The Forest of las américas is Already Alive: On Christina Olivares’ Future Botanic

Christina Olivares wants us to dream together. Her second poetry collection, Future Botanic, is a city garden ready for the next step. To become a forest in their own terms, through their own conjurings, with “botanical livewire.” (18) In that space, the foundational memory is not of America (i.e. United States), but las américas. Not the politically divided continent, but the immeasurable geography of vibrant possibility. The journey might be long, but the seeds have been planted, “given / given over to each other / our américa. a fever.” (18)

*

After finishing Future Botanic, I sat in the backyard of my parents’ home in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, listening to the trees talk while the last gusts of Tropical Storm Ernesto passed through. It was mid-August, the beginning of the hurricane season’s peak. Sweating profusely, I thought: what is the poetics of las américas? I asked the trees. Something about softness and care within the storm, I felt in their reply.

I remembered Puerto Rican poet, editor, book artist, and translator Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s poem to América, translated by Urayoán Noel.¹ “America you’re your own worst enemy. America will you be okay?” las américas are not okay, but its poets are demonstrating us how to move forward. And it must be done together, sweating out the toxins of empire and colonization.

A poetics of softness and care built with your community to weather the storms. I like the sound of that. And so does Olivares’ storytelling.

*

If the title wasn’t a clear enough cue of the role of the non-human in Olivares’ narrative of collective liberation, the cover makes it explicit. A tower of concrete blocks is topped by a replica made with coffee clay, falling apart. Gabriela Salazar’s artwork shows we cannot build the future without destroying it if we continue down the toxic path we are on. If we continue to think humans, “a wrinkle of planetary memory,” (63) have the final say on how things play out in this vastly, wildly diverse, yet fragile, planet. 

I wouldn’t say Olivares is evoking ecopoetics,² but something like ecopoetics of the City™, of the metropolis governed by industry and excess and still, at the end of the day, “this tiny garden / we wanted so bad.” (12) At the end of the day, “the dream of the queer animal that you are” (16) waits for your greened arrival. At the end of the day, “the Bronx is a spell on us which we also make.” (20)

In Future Botanic, Olivares wrestles with, wrangles, wrecks, wises up, and wonders through portals of knowledge, memory, imagination, and desire. Only after this intense, tender constellating can a strong foundation be set for new possibilities, for “our américa built inside of us a botanical / no-américa.” (17) This reconfiguration of the colonized lands west of the Atlantic, of its memory-history, is implied in the Sylvia Wynter epigraph: “We must now collectively undertake a rewriting of knowledge as we know it.”

*

Some lines that remind me of Cecilia Vicuña’s exquisite work:³

What does dirt dream? (79)

Who will be ingested by this earth and/or who have ingested this earth. (62)

Imagine this ransacked, dreamed-up hemispheric earth dreamed us up the same way it dreamed up dinosaurs, salt, soil, sea. Imagine we are its dream. (63)

Death is everywhere! We turn our secrets over in awe! How dare we be so free. (29)

Nourish the land redress:

Nourish the descendants (73)

*

Future Botanic is divided into six parts, with progressively longer and more provocative titles (the last one: Deliberately and with Such Love Archive the Holdings). The book moves through the author’s younger years in the Bronx, coming into their queerness, the rough-yet-tender emotional landscape of the city (in which the green can be found if you are paying attention), embracing community as a life-affirming model in living spaces designed to destroy us, a visit to family in Cuba, fever-pitch, collaborative incantating for a world in which we are “the dream-within-a-dream of these entire américas” (63) and a pre-pandemic trip to Nepal after the passing of a beloved. 

Olivares navigates through a wide span of time, places, and states of mind, generously showing us her journey to internal liberation. The mistakes are part of this process, of course; this includes the stumbles while rewiring and re-weaving cognitive tissue to disconnect from capitalistic beliefs of individuality and personal growth as ultimate ideals. “My imaginative failures— / little / and / catastrophic / what do my imaginative failures / protect?” (72)

If there is one thing Olivares believes is central for personal and collective liberation, it is the imagination. And it is through the body, the flesh and bones that allow us to dream and conjure and haunt and desire, that we can encounter the world and make it what we dream. Our “floral-florid botanic bod[ies]” (19) are ready to listen to the “dream edging delight.” (18)

The body is a carrier of archive and the one who activates it, shares it, rewrites it with decolonial rules in ways we may yet not understand. “I carry in my face the face of a man who healed a boy. This boy, now a painter, touches my cheek gently, the way a father might. My archive is this cheek, shape of this mouth, who knows what else.” (51) 

If I hold it on my body,

it happened. (28)

Understanding is an act of the imagination.

Archive blooms at points of touch between the self

and the archived. (61)

Scholar Saidiya Hartman famously said: “So much of the work of oppression is policing the imagination.”⁴ Olivares is aware of how trauma, colonization, and toxic forces in the world could pollute their imaginative capacities. “I know to be embodied in any américa / is to be ruined by violence” (6) There is history-memory that is best left behind. “Locating the roots within and choosing—if to keep. If to use as salve or to nourish. If to extricate and burn.” (64) The imagination is a powerful tool to liberation but is not the final step. Don’t let it lure you into complacency with its beauty. Keep moving. “To remember is a deception. Holding a thing isn’t changing or knowing a thing.” (53)

*

What is the role of form, of structure in the poetics of las américas? For Olivares, speaking about Cuba as an American-Cuban means using a crónica-like⁵ prose poetry that narrates a return to the homeland with a “[q]ueer twist of the américas.” (35) Interspersed with moments of lyricism and enjambment, the middle section of Return urges us to “wait, open, listen.” (42) 

In the Notes section, I learn it is zuihitsu.⁶ Of course. The contemplation of seemingly random moments together reflects the diasporic person’s nonlinear path towards self-realization. A repetition, a mirroring through form. A prayer created as much by reverberations as by its omissions.

Throughout Future Botanic, Olivares constructs a Bronx-like panorama with/for her capacious language. Tall, skyscraper poems exist alongside neatly rectangular roads, delayed subway crossings, river currents, and erratic ocean waves. The grid, however, cannot keep the natural world out forever. 

I can see the seeds in the standalones “Nourishment is” (68) and “List, map draw, say the unimaginable:” (69). I see the new growth (70-71), its burning (72), the ashes feeding the ground (73), and another growth turn into meadow (74-74), tall trees (76-77), a sky-high canopy (78), before giving to the earth its first seeds (79).

The forest is already alive.

*

What is the role of style in the poetics of las américas? Future Botanic is anchored by its consistent use of repetition, a doubleness that serves as a refracting mirror of interiority. This complex construction of the self (and its relation to its community) is a metaphor for the two-side-of-a-coin reality of existing in the world as a queer, brown, female body: “am I becoming, have I become.” (5) The return is ever-present, the only fixture in the never-ending path towards a radically tender world.

Mostly in the first half of the book, this repetition works because it’s kept to this twice-and-done deal. Much later in the book, repetition is used to bring home a line that could explode on social media any minute now: “radical imagining is our evolutionary project.” (75) Stated four times, the powerful slogan (and title of the section) loses its punch by the end of the page.

Punctuation is spare in this collection, and not particularly exciting. Except for pages 29-30, which close the second section, Uptown Summers. The unexpected use of exclamation in 29 and enjambed questions in 30 broke the pattern, reenergized the language, and added an almost eerie tension, a plural strangeness, to this closing. “We drank / of this earth we are? / We choose to love the dirt / we are? (…) Found / that this living / is for joy?” (30).

What will happen in the next section? In the rest of the book? I was itching to know. Sadly, this effect did not occur again. 

*

Olivares’ poetics of las américas understands that language is one of our most powerful tools to create meaning and, thus, to generate change. Yet recognizes that “there aren’t enough words in our languages / to say all the things we know or are, have become, / can trace ourselves to, run from, are claimed by.” (70) It urges us to not be tied to the sense-making of today; work towards the bountiful, queer meaning-making of tomorrow. The outcome of “a seed or a body or an archive (…) prescribed by some past / it staggers into some future: / cómo se pronuncia hijx?” (61) This term is defined as a noun, adjective, and verb in three consecutive prose poems with some of the most electric language in the book. “Us: tumbling, uterine future-holdings.” (63)

Here the language is rooted in lineage. “I belong to all the bloods in me.” (60) Ancestors are present and helping to make this new, radical language with their invaluable knowledge, even if it is not obvious. “I do not know most of their names. They know most of mine, and they call me by them.” (60)

There is direct assistance, too. A tía-abuela (great-aunt) provides a wonderful poem on page 45 on the symbiotic relationship between the self and language that I will not spoil here (it’s that good). This leads to a poem from Olivares that enacts the tía-abuela’s instructions and provides a space for catharsis, renewal, rest.

Sparked by a comment from a stranger, Future Botanic embraces the collectivity of art and sense-making in the periphery of empire. Apart from familial and community interventions, there is opportunity for the reader to write into the book with two “experiments” in which we are prompted to imagine and dream together. “List, map, draw, say the unimaginable:” (69) The poetics of las américas is a communal, ongoing endeavor.

*

With Future Botanic, Christina Olivares gifts us a nonlinear trajectory to self-love and acceptance, which ripples to community care, which ripples on to dreaming of a better future, which ripples further into crafting such future. The Bronx, “an isolated, rich, embedded geography within las américas,” (93) serves as a litmus test for the garden that can hold “our desire to find the astonishing, / be astonishing ourselves.” (21) las américas is a futurism already planted in us. Water it, nourish it. Let yourself bloom. 

Cosmos, seed, species

inventando. We’re

sound. Sing it

forward, backward, all time, no time at all. (91)

Christina Olivares. Future Botanic. Get Fresh Book, 2023. 112 pages. 979-8218120108.

_______________________________________

¹ Nicole Cecilia Delgado and Urayoán Noel. Guernica, 2021. https://www.guernicamag.com/traduccion-translation/

² “Ecopoetics.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/ecopoetics

³ “Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet, artist, activist and filmmaker whose work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization.” https://www.ceciliavicuna.com/

⁴ Kimberlé Crenshaw, N.K Jemisin, and Saidiya Hartman. “Under the Blacklight: Storytelling While Black and Female: Conjuring Beautiful Experiments.” African American Policy Forum. August 5, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGS5aP5Vi7g

⁵ “The chronicle is a somewhat unstructured genre that combines literary aestheticism with the journalistic responsibility to inform. Many important Latin American literary figures, from César Vallejo to Gabriel García Márquez, have penned chronicles, and this practice has been instrumental to their literary contributions in other genres, such as poetry and the novel.” https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199766581/obo-9780199766581-0092.xml. 

Argentinian writer and journalist Javier Sinay talks in depth about the genre of crónica in this interview with The Brevity Blog: https://brevity.wordpress.com/2023/09/11/cronica-the-platypus-of-prose/

⁶ Zuihitsu. Academy of American Poets. https://poets.org/glossary/zuihitsu#:~:text=Translated%20from%20the%20Japanese%2C%20the,presentation%20of%20organized%20literary%20construction.