Honora Spicer | Jacket2

Reading Yousif M. Qasmiyeh's 'Writing the Camp'

Honora Spicer

Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, 'Writing the Camp' (Talgarreg, Wales: Broken Sleep Books, 2021).

The tender, raw poetic investigations in Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s recent Writing the Camp (Broken Sleep Books, 2021) conceptualize a theory of the refugee camp as archive, taking as local frame Baddawi Camp in North Lebanon, where Qasmiyeh grew up.

Orienting to im/mobility

Honora Spicer

This image is a screenshot of El Paso <a href="https://gis.elpasotexas.gov/planning/index.html">zoning maps</a> accessed online. The ICE detention center described here is underneath the corner where the three maps overlap. — This image is a screenshot of El Paso zoning maps accessed online. The ICE detention center described here is underneath the corner where the three maps overlap.

The questions came out of walks — from El Paso Service Processing Center (ICE Detention) to the Bus Route 50 stop, outside USPS on Boeing Ave. On sandstorm nights, the walk was lean and grimace, spit and hack. The wide stretches required it; long blocks zoned postwar. Required wait, corners of dust lots labelled “Property of US Government,” under the airport watch tower and the Super Guppy’s tarmac gleam.

The header image was taken by Honora Spicer in May 2020 on Boeing Ave. in El Paso, TX. The image is taken through a chain-linked fence and depicts a chain link and barbed wire in the foreground. Behind the fences are two parallel blue and silver ICE buses parked on the tarmac of El Paso International Airport, alongside a white ICE van for unaccompanied minors. On the left are yellow private airplane hangars. On the right is the front portion of a white airplane, with the hatch of the deportation flight open, and a figure in a white sweatshirt entering the hatch. In the background are the rust-colored Franklin Mountains.

Architectures of Disappearance accompanies the research project Carceral Geography in El Paso, TX: Creating Sound Walks to Experience Disappeared Histories. Drawing on approaches of carceral geography, this Commentary convenes contemporary poetry, visual art and performance that takes a geographical approach to making visible physical and linguistic architectures of movement constriction.

Funded by the Mellon Humanities Collaborative at El Paso Community College/ University of Texas at El Paso in 2021-22, I lead the project as faculty fellow, collaborating in collective study with a group of student fellows whose words, doubts, sparks, and leads will also shape this page. I have the expectant hope that the Commentary form will invite investigations that mutate out of our embodied experiments, archival research, and community writing workshops in El Paso throughout Fall 2021. Study will be constituted by the snags, glitches, and serendipities of a virtual research process built on relationships and emergence.

Architectures of Disappearance comes out of my current work on a documentary poetry project called POST BOND (excerpt in Tripwire), focused on one square mile in east El Paso containing the ICE detention center, migrant shelter, post office exchange, airport runway and NASA forward operating location.

Honora Spicer is an experiential educator, writer and translator. She is interested in pedagogies of teaching social justice through the moving body, and experiential education approaches to histories of constriction of movement in the US settler-state. She teaches history at El Paso Community College, alongside open enrollment courses in Place-based US History. In January 2019-July 2020, she lived in El Paso, volunteering with humanitarian and abolitionist organizations in migrant shelters and immigration detention centers. Her literary translations from Spanish have appeared in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-day, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, and elsewhere.

Reach out with responses to this Commentary and ideas for connections: noraspicer at gmail dot com. I would love to be in conversation.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Jacket editors here.

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Orienting to im/mobility

Reading Yousif M. Qasmiyeh's 'Writing the Camp'