Some Words on Death: Literature and Philosophy on Death, Language, and Migration
by Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes
What is the ideal language of death?
* * *
If it’s going to be a confessional, it’s going to be about him, my dad. That’s just what happens when you have the one BIG trauma in life. It’s the awkward, sticky spot in introductions and conversations where the person I’m talking to asks an innocent enough question like “what do your parents do?” or “tell me about your family,” and first it’s all the stuff about my mom and all that she does. They’re nodding politely. I take a breath. My heart races a little; I know that I’m kind of going to ruin that other person’s day when they find out about my tragedy but here it comes, and, hey, they asked in the first place, right…?
“Oh, well, my dad passed away in 2015.”
Silence.
There are so many things I hate about that sentence:
1) Dad. Never called him that, and pai is(was) what he is(was) to me, not dad[1].
2) “Passed away.” I hate that phrase. I say it to comfort others. He’s dead. That’s the end. There’s no medium of passing, it’s not a euphemism: he got cancer, and then he died.
3) “Twenty-fifteen.” Saying it like that, which I always do.
a) It reminds (and surprises) me of just how long it’s been, every time.
b) The numbers somehow make me feel like it’s not an experience that’s mine; everyone had a 2015. About everyone my age was in middle school to early high school. Eighth grade probably sucked for most people, but it sucked in a spectacularly singular way for me.
4) Saying it. Just having to say it. Having to deal with people’s reactions. Having to somehow formulaically comfort them.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” “No, it’s okay.”[2]
——————
[1] Dad in Portuguese. Papai is daddy.
[2] What’s not said: “No it’s okay, you didn’t know, you were trying to be nice and normal. That I have this emotional baggage, no takesies-backsies, is on me.”
* * *
The number of Brazilians in the United States is unknown.
We are a lost population. Look:
We remain indefinite, incalculable, because many of us enter with a tourist visa and overstay our welcome, undocumented (Skidmore 9.2).[3]
We are a lost population. Look:
In South America, we are the only non-Hispanic country. They don’t know how to count us. They don’t know how to recognize us. On the 2000 U.S. census, Brazilians who marked they were “Hispanic” and additionally commented “Brazilian” were not counted as Hispanic because they don't originate from a culture or nation where Spanish is the spoken language.
We are a lost population. Look for us: find us.
—————-
[3] Chart taken from De Jouet-Pastre. It was used in a study about Brazilians migrating to the U.S. What does it say about my people that we are present only in our absence?
[4] The map highlights the number of Portuguese-speaking countries in Latin and South America; that is, only Brazil. Although it’s a relatively large country, it’s nonetheless linguistically isolated.
[5] The inclusion of images in this essay are inspired by the multimedia structure in Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony.
*
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River.[6] Her poetry collection Postcolonial Love Poem revolves around topics such as, but not limited to, identity, family, loss, and love. In the poem “American Arithmetic,” she writes critically of physical and statistical representation of Native Americans in U.S. populations.
Her poem begins:
Native Americans make up less than
1 percent of the population of America.
0.8 of 100 percent.
O, mine efficient country.
I do not remember the days before America––
I do not remember the days when we were all here (1-6, 17).[7]
Like Brazilians, Native Americans are a lost population. Not only lost populations, but lost people.[8] A population is a governmental term of art; institutions deal not with subjects and people, rather with numbers and their functions. A population is a function. The poem’s sterile tone juxtaposes the devastating reality presented by the facts about the underrepresentation of Native Americans. It ironically suggests that readers indifferently pass over the statistics and continue through the poem unfazed, much as a government responsible for relating these facts would wish them to. Diaz’s calculated diction of “population”[9] and repetition of “percent” in conjunction with the factual tone in the poem’s first stanza embodies the bureaucratic dryness with which institutions address questions about the human condition in the United States. The government as an existential ignoramus.
Then, in the second, single line stanza, the poem’s tone shifts: “O, mine efficient country.” The syntax, the apostrophe, and the archaic determiner of “mine,” resembles an older, colonial-era language, so it emulates the institutional antecedent to that of statistical voice in the first stanza. This tonal shift creates a juxtaposition between the contemporary bureaucracy with its colonial ancestor while simultaneously criticizing both. The first two stanzas establish a decisive, American voice, which literally precedes and thus figuratively precludes the possible establishment of the Native and her voice. Indeed, the speaker’s voice introduces itself only in the third stanza and uses hesitational language: “I do not remember the days before America–– / I do not remember the days when we were all here.” The first instance of the self, the “I do not remember,” is a negation of its powers, a lack of knowledge and possession of its object. Its anaphora, “I do not remember the days,” furthers this ironic instability of the original ancestor to both colonial voices, to the American voices. Diaz highlights the irony of the myth of America as a singular nation. She writes a postcolonial love poem to America’s true origin story, the Native-dominated times, “the days we were all here.”
——————
[6] Taken from the brief biographical note at the back of the book. It’s strange how a whole life can fit into one sentence.
[7] While this poem addresses questions related to identity and physical representation, I must mention that it also delves deeply into questions of race and institutional interactions in the United States (between Native Americans and the police, for example). However, those fall out of the purview of this essay, so I acknowledge their importance but will not focus on them in my analysis. For the full Diaz poem, see Appendix 1.
[8] I recognize that there are innumerable ways in which the Brazilian and Native American communities vary from one another––and within themselves–– and to address them as singular, homogenous communities is somewhat of an oversimplification. This difficulty applies also for the bureaucratization of peoples, and in a way, I’m ironically employing that style in that I’m comparing them in the narrow sense of their representation relative to the United States statistics.
[9] and mine
*
“O, mine efficient country”
L'amour pour principe et l’ordre pour base; le progrès pour but.
O amor como princípio e a ordem como base; progresso para o objetivo.
Love as a principle and order as the basis; progress as the goal.
I do not remember the days before America–– I do not remember the day when I became a foreigner to Brazil. I have always been a foreigner to America. I was always a foreigner in Amsterdam. I do not remember belonging. I do not remember a homeland. I do not remember the days when we were all here: love, order, progress.
—————-
[10] The saying is in Comte’s Système de politique positive, but its history relevant to Brazil comes from chapter 4.3 of Skidmore’s textbook, Brazil, Five Centuries of Change. I question why the Brazilian government elected a French philosopher’s ideal to represent the people instead of a native one. It’s a colonial displacement all its own, and it’s right there on the flag.
[11] We will soon return to Comte and the concept of positivism
*
Her poem ends:
I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.
But in American room of one hundred people,
I am Native American––less than one, less than
whole––I am less than myself. Only a fraction
of a body, let’s say, I am only a hand–– (27-31, emphasis Diaz’s, 18).
The imposition of America, and Americanness, kills the Native American. It kills the Brazilian. We are statistically invisible. Diaz combats this erasure in “Arithmetic.” The single-line stanza shows the speaker’s loneliness, yet by sheer existence of the line and the poem itself, the speaker makes herself visible; she finds herself in poetry. She further demonstrates the counterintuitive power of brokenness, of being “less than one, less than / whole––I am less than myself. Only a fraction / of a body.” She highlights this in both form and content. Structurally, the caesura breaks a single line into two parts, creating multiplicity, but, ironically, neither sentence is grammatically complete. The sentence that leads into the caesura holds too many clauses, a run-on. The one that follows culminates in a dash rather than in terminal punctuation, creating movement and potential where it is typically unexpected. In addition, the sentences themselves concern incompleteness. The bodily fraction that Diaz focuses on in this poem as well as throughout the collection, is the hand. Even in an incomplete state of self, a fraction, the hand possesses the power to write, to create poetry, to grab and take. One need not be complete to be powerful.[12]
——————
[12] I wonder: What nationality are my hands?
* * *
What characterizes my father beyond his death? What is the ideal language of death?
*
In his Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus states:
“Make yourself familiar with the belief that death is nothing to us, since everything good and bad lies in sensation, and death is to be deprived of sensation. … So that most fearful of all bad things, death, is nothing to us, since when we are, death is not, and when death is present, then we are not” (Epicurus).
A fact: We all die eventually.
A fact: I will die eventually.
A fact: You, reader, will die eventually.
It’s awkward, isn’t it? Death. We don’t know how to deal with it well, probably because we see our understanding of life to come largely from our experiences. And we can’t experience death, none of its conditions or relations to other natural phenomena, because, by definition, death is the nullification of life’s forces. Philosophically, the most general, agreed-upon idea is that death is the deprivation of life. At this point, I take “life” to mean everything that’s included in it––like thoughts, feelings, interactions––not just pure biological processes which constitute animation.
*
By my own definition, my father died before he actually died. When his heart stopped beating, morphined beyond his senses, lungs filled with pneumonic water, his life was already gone. The day I went to the hospital, encouraged by my family to “say goodbye,” I looked at him, prostrated and unconscious in a silly polka-dotted hospital gown, his skin yellow, like a rotting honeycomb no longer sweet. My lungs felt obscenely filled with that stale, gauzy air. I didn’t say anything. No last exchanges. Instead, I laid my hand on his forehead for a few moments, checking for a fever that I knew would be there. It wasn’t a goodbye. Death is the loss of words, of language.
*
Language gives us the ability to experience, or at least to remember and affix meaning to experience. Remember Comte? He’s founder of the philosophical doctrine of positivism. This idea states that all knowledge is positive—empirical or a posteriori—originating from two things: (1) experience of natural phenomena, their properties and relations, or (2) knowledge that’s true by definition, analytic and tautological.[13]
That becomes logical positivism, a school in the philosophy of language. Logical positivists posited that there is an ideal language, and that language is precise, free of ambiguity, and clear in structure. Following Comte, logical positivism presents the iconoclastic contention that empirically unverifiable sentences are meaningless.
Remember Epicurus? “Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death is not, and when death is present, then we are not.” When death is present, then we are not. Epicurus and Comte would be right, that if “everything good or bad lies in sensation” and empirically unverifiable sentences are meaningless, then death is nothing, death is meaningless. There is no language of corpses. There is no language of death. Language belongs to being(s). Death does not.
By contrast, metaphysical eternalists claim that objects in both the past and the future are ontologically equivalent to present ones. An object, let’s say a papai, who exists only before 2015, has as much reality as a daughter, who lives in 2021. In this case, a termination of existence is not a termination of being (Feldman 213). Language belongs to being(s). Death does not eradicate being.
The most optimistic outlook seems to be a combination of modal realism with transworld identity, meaning that although a dead person no longer exists in our universe, the same person is still alive and exists in other possible worlds. Here, there is no language of death because there is no complete death. We’re all still alive in some universe (Yourgrau 85). I find little comfort in this theory. My papai is still dead. Language belongs to being(s). Perhaps that’s why reading dead people’s writing feels ghostly. Perhaps that’s why traditional forms of death writing––in eulogies, elegies, and obituaries––feels inappropriate, and artificial.
—————-
[13] In other words, that it is because it is.
*
Victoria Chang, the writer of Obit, is the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants to the U.S. The death of her mother served as the impetus for this poetry collection. Chang pursues the posthumous roles of hope and language. The text generally centers on her familial relationships: reflections on her mother, with her father who remains alive but mentally incapacitated after suffering from a stroke, and with her children. She studies sorrow and transforms the obituary as well as the idea of death writing. Chang notably discards the elegy as a poetic form.[14] Instead, she appropriates the ironically cold, formulaic, and compact genre of the obituary. Her poetic obituaries, albeit identical to the source in their curt form, accurately reflect the expanse of loss and grief in content.
For instance, in her poem “My Mother’s Teeth,” her short syntax within the economical obituary form creates a halting vignette of loss, linking form and content and subverting the purpose of the obituary of facilitating a reader’s indifferent absorption of death.[15] Chang presents the two-pronged death of an inanimate object, the teeth. The first time, “ in 1965, all pulled from gum disease,” chronicles an incidence of violence, due to another prior demise of care or perhaps of knowledge and ability to care. Then, “once again on August 3, 2015,” with the death of the speaker’s mother. The recharacterization of the obituary with the death twice over is a re-writing of the speaker’s history, as well as that of her Chinese mother, and metaphorically reanimates them in a much more meaningful way than the common obituary, a thematic result of Chang’s exquisite manipulation of form throughout Obit.
The poet explores the language of death and, in turn, the death of language, of communication with her mother. She highlights the counteracting reductive and reproductive effects of death. First, the speaker tries to understand the language of death physically: she puts her mother’s dentures into her mouth. Yet all she receives is more life, more of her life-drives: her two sets of teeth “only made [her] hungrier.” Then the speaker remarks, “When my mother died I saw / myself in the mirror, her words around my mouth, like powder from a donut.” The mirror is a natural agent of reproduction, faithfully taking the shape of its object of observation; the speaker, after her loss, sees two reflections of herself. She sees her mother reflected in her as what has left, and she sees herself as what has been left. But mirrors, like obituaries, are empty of purpose beyond reflection of their objects. Furthermore, the donut’s powder symbolizes a dichotomy of loss: with its ghostly imprint around the speaker’s mouth, the donut leaves some suggestion of its previous existence while ceasing to exist itself. Likewise, the mother’s words leave their shadow around the speaker’s lips. She goes on to say, “Her last words were in English. She / asked for a Sprite. I wonder whether her last thought was in Chinese” (12-14). The sheerness of the donut powder juxtaposes the opacity of her mother’s last thoughts. The concrete act of death eliminates the possibility the speaker had to better understand or know her mother. She’s in the search for the language of death.
For Chang,[16] being multilingual complicates grasping death-language.[17] The donut and the Sprite, quintessentially American products, highlight the unavoidable ambiguity of being multilingual and multicultural. From personal experience, I know that which aspects of each language and culture resonate most profoundly often remain unresolved. The colors of the donut and the Sprite are somewhere between white and translucent, and their color––or lack thereof–– underlines the enigmatic nature of the language of death. She contrasts her mother’s American words with “I wonder whether her last thought was in Chinese,” formally emphasized by the caesura in the exact center of the line. She draws a distinction between last words and last thoughts. Where does death-language end? When did it begin?
——————
[14] Contemporarily, elegies are known as poems of lamentation on the loss of a loved one or important person. However, the elegy’s exact nature is not categorically definitive; it generally refers to a meditative poem on the nature of mortality and life. The only specificity that pertains to Classical elegies is not subject, but metre, that is, alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and pentameter (Greene 397).
[15] The poem on the left-hand side of this page is Chang’s full poem “My Mother’s Teeth” with all form and content intact.
[16] and for me
[17] I recognize that I am not drawing a strict separation between the poet and the speaker and so conflating Chang and the speaker. But given the poet’s own account of how her life events and biographical information shaped this book, I feel comfortable relying on that parallel.
*
I know that my father’s last words and thoughts were in Portuguese. Towards the end of his life, he never spoke English. It was never his language. I wonder whether his last thoughts were music. I wonder in what language I will think my last thoughts.
*
Chang and Diaz[18] batter against the devastating banality of Americanness that infiltrates their identities. America has so deeply pervaded the lives of the speakers that questions of culture arise inevitably for both. In the geography of the mind, where does America (super)impose itself? Is it palimpsest or billboard araldite?
——————
[18] and I
*
The speaker in Chang’s poem continues her search for the language of death in her grieving process: “I used to think that a dead person’s words die with them. / Now I know that they scatter, looking for meaning to / attach to like a scent [...] I always knew that grief was / something I could smell. But I didn’t / know that it’s not actually a noun but a / verb. That it moves.” After her mother’s passing,[19] the speaker experiences a change––or death––in her understanding of grief, as of action instead of static substance. Is grief the only language of death available to us?
—————-
[19] N.B. the euphemism, the movement in the verb
*
Jacques Derrida claims qu’il n’y a pas de hors-texte. That “there is nothing outside the text.” In other words, every decoding is another encoding. Chang, in her decoding of death, encodes symbolic obituaries to the devastating casualties of the everyday, like replaced rotten teeth, beyond her BIG trauma.
*
When I’m talking about my dad, am I always talking about death?
When I tell you that he was a professor and a jazz drummer, am I telling you he’s dead?
When I tell you that he was a poet, is he still dead?
When I listen to his music, am I hearing the percussion of ghosts?
When I listen to his music, is it just his spectre’s heartbeat?
What do you do when your words are alive but their subject isn’t?
When I am talking about my dad, when should I start talking about poetry?
* * *
Grief, to Chang, smells like orange blossoms. Grief, to me, smells like the inside of an airplane.
*
When my family migrated the first time, the number of Brazilians in the United States increased by five.
*
The first time I grieved, I grieved for my country. I was six years old when I went into my basement and cried for what seemed like a long time. When my parents found me, I told them que eu estou com saudades[20] do Brasil, that I missed Brazil.
My parents asked me repeatedly what I meant when I said that I missed Brazil. Every time they asked, I repeated myself that I just missed Brazil, that I missed all of it. I knew that what we had in Brazil––our life, our families, all our friends, the potential futures that we had imagined––was all lost; it was all dead. I grieved for its permanent absence. Migration is grief; it’s death; it’s inevitable, permanent loss.
——————
[20] In Portuguese, “to miss” is not a verb, it's a noun, a feeling one has of saudades. It’s the absence of possession of your object of longing which conjures saudades. Unlike the English to miss, saudades has no synonyms. It is that feeling and that feeling alone. I always thought it more apt to the actual sentiment than the plain verb of missing. My father was the one who pointed that out to me
*
Let me tell you essential things about my father.
My father lost himself in the United States. In Brazil, he was many things: a jazz drummer and composer, a professor of music and composition teaching at two colleges, a writer, a poet, a husband, my father, a brother, a son. In his migration, he lost his place in the world.
He didn’t speak the language. His life was then always translation, misunderstandings. English is riddled with consonants crammed favela-like in words he could never pronounce. Rs followed by Ls and Ds, a literally unpronounceable world of words. As a writer and musician, a man of letters and sounds, that loss must have been exasperating. The U.S. rendered his music foreign. His jokes didn’t land with Americans. He had no close friends or family, besides us.
Then, around the time I was seven, he had his first seizure. They weren’t throw-yourself-on-the-ground-frothing-at-the-mouth seizures. If you weren’t paying close attention, they were almost invisible. A twitch in the right eye, or on the top corner of the lip like the fragment of a smile––but all wrong and broken––a halt in speech, an inability to maintain a grasp on objects in-hand.
I had a list. I had a plan:
“O Que Fazer Quando Seu Papai Para de Funcionar”[21]
(1) Pick up what he dropped and put it on the table next to him, like a good girl.
(2) If he dropped his phone, politely ask the person on the other end of the line, “please wait for a second: Daddy’s having one of his thing-a-ma-jiggers”.
(3) Hug him.
(4) Use all your eight-year-old strength in that hug to make sure, or to at least hope really hard, that he won’t fall. No one taught you what to do if he falls.
(5) Try not to look at his face, it’s scary. It isn’t Daddy.
(6) Feel the way he twitches like a broken toy. Whisper, “Papai, vai tá tudo bem.” “Daddy, everything is going to be okay.” even though you don’t believe it.
(7) Sigh with relief when it ends, and he says your name again: “Gabi, voltei.” “Gabi, I’m back.”
And in the end, my father couldn’t cope with turning into a kind of ghost of his previous self, so he left the U.S. to return to Brazil. His migratory path begins and ends there. His words began and ended there. From a hospital in São Paulo to the city’s graveyard and the Gomes family plot.
——————
[21] What To Do When Your Daddy Stops Working
*
After his migration, only four additional Brazilians were to be counted in the U.S. census. Is migration a language of death?
Ocean Vuong knows about the grief of migration and loss of family. He was born in Saigon, Vietnam but his family, due to their mixed American-Vietnamese heritage were forced out of Vietnam once it fell to communist forces. A total of seven members fled to Hartford, Connecticut when the poet was two years old. His father abandoned his family shortly after. His mother doesn’t speak English to this day (“Ocean”). His poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, speaks on the subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholy.[22]
His poem “Logophobia” explores many, if not all, of these subjects.[23] To begin, the title, logophobia, is the fear of words, and it’s inherently polysemic. It could mean any of the following: the phonetic fear of how words sound, the fear of literal meanings, the fear of their abstraction, the fear of giving names to things, the fear of languages––one’s own or another’s––or the visual fear of the shapes of the letters and words. The fact that the poet is multilingual adds another layer of meaning.[24]
The poem begins in media res, with the speaker in the aftermath of an action, “afterward,” in the “red dark.” The speaker writes the word “gia đình,” which means family in Vietnamese, on a yellow pad. As the poem progresses, the word becomes associated with the “red dark,” the “blue blur of bones,” and the white color of bones, which elicits American- associated images. So, no matter how much he sees the word in a separate, yellow realm, its connection to the U.S. remains. Like Vuong, although I think primarily in English, some words come to me only in one language, not the other, and it seems to come out of the dark, unpredictably.[25] The use of multiple languages highlights the simultaneous inextricability and disjunction of the two linguistic worlds and all that they signify. Logophobia comes in here with fear of the word family. First, its denotation doesn’t apply to the speaker, since the father figure (poetic or actual) is absent from its meaning to Vuong. So, the speaker’s logophobia originates from his inability to associate with the typical meaning of family. The linguistic conflict creates a further barrier in his understanding of family. The subsequent stanza illustrates the violence associated with family in the form of the period, serving as linguistic bullet. In a collection which revolves around exit wounds, the word family conjoined with the period seems a significant exit wound and starting point for Vuong, a paradox which appears in other poems, such as “Self Portrait as Exit Wounds.” I often experience a similar logophobia, those internal winces when people ask me those lurkingly nefarious questions about myself and my family.
Moreover, this is a metalinguistic poem, writing about writing. Vuong illustrates writing as life. What follows is that silence is death. Language belongs to being(s). In the beginning of the poem, it’s the speaker who utters the word family, but in the poem’s penultimate stanza, it’s the words that have agency, entering and propelling the speaker. More complexly, they emerge from the father’s silence: his open mouth, which albeit a phonetic instrument, is nonetheless a hole, an abyss of silence and absence. Therefore, the fact that the period-wound pierces his father’s back, not his front, intimates betrayal on one hand, but on the other, conveys that Vuong simply doesn’t know enough about his father to know what would pierce his heart. To find himself, the speaker must exit and enter through the bullet hole; he must eclipse the father’s silence and absence, his symbolic death, to overcome the fear of the word family, to reach the meaning on his own terms, literally and figuratively. The poem culminates without punctuation, linking the form to the content of the “wide / open mouth,” which resembles a period in shape and consequent silence, but suggests a continuation of words, of life.
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[22] The list of subjects is from the description on the back of the book.
[23] To see the “Logophobia” in full, see Appendix 2
[24] I’ve already spoken of conflating poet and speaker in my section discussion Chang. Again, considering the unmistakably overlapping details of the biographical information and the poem’s content, I can surmise that Vuong and the speaker are virtually and authentically similar.
[25] It’s a strange cognitive dissonance to understand a feeling in one language and not the other, because there’s no way of putting it exactly how it is in one of them. Saudades, for example.
* * *
Derrida, on death: “a transcendental sense of death is disclosed in the silence of prehistoric arcana and of submerged civilizations, the entombment of lost intentions and of guarded secrets, the illegibility of a lapidary inscription” (1015).
Death is silence. My father’s voice is one of the things that I least remember about him. I remember only its idiosyncrasies: his warm, cackling laughter, his hoots when he jumped in cold water, the way he could never pronounce “word” or “world” in English. My father lost his mother tongue when we moved to the U.S. and suffered from temporary linguistic losses during his seizures. In the days and weeks leading up to his death, as his brain increasingly deteriorated, among other abilities, he lost his language. That’s the worst way to imagine him, almost infant-like. Almost silent. Already dead.
*
Ludwig Wittgenstein presents two distinct approaches to the philosophy of language. In his early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he defines the ideal language based on the definition of logical positivism. He claims that “logic is not a theory but a reflection of the world. Logic is transcendental” (6.13). The transcendental signifier for Wittgenstein is logic, for Derrida, it is death.
In a way, there is nothing more logical than the inevitability of death. Of the certainty in the cessation of language. Wittgenstein states that the “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” and indeed, the limits of life are those of language, for death is loss of life, a loss of the linguistic possibility. He finishes the treatise with the proposition “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (prop 5.6, 7 Tractatus). It seems that Wittgenstein claims there to be no language of death; when death is present, then we are not. Without language, we are not. Where, then, is the ideal language of death?
Later, in his Philosophical Investigations, he recants much of his cold, calculated positivism, and strays from the question of the ideal language into the domain of ordinary language, the way we actually use it.
Later-Wittgenstein is right: there is no ideal language. There is no ideal language of death. In going through poetry and philosophy, we’ve seen that there are dialects of death that we all know, that are necessary parts of life: migration, pain, grief, family, love. To accept death is to see it in all things and to know that death is also life. Life must be the language of death, for one cannot exist without the other.
*
Poetry is a necessity. Language is a necessity. Death is a necessity. Poets like Diaz, Chang, and Vuong ground their experiences in language. I, too, ground my experiences in language. Language is not life, but it's the closest approximation that I have to knowing anything about it. My father’s poetry is not his life. But it’s the closest I can get to him now, the act of writing, the act of reading his writing.
* * *
I’ll leave you, reader, with my father’s words:
Uma poesia que atravesse o tempo
é tudo que meu espírito
deseja neste momento.
Poetry that spans all time
is all that my spirit
yearns for in this moment.
——————-
Appendices
I. Diaz’s “American Arithmetic” in full:
Native Americans make up less than
one percent of the population of America.
0.8 percent of 100 percent.
O, mine efficient country.
I do not remember the days before America—
I do not remember the days when we were all here.
Police kill Native Americans more
than any other race. Race is a funny word.
Race implies someone will win,
implies I have as good a chance of winning as—
We all know who wins a race that isn’t a race.
Native Americans make up 1.9 percent of all
police killings, higher than any race,
and we exist as .8 percent of all Americans.
Sometimes race means run.
I’m not good at math—can you blame me?
I’ve had an American education.
We are Americans, and we are less than 1 percent
of Americans. We do a better job of dying
by police than we do existing.
When we are dying, who should we call?
The police? Or our senator?
At the National Museum of the American Indian,
68 percent of the collection is from the U.S.
I am doing my best to not become a museum
of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out.
I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.
In an American city of one hundred people,
I am Native American—less than one, less than
whole—I am less than myself. Only a fraction
of a body, let’s say I am only a hand—
and when I slip it beneath the shirt of my lover,
I disappear completely.
II. Vuong’s “Logophobia” in full:
Afterward, I woke
into the red dark
to write
gia đình
on this yellow pad.
Looking through the letters
I can see
into the earth
below, the blue blur
of bones.
Quickly––
I drill the ink
into a period.
The deepest hole,
where the bullet,
after piercing
my father’s back,
has come
to rest.
Quickly––I climb
inside.
I enter
my life
the way words
entered me––
by falling
through
the silence
of this wide
open mouth
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