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Defacing the Monument
from the Noemi Press Infidel Series:
Defacing the Monument opens with the narration of an Operation Streamline hearing, a proceeding during which as many as 75 undocumented migrants are criminally prosecuted and sentenced en masse to serve jail time prior to deportation. It’s an attempt to bear witness to what happens to those who do not hold the “correct” documents as a way to show texts always bear the marks of power. Documentary poetics offers a tradition and a form through which a writer can situate events or experiences within broad social and historical contexts. It can provide a space to record, to unearth, to witness, and to contextualize. But we can’t fetishize the document. And we must use it with an eye toward our own complicity and participation in the systems we wish to investigate. Part documentary act, part lyric essay, part criticism, Defacing the Monument enacts the possibilities and limits of documentary impulses.
Defacing the Monument opens with the narration of an Operation Streamline hearing, a proceeding during which as many as 75 undocumented migrants are criminally prosecuted and sentenced en masse to serve jail time prior to deportation. It’s an attempt to bear witness to what happens to those who do not hold the “correct” documents as a way to show texts always bear the marks of power. Documentary poetics offers a tradition and a form through which a writer can situate events or experiences within broad social and historical contexts. It can provide a space to record, to unearth, to witness, and to contextualize. But we can’t fetishize the document. And we must use it with an eye toward our own complicity and participation in the systems we wish to investigate. Part documentary act, part lyric essay, part criticism, Defacing the Monument enacts the possibilities and limits of documentary impulses.
- GenresPoetryNonfictionWriting
161 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2020
5 people are currently reading
141 people want to read
About the author
Susan Briante
12 books35 followersSusan Briante was born in Newark, NJ, after the riots. The author of the book, Pioneers in the Study of Motion (Ahsahta Press, 2007), Briante now lives in Dallas with the poet Farid Matuk.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
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December 13, 2020Because I read all the pages, I told Goodreads that I'm finished with this book, and that's a bald-faced lie.
May 6, 2021
much to think about..
January 23, 2024
“Perhaps the poem or the documentary can be a place to model not healing but discomfort with the wreckage of late capitalism and late empire, to model Agee’s tremble, creating conditions for identification as well as difference and disambiguation.”
Appreciated more upon reread!!
Susan Briante’s Defacing the Monument is a provocation for poets, writers, educators, activists, and, simply, Americans. Briante examines the ethics of docupoetics (and of poetics, in general) through a radical exploration of a poet’s responsibilities–as well as poetry’s capabilities–towards those we implicate through our own writing/silence. By investigating the state’s documents used against migrants who have entered the U.S. from the U.S.-Mexico border, Briante’s own work desecrates citizenship and documentation as the value system used in the U.S. Similarly, the text invokes a wreckage of borders and walls–both literally and figuratively. I particularly appreciated the moment she disrupts her own participation in the state’s enactment of violence towards indigenous peoples from Latin American regions by removing the border that separates her from the migrants in the same courtroom: “upon which scale should I plot the distance between me and the men and women who stood before the judge in shackles? Between me and four women who sat on the couch in the Nogales apartment?” (63). To appropriate, to document without reduction, to avoid exporting the state’s violence, we must eliminate the borders that separate writer and witness and Other and state.
I appreciated her examinations of how a poem can be an experiment or a tool; actually, a poem must go beyond offering reconciliation and comfort when it is a result of conflict and/or the suffering of others. Briante argues that “We need to document. But without activism, the document (or the list) can become a source of nostalgia as useless as the stopped clock sitting on my living room shelf” (134). Through our poetry, how do we radically imagine alternative systems and societies, and how can our own processes invoke the justice we seek? How can our docupoetics disrupt and agitate dominant institutions we benefit from ourselves?
Briante’s book is not resolute. She offers little in terms of exact methodologies through which to deface monuments (she does use examples from C.A. Conrad, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Layli Long Soldier’s books, but does not imply writers should use the same exact methodologies.) If docupoetics, however, is more about a process and provocation than a product, then Briante excellently interrogates questions and instincts for writers who are developing their own docupoetics.
Her questions and writing exercises, while ironic at times, offer a great place to begin to consider our own positionalities and histories we write from when exploring our own docupoetics and subjects: “What history falls behind you like a shadow? How are you writing in relation to your history? In hush, in slur, in scream?” (145) and “How can you utilize silence or represent that which is beyond representation?” (147) are questions I will be thinking about as I take on my own project.
Appreciated more upon reread!!
Susan Briante’s Defacing the Monument is a provocation for poets, writers, educators, activists, and, simply, Americans. Briante examines the ethics of docupoetics (and of poetics, in general) through a radical exploration of a poet’s responsibilities–as well as poetry’s capabilities–towards those we implicate through our own writing/silence. By investigating the state’s documents used against migrants who have entered the U.S. from the U.S.-Mexico border, Briante’s own work desecrates citizenship and documentation as the value system used in the U.S. Similarly, the text invokes a wreckage of borders and walls–both literally and figuratively. I particularly appreciated the moment she disrupts her own participation in the state’s enactment of violence towards indigenous peoples from Latin American regions by removing the border that separates her from the migrants in the same courtroom: “upon which scale should I plot the distance between me and the men and women who stood before the judge in shackles? Between me and four women who sat on the couch in the Nogales apartment?” (63). To appropriate, to document without reduction, to avoid exporting the state’s violence, we must eliminate the borders that separate writer and witness and Other and state.
I appreciated her examinations of how a poem can be an experiment or a tool; actually, a poem must go beyond offering reconciliation and comfort when it is a result of conflict and/or the suffering of others. Briante argues that “We need to document. But without activism, the document (or the list) can become a source of nostalgia as useless as the stopped clock sitting on my living room shelf” (134). Through our poetry, how do we radically imagine alternative systems and societies, and how can our own processes invoke the justice we seek? How can our docupoetics disrupt and agitate dominant institutions we benefit from ourselves?
Briante’s book is not resolute. She offers little in terms of exact methodologies through which to deface monuments (she does use examples from C.A. Conrad, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Layli Long Soldier’s books, but does not imply writers should use the same exact methodologies.) If docupoetics, however, is more about a process and provocation than a product, then Briante excellently interrogates questions and instincts for writers who are developing their own docupoetics.
Her questions and writing exercises, while ironic at times, offer a great place to begin to consider our own positionalities and histories we write from when exploring our own docupoetics and subjects: “What history falls behind you like a shadow? How are you writing in relation to your history? In hush, in slur, in scream?” (145) and “How can you utilize silence or represent that which is beyond representation?” (147) are questions I will be thinking about as I take on my own project.
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February 5, 2022"remember that our stories do not take up equal space in the 'marketplace' or the myth of the nation, that everyone has the right to their opacities, the beautiful eclipses that both farmer and astrologer read."
briante has produced a stunning work of documentary poetry that questions and explores and defaces. i could not recommend this enough.
briante has produced a stunning work of documentary poetry that questions and explores and defaces. i could not recommend this enough.
July 23, 2023
I will keep thinking about this forever. It is probably the most important book I’ll read this year. Written to poets and documentarians, but a book everyone should read.
•••••
“The reading or writing of a poem can help us to reflect on our place within the spheres of power and powerlessness that constitute our world.”
“We need to understand our documents as well as ourselves within the web of power and processes that produce them.”
“My compassion must compel me to see the ways directly or indirectly that I am implicated in their suffering.”
“How can we amplify voices without turning other people’s stories into commodities, without reaffirming the faulty myth of “giving voice”?
“Witness feels more powerless than ever.”
“We must not see the suffering of others as a commodity. We just not seek the approval of the state or its co-conspirators.”
•••••
“The reading or writing of a poem can help us to reflect on our place within the spheres of power and powerlessness that constitute our world.”
“We need to understand our documents as well as ourselves within the web of power and processes that produce them.”
“My compassion must compel me to see the ways directly or indirectly that I am implicated in their suffering.”
“How can we amplify voices without turning other people’s stories into commodities, without reaffirming the faulty myth of “giving voice”?
“Witness feels more powerless than ever.”
“We must not see the suffering of others as a commodity. We just not seek the approval of the state or its co-conspirators.”
July 15, 2023
For what it's worth, this book pretty much summarizes performative activism front to back.
Addresses social issues that we as a society must work together to resolve, certainly- but at many points the author's narrative feels much more personal than it should feel for someone who does not share the same extent of systematic oppression of the minorities addressed within this book. Shock used as narrative serves less as a motivator to the reader, and instead feels muddled and off-putting. This book does a good job of showing that is indeed possible to misuse the empathetic strategy of placing oneself in another's shoes when it relies on real life suffering- there MUST be a better way to act and protest against oppression rather than in inaccessible literature written and composed mainly off of the works of other POC authors. Instead of investing in Defacing the Monument, may I instead suggest reading the original works that this book (shoddily and often improperly) cites?
Addresses social issues that we as a society must work together to resolve, certainly- but at many points the author's narrative feels much more personal than it should feel for someone who does not share the same extent of systematic oppression of the minorities addressed within this book. Shock used as narrative serves less as a motivator to the reader, and instead feels muddled and off-putting. This book does a good job of showing that is indeed possible to misuse the empathetic strategy of placing oneself in another's shoes when it relies on real life suffering- there MUST be a better way to act and protest against oppression rather than in inaccessible literature written and composed mainly off of the works of other POC authors. Instead of investing in Defacing the Monument, may I instead suggest reading the original works that this book (shoddily and often improperly) cites?
January 6, 2021
Essential
February 14, 2021
This is a complex as hell book, working in deconstruction of poetry tropes, criticism of the documentary poem and the state at large, personal grief, and how to actively resist the bullshit of the state. Susan begins by observing a court session that’s part of Operation Streamline, and builds from there. Critically complex as hell, similar to DMZ Colony in how she tackles the subject matter, and definitely one I’ll be coming back to.
August 4, 2021
not sure I would read this outside of class but for writers it is an essential read
January 21, 2024
2.5 stars
April 19, 2024
A heady hybrid that bears rereading.
April 22, 2025
“How will you write through archives that don’t exist?”
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews