrants, often violently? Would they continue allowing multinational corporations to use Mexican resources extractively, leaving behind decimated ecosystems, uninhabitable places that in turn displaced people from their homes?
These are not light questions, they are questions of survival, they are questions that ask us, at a deeply moral and personal level, to think of people other than ourselves. The promise that elections make us is that we, as a citizenry (and more on that in a minute), get to answer those questions—but that’s a promise that rarely, if ever, gets borne out. Every cycle, elections involve a tremendous amount of organizing, of activism, of demanding better from our disque representatives within and without the system—and also a tremendous amount of frustration as the understanding sinks in that there are limits to our voices in political systems that, in both countries, are saturated with money, with greed, with the detritus of capitalism.
Let us stay here, for a minute, on this idea of the citizenry. “Citizenship” as it were, in this country, is a highly conditional state—conditional on your birthplace, the amount of money in your bank account, on your arrest record—and therefore often on the color of your skin. This citizenship that voting promises grants you a voice in our electoral system is already a narrowed, limited view of who lives in our neighborhoods, who makes up our families, who sits around our tables and makes up our community.
And I think with all of that in the air this year—these limited, hamstrung ways in which we’re given a voice on issues that matter en nuestras entrañas, down to our bones— the main feeling I have, what I am saturated with, if you will, is grief. Is this the best we can do? To argue for, not the flourishing, not the health, not the growth but rather the bare-bones survival of our fellow humans? Of the earth itself? To continually place questions of capital in opposition to living beings and watch as time and time again, the system decides in favor of finance? These are questions that are so lacking in care and compassion and imagination that I can only feel grieved that this is where we are.
And I don’t think I’m alone in that. In fact, I feel like every time I talk to someone about, you know, everything that’s going on there’s denial, there’s anger, there’s bargaining, there’s depression. There’s a lot of depression.
What I am not seeing—and this is probably more down to the caliber of my friends and loved ones than an overall mood—but what I’m not seeing is acceptance. I’m seeing people continuing to fight, continuing to protest, continuing to make their plans for liberation despite this huge, hugely expensive political machine grinding its way to election day. And I’d argue that that, too, is a different kind of saturation.
In an essay written in the aftermath of 9/11, the philosopher Judith Butler argues that grief—that desolation at the loss of the other, at dispossession from a community or place, perhaps at the feeling that your country itself has lost its way—that grief shows us the ways and places in which we are entangled with each other. “Let’s face it,” they write. “We are undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”
We are undone by each other, but in that, we are also made up of each other. I am made up of my dad’s curiosity, my mother’s stubbornness, my sister’s honesty, my sibling’s righteousness, my husband’s tenderness, my teachers’ lessons, my friends' humor and their creativity and their care. I am made up of, my politics are made up of the countless conversations I’ve had with folks who came to the US to find safety for themselves and their families, of the long talks with colleagues and comrades who are working to make the world a better place, of the people who took the time to correct me when I was ignorant or misinformed. I am made up of all the art that’s moved me and the artists who have made it, the books that have changed me and the people who wrote them. To zoom out even more: I am made up of Lake Michigan and the trees in my front yard and the squirrels that live in them, the Skokie Lagoons and the blue herons and the muskrats I saw every week this summer. I would be undone without them. I would guess that you probably have your own list of beings that you are made up of too, maybe overlapping and intersecting with mine, your own list of characteristics you borrowed or inherited or learned from the people you love the best, ideas you cribbed from conversations and art, places and people and creatures that feel like home.
This, in itself, is another kind of saturation. It’s an acknowledgement that we are permeable, that everything we are we owe to other people, that we exist in webs of if not love and community then at the very least mutuality. An acknowledgement that we are undone by each other—that without the other we would be lost to ourselves. This is not always an easy acknowledgement, particularly when we live in such an individualistic society, one that elevates self-reliance and pulling yourself up by your boot-straps, one that tells us that someone who can’t stand alone is weak. But if I can convince you of anything this afternoon, it is to lean even farther into that saturation, to not just acknowledge but to celebrate the ways in which we are entangled and porous, in which we are woven one into the other.
Take language—I’m a translator, I work between English and Spanish, transferring one to the other and back. There’s something all-encompassing about translation—it takes your whole brain, obviously, in making connections and deciphering new ways to say the same thing, but it also takes your body—gut feelings and the memories so deep they’re stored in your bones.
When I speak Spanish, I’m speaking the language of Cortez and Malintzin, Sor Juana and Gioconda Belli, Cervantes and Marquez. It’s also my own language—the words taught to me by my mother when I was just learning to ask for what I wanted, the made up language composed of malapropisms of my siblings and I as we were learning to talk, the borrowed words from English, the patterns of sentences and 1980s slang I unknowingly absorbed from my parents ways of speaking and made my own.
This language is the water I stand in, the well I draw from. There are tributaries feeding my spot in the river, both above and below the earth. This same river, a little further upstream, is the one the 17th century poet nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz drew from, and when I say the word “mujer” or the word “fe,” these are words that have been fundamentally altered by her having written about them some 300 years ago. The Spanish she wrote, in turn, was as influenced by her time in the Viceroy’s court as a lady-in-waiting as it was by the Nahuatl she learned from her mother’s household staff as a child; as influenced by the Spanish of Hernan Cortez who had first come to Mexico just 129 years before her birth as by the language of Malintzin, the Nahua woman who served as his interpreter, his slave and the mother of one of his children. This was the water Sor Juana drew from, and what she returned to the river was forever altered by having passed through her hands.
When I speak or write, my words flow out from my own little eddy to rejoin the wider stream—my turns of phrase become part of the Spanish that exists in the world, just as Sor Juana’s did, able to be picked up and passed around, drawn up to drink from and to be appropriated by another wader. In this way, language is made up of the personal and the cumulative—each of us standing in our own space, absorbing the words around us and contributing to the greater stream. Like the waters of the river, it’s an inevitable, inseparable commingling of the collective and the individual. Language would not work if we could not share it, but the individual impressions we leave and the baggage we bring with us on each word we say matter too.
Language, and writing, this thing I’ve given my life to, this thing that permeates me, is the result of this same kind of interweaving, allows us to bring into our minds friends and strangers alike, the genius of Sor Juana and the equal, if different, genius of whatever teen girl first gave us, “pero, like.” All this language is all the more powerful for having been co-created—every conversation a miracle of individuality and collaboration.
Literature and art are places where that interrelation is easier to celebrate because we have practices for it, names for it. We can call it citation or acknowledgement or collaboration or reference or homage, and art gives us language to be deliberate and generous in pointing out the places where our work shows the way we are saturated in the work of others.
And that is, essentially, what we are here to celebrate this week, during Lit & Luz—the building of relationships, the artistic interdependencies between two countries, the celebration of the ways we have, despite borders and politics and distance, wrapped our minds around the same questions, made the world clearer by using each other’s work like lenses.
It is a very specific kind of acknowledgement of who we are to one another. The collaborations that this festival makes space for highlight the ways that our passions and talents and interests fit together to create a more coherent, more vibrant whole, shows us that engaging in this kind of togetherness can lead in surprising new directions. And so then what is left to us, as artists and audience (if such a distinction can be made) but to take these lessons and carry them out into the world, into what remains of this election year and beyond it.
I have talked a little bit already about how difficult and frightening it can be to acknowledge that we are reliant on each other, and I think that fear is over and over again reflected in our isolationist, nativist national policies. Big beautiful border walls and mass deportations and, for that matter, sharply curtailing asylum and not acknowledging the presence or the human rights of the millions of undocumented people who already live in this country—these are all reflections of that fear.
I think that the grief that I opened this talk with, the presentiment of loss that many of us are carrying around these days is, in fact, an absence of that fear. It is an acknowledgement of how much we have to lose by the separation and fragmentation of our communities, an acknowledgement of how much we have already lost. It can be so easy to let this version of the story be the one that sinks into you, the one that shapes your actions. There are so many ways that the system is set up that lets this grief and these losses feel inevitable, that lets you get saturated with the bad rhetoric and the sadness and the anger. And these are not feelings that are useless—this anger and sadness can take us to the streets, it can push us into demanding change, but they are also unsustainable feelings.
What I am calling you to is not just to vote as interdependent beings but to live like them. To let yourself be saturated not by fear but by the relationships that sustain you. To find ways to use artistic practice of citation and borrowing and referencing and homage in your day-to-day life and name them, even if just to yourself.
“I am making coffee in the way my mom taught me.”
“I am at this protest to honor my friend who can’t come out.”
“I am looking after my neighbors in the way my grandmother looked after me.”
“I understand this issue differently because once, I watched someone online share their life with me in a video and it changed my mind.”
This, too, in its own way, gives us a reason to fight and change things, reminds us that our voices and our actions are strongest when they are collective and embodied, re-embeds us in the communities our political system seek to alienate us from.
We live in a world that seems intent on saturation—whether it’s the TV in the doctor’s waiting room or the doomscroll that’s always a few clicks away on our phone or the endless meaningless political coverage but I think there’s also something of a choice in what kinds of saturation we let in. We can choose instead to fill ourselves up with the people around us, with sun on changing leaves, with favorite books and new ideas and art made by people and not machines. To take the grief and honor its origins in everything beautiful around us. I can’t promise that I’m 100% there, that I’ve figured out to be this completely fearless and politically enlightened figure because again—it’s so hard not to be scared these days, hard not to act out of fear or scarcity or anxiety, but I do think, in joining the world of immigration advocacy, in finding out how to turn a language that binds me into my family and home and safety into a language that I can use to help usher other people into that safety, I took a step in that direction.
Where I’ll Be:
I’m teaching a handful of in-person classes on “Journaling For Growth” here in Chicago at Intuit Healing—much to my own surprise I am, in fact, a daily journaler, and I have a lot to say about it, so come hang out at my class and find out! If you’re interested in an online version of it, let me know—I’ve gotten some feedback from you all already, and am tentatively looking at this summer for online, but I will say that teaching this class in person has been really lovely not just for the class itself, but for getting to sit with a bunch of people who are earnestly thinking things through. Next date is April 26th, and there will be another in May!
Also on April 26th, I’ll be moderating an event with the INCREDIBLE Marcelo Hernandez Castillo at Chicago Public Library—he’s keynoting their Poetry Festival, and I’m just lucky I get to yap with him.
May 1st, I’m going back to the old stomping grounds of Harvard Divinity School for the Peter J. Gomes, STB ’68 Distinguished Alumni Honors. I’m one of the honorees this year, which has me absolutely geeking out, but I think there will be a public component to the program that you can sign up for.
What I’ve Written:
For
, I tried to wrap my head around the “deportations” to El Salvador and all the reasons they’re really bad news:
What I’m Reading:
Still going strong on the CLMP titles for judging the Firecracker Awards—it’s been really fun and also just powering through a LOT of books.
Also still working on Much Depends on Dinner and have started a re-read of Jenny Offil’s Weather, a book I first read in 2020 and feels worth revisiting in these strange days at the turning of a too-warm spring.
PLEASE TEACH THE CLASS ONLINE I AM DYIN TO TAKE IT!!!!