Father | Genocide

August 24, 2021, Turtle Point Press

On the night before he "walked on," Margo Tamez's father recorded two questions onto a cassette tape: Where did all the good men go? Where did they go?

Two decades later, Tamez reconstructs her father's struggle to be a man under American domination, tracing the settler erasure, denial, and genocide that he and preceding generations experienced.

She reclaims stolen territory in the felt and known history of colonial Texas through Ndé Dene [Lipan Apache] place, memory, and poetics of resistance.

“I was raised up in American violence,” Tamez writes, “and I have to explore all of its possibilities.”

Her poetry brings out those possibilities by timebending, with a poetic form Tamez calls Indigenous fusionism-Indigenous futurism, a union of pastpresent, bodyknowing, intertext, bent tradition, landguage, and familial blood-knowing.

“These poems echo, give shape to, and amplify Ndé post-memory of intergenerational Indigenous genocide survivors. Through my efforts as a poet and herstorian, (educated as a critical Indigenous feminist historian), I explore the affective process of centering my father’s life and death is an act of resistance to hagiographic approaches that fetishized and engendered Indigenous histories as American and American men’s domain. In FATHER | GENOCIDE, I confront the crevasses of what and who, in that bankrupt historical project, are absenced, vacated, suppressed and silenced. Emplacing my father in the center of my poetic-herstorical lens opened new and previously untried pathways—in form, line, space, and pluri-deminsions—to claim a nuanced, affective, psycho-social and culturally-spirited way to herstoricize and historicize Ndé mens’ lives previously buried in the rubble of Texas’ genocide history.

More broadly, the collection explores how historical memory of violence unsettles the linear representations and mytho-histories— embedded in the state’s pseudo literary, historical, and narrative institutions—which have previously denied Ndé Dene peoples our lived experiences, knowledge, time, space, and place—before, during, and after death.

My poetry acknowledges and draws attention to the lingering impacts of historical erasure overly saturating Ndé Dene homeland-landscapes, obscured by aggressive settler erasures and place making.

Spirit memory as sentience, landguage, place, despair—wrought in our internalization of Indigenous spatial exile as a norm—and liberation consciousness influence my understanding of Ndé peoples’ refusals over many generations to be subjugated in the state of abjection imposed by American violence. My attention to my father’s actual life on earth compels me to write against the fractious distortions of perpetrators and bystanders.”

Margo Tamez