On Dreaming, Fragment, and Intuition: A Conversation with Susan Briante

Susan Briante | Defacing the Monument | Noemi Press | 2020 | 162 Pages

Susan Briante’s Defacing the Monument has won numerous awards since its publication by Noemi Press in August 2020. In September 2021, Briante won the 2021 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism through the Poetry Foundation. Through Defacing the Monument, Briante writes about the Southwest Border while asking critical questions about agency, power, and what it means to ethically write about populations who’ve suffered at the hands of the U.S.’s oppressive political system. 

Here, two reporters (Carrie George and Noor Hindi) talk to Briante about the emergence of the book, the tough questions it asks of readers, and the use of reporting, visual art, and its hybrid crossing between nonfiction and poetry. 

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Noor Hindi: Can you tell us about crossing genres between journalism, nonfiction, and poetry? What are the possibilities and limitations? I'm curious about the things that journalism can and can't do that poetry can and can't do, as well as the sense of mystery and possibility in both. 

Susan Briante: I think my desires around the possibilities for writing exist to equal measure in both genres. Like, I think poetry and journalism and essay writing and literary essay can all do similar things. And then there's a very distinct thing that they can do, but it makes a lot of sense to me why people would work in both. And actually, I wish that when I was in a career in journalism, I had had more models for people who were doing that. And that's kind of what fascinated me about the book. It's the freedom of writing without the constraints of reporting. 

I have a critique of certain kinds of biases in journalism, but I don't have a critique of journalism. You know what I mean? It's not that poetry is so much better because I think poetry and essay is so dependent upon reporting—often that work journalists are doing. I couldn't have begun to write my book about the border if it weren't for the work of so many. But my book isn't about the border. My book is a book about writing about the border. But if it weren't for the work that so many journalists have done to sort of explain, you know, what the laws are, how they've changed, their witnesses, some of the things that are happening there.

But I do think, first, that it depends upon the kind of reporting that folks are doing—when I, in my brief career in journalism, worked for a newspaper, I was a daily journalist. And I think there's just not the time to be reflective or meditative or consider full systems. And I’m just starting to get to know some of the journalism faculty here at the University of Arizona where I teach. And also some students who graduated from the MFA program who have gone into journalism. And I know now that people talk about things like systems journalism, or solutions journalism. And these kinds of terms weren't around that many years ago when I was in J school and then working as a reporter. So those kinds of ideas are exciting to me. But I felt the constraint of just getting the information out without being able to be reflective or diagnostic—or biased, in a sense, right? I mean, and bias is a weird word, but to even want to be an advocate could be hard.

And in some stories, even while there is a kind of social justice or advocacy journalism, I think poetry and essay can better allow us those moments. They also work on the brain in different ways. 

Noor Hindi & Carrie George: How did the book emerge? What inspired it and the ideas throughout it about witness and reporting?

SB: The book came out of a project I do here at the University of Arizona with our MFA students called Field Studies in Writing Program. And three students each summer live in Patagonia, Arizona, which is just 20 minutes from the border to engage in sort of social justice or environmentally engaged research issues.

And what we try to, or what we aim to facilitate is what we call reciprocal research, where we have students working with community groups—but not just working with them to extract information and knowledge—but to be able to engage and sort of activate and to use their creative writing skills to help these groups.

So we've given creative writing workshops. Every summer, we work with youth who are working with a restoration project, the borderlands restoration network. And we've done other workshops with the Kino Border Initiative, which is a migrant aid center. The first summer we did this, we were sitting in the offices of the Kino Border Initiative in their Nogales, Arizona offices talking, and I said to her, ‘you've got five creative writing writers in front of you. What can we do?’ And it was in this moment—and I don't know if you've had these moments—she had just talked about the crisis. She had just shown us all that they're doing, and I just feel like here I am writing my fucking book. You feel like, ‘oh my God.’ It was this feeling of shame. And she was like, ‘um, hold on, I need this.’ She said, ‘You don't know what it is that will make that one person pick up the checkbook and write a check or call their representative. Or, if they're in a position of power, work to change.’ And she said, ‘Sometimes, they have to hear the stories, but they see that one image or they read that one poem’ and it kind of gave me the faith that art operates on a different channel. And that in many cases, in these situations of crisis, as many channels as we have open to allowing people entry and understanding can be helpful.

CG: When I was in journalism school, I worked with lots of subjects, and one thing that I always struggled with was being in a person's life for such a fixed point of time. You think of these different channels and the ways that a picture or a story can affect change—but who are we to enter a person's life, hear their most vulnerable stories, and then leave? 

SB: Yeah, that's a huge issue. That was part of that notion of reciprocal research. But it's working more on an institutional than an individual level, right? If we were going to go to the Kino Border Initiative, it wasn't just ‘what information can we take from you and the client you serve,’ but ‘how could we help serve the mission beyond even just writing poems about it?’ So we were able with KBI to do workshops for some of the students that they bring down to also witness what's happening.

Our students are engaging in workshops with their students so that creative writing becomes a different kind of reflective mechanism where people are involved in some of these things. But I still struggle with that and it's especially hard when you're dealing with a migrant population because there isn't a way to keep a connection. I think about—and there's a moment in the book where I talk about being an employee at a women's shelter and we got a chance to interview these five women. And I think about those women all the time, like, what has happened to them and where did they go? I think one of the things that we can do as writers is to, in those moments of interaction, try to be cognizant of the potential of the extracted nature and to try to offer agency to them whenever possible. 

There’s a part in the book where one of our students said to these women ‘do you feel better when you tell these stories?’ And that was a disruption that was really important to hear. If we're going to talk to people, what does the telling feel like? Does the telling feel safe? 

CG: Obviously there's no checklist for ethics, so there's not one way to answer this question, but I was thinking about how we can approach telling people's stories carefully and responsibly. And what happens if you are trying to do your reporting and you cross a line. How do you come back from that and how do you make it right?

SB: Well, I think it goes back to maybe something we were sort of alluding to at the beginning. I don't want to set up impossible standards for journalists who are working under very different conditions, but the best thing we can always do is just build relationships. And you hope that if in a relationship you mess up, if you can apologize—we apologize then ask how we can make it better. And then I think we often hope that you won't be remembered for the one transgression, but rather, you have the opportunity to have a relationship in which you show your full self. I mean, we are going to make mistakes—and even there are criticisms of this book that people have said ‘you talk a lot about giving voice and how do you give voice, but migrants aren't centered in this book.’ And they're right. I did end up centering my own thought process about how to approach and in doing so I didn't center migrants.

CG: I love the idea of putting relationships forward and putting community forward. That feels important in all kinds of writing, not just journalism. You allude to this in the book, to the writers who come before you. And you mentioned so many others, you mentioned Layli Long Soldier and Claudia Rankine and Muriel Ruckeyser. The amount of collaboration that seems at play in this book, maybe not literal collaboration, but the inner workings of all of these other writers and artists. We were wondering how you made that happen, how these works and these people were influencing you when you were working through the book. 

SB: I was just trying to figure out how to answer these questions. And so it was that moment of like, okay, I might be alone here with these questions in terms of the depth, but I'm not the first person to think of these things. So then how, how does this writer deal with this? And then if she does it this way, then what does that say, what can be transferred? Or what can I learn? There's so much amazing writing being made and we have access to it in so many ways. I mean—that's definitely a “we” with an asterisk, but those of us who have easy access to the internet and the scope to do some searches, those of us who have access to a library or to small press culture, can find it. You also get really excited by people who say your book led me to these other books, but that feels really great. 

I mentioned Divya Victor, earlier—so she has a book out called CURB and she just did this really simple thing that I thought was so beautiful on her Instagram account. She made posts as acknowledgements. Anyone who read the book, was one of her readers who she felt influenced the book, she named them and highlighted a book of theirs and thanked them... And I thought like, ah, I want to do that! Like it's something I think a little bit about as someone who teaches creative writing, and as someone who thinks about systems and capitalism, you know, so much about the way in which we ask our students and or society assets to engage with art making is about the individual. And it's so much more pleasurable to make art when we really are allowed to collaborate or to think about the collaboration. Like I can teach collaboration or encourage my students to collaborate, but in the end they're turning in a thesis that, because of the rules, it's produced by one person.

NH: Something that I loved about the book is this persistent questioning that occurs throughout it. Sometimes I feel like it's directed at yourself, sometimes directed specifically at the white gaze, sometimes directed at a general reader. And it feels like your positioning throughout the book changes depending on what you're writing about as well. Can you talk a little bit more about those questions and what you were pushing readers to think about? And then the whole back section is those ‘notes for further interest’ that I love so much, and that feels like its own sort of loose school of thought. 

SB: If there's one takeaway from some of the questions that were arising for me in being a witness to the migration crisis—the crisis that's been created by our government, but that's still a crisis, is there's not some kind of ethics checklist, you know?

I mean, it'd be kind of great if there were. I think that there is this way in which the work that I have to do as a white woman is going to be different work than a writer of color has. I think every situation we bring our full selves and the baggage and the privilege and the biases more into every situation. And I think one of the things I just wanted to make the reader aware of was that I was constantly trying to think through what that means. And that perhaps is something writers and witnesses should also be thinking through. 

CG: One thing that I really loved is the way you questioned yourself and were vulnerable. It just feels like we're in a place right now where everybody has to know everything, or everybody has to be certain about everything. There's not a lot of room for nuance and confusion. It felt really—not comfortable— but realistic to be operating in this book that was moving through all of those gray areas. 

SB: When I think about these things, I'm thinking about addressing other white writers, because I feel like that's where I've seen the things that most concerned me and that I don't want to replicate. Because you can't—you don't know everything, and that's okay, but you need to be able to make yourself responsible, or as responsible as you can. And I do think, unfortunately, there's a way in which we want to attribute it to white fragility, which is a fraught term in some ways. But there are a lot of white writers who are like, there's just no way I can write this. No, like you can. There's actually work you can do. And part of that work is questioning yourself and your position and reading other folks and thinking of perspectives. And again, it's not to say that even in my doing that, I have somehow mastered or taken care of everything. It's work that we're going to do the rest of our lives. And in some ways it's the best work we could be spending our time doing.

NH: Is there something potentially useful in bringing a self to the page that isn't trying to master all of the information around them? I think when Carrie talks about that sense of walking into these questions, there's this sense of mystery and this honesty I felt throughout reading the book that welcomed me in it. And it lets you think about these questions and these topics, as you're thinking about them, Susan, which I think is really cool. I don't think a lot of books walk you through the process of how the writer  is grappling with these really big ideas. And it felt really honest and also felt very pointed at the same time. And that's a really difficult balance to strike. 

But then there's something I’ve really been begging to ask, that sense of mystery is something I really fell in love with, with these questions. I'm even thinking about these moments, like page one forty five, where were you born and where did. Where did the world rise up for you? What history falls behind you like a shadow? How are you writing in relation to your history and hush and slur and scream? That question reads like a poem, even as it's a question.And I love those moments, these “unanswerable questions.” And then the irony of there being five lines in the book to answer very expansive questions. There's a little bit of irony in that and humor and mystery and playfulness even as we're writing about something so serious. I wondered if you could talk about that—and kudos to you for doing that. 

SB: Well I just can't say enough amazing things about the folks I got to work with from the publisher Carmen Giménez Smith to Suzi Garcia, who was sort of my direct editor on the piece and Sarah, then the managing editor and then Douglas Kearneywho designed all the infidel books.

I think they got my vision for what the book could be. I have no design skills. Like, I did all of my first draft in Microsoft Word. Doug was really great about sort of maximizing the visual elements, and it was early in the process that, I think Carmen and I, we were thinking about this book and thinking about my experience writing out of and being interested in documentary poetics. But we also knew that there were lots of them that were being written sort of out of documentary politics, but not many that had been written about it. We're cognizant of that.

What if we play with this idea of like a workbook or a textbook?

This can also be one of the opportunities. Like what are the things that poetry or essay can do that journalism can’t do. And one of those really fun things is playing with form in such a way, right? Like we can invent our forms and in ways that journalism just can’t. So there's tons of inventive journalism, but still has kind of a smaller center of expectations. 

CG: I was going to ask about the editorial process throughout the book and little bit more about the creation and the title. 

SB: The title actually came up in an earlier essay. And that was more of a sort of scholarly essay written in Jacket 2 on Muriel Rukeyser’s poetics. And it was in doing that reading about one section of her poem where she's writing into what’s been engraved on this monument that I came upon the phrase “defacing the monument.” But I think as I was writing this book, which was kind of moving way beyond the scope of that article, that idea of defacement kind of kept coming up. I was so excited to see the work of Fernández who paints the border walls a color so it blends into the sky that is this beautiful defacement, but also the kind of defacement that opens up this other possibility, right? And an erasing. And then that idea of what we were just talking about, how to allow the book itself to be defaced is actually to allow just the very kind of interaction I want the book to provoke.

CG: I re-read the book this week, and in rereading, I was thinking about all of these things that have just recently happened—the shift in power between Trump and Biden hasn’t affected the border crisis the way we wish it would. Everything that happened with voter fraud and January 6th, and then of course George Floyd. I was just wondering if you were thinking about these things as you were finishing getting the book published and if there's anything you wish you could go back and add to the book?

SB: I think every book is going to have that. You have to stop somewhere at some point. I think I kind of wish that I could've ended with some of these images of defaced monuments. I mean, it's been happening for years. You know, I think about Bree Newsome, a woman who climbed up the flagpole in front of the South Carolina state Capitol after the killing in Charleston of the congregation at the Black church. And I think she said something like ‘in the name of God, I will not let this flag fly another day’ and took the flag down, and immediately was arrested. I kind of wished that I had gestured more to those practical defacements, but, I mean, that is the beauty of the white space, where the questions are. I hope that someone else has picked up and is writing that next part of it.

NH: There's this aspect of photojournalism in the book. Can you talk a little bit about that? Do you consider the photos in this book as document, or as sort of their own separate things?

SB: It was sort of influenced by some of these cool books that incorporate texts and analytics.

So James Agee, Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men does that. The book starts with Evans’ photograph that doesn’t have any description or attribution. If you’re actually trying to figure out who he's depicting, you have to read quite a bit into the book to get to sections where he describes [it].

I think also W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn is a book I'm also looking to here. It has these images that are just sort of dropped in, and there's never captions, and sometimes, you know, they're very often referred to in the text, but sometimes there's a delay before you have the experience, before the photograph kind of links back to it. And so these are books that I've admired, that I was interested in sort of seeing if I could use some of the tools. And I think when you take away the caption and when you don't always immediately line up texts, you allow the image, you allow the reader to have their own experience of the image, and that was important to me. 

CG: Do you have any advice for people who are interested in getting into this kind of docu-poetry or documentary artwork?

SB: I think some of it is you want to always consider the biases and the constraints of whatever archive it is that you're looking at. Also all of the frames of your witnessing if you're doing witnessing work as well. Some books that often come up—a lot of them are in the book, but, James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which is more about witnessing than the archives, but it's a book that gestures to its own creation... It's so frustrating and self-indulgent, but you know, trying to pick at a lot of the stuff that we're talking about... 

And then I think also, writing into the things, imagining the things that we don't have access to. Like this goes back to that earlier question. If we're aware of what the archive is leaving out, what can imagination add and how can we use that in ways that are respectful, not appropriative? And then what are these archive possibilities for information like dreaming, fragment, intuition. That's another possibility.