Abolition in Our Lifetime: A Conversation with Christopher Soto
By E.R. Pulgar
Christopher Soto doesn’t mince words in his debut collection Diaries of a Terrorist, an eviscerating and urgent work of verse that calls for abolition of the police state. The Salvadoran poet and abolitionist was born, raised, and is currently based in unceded Tongva, Chumash, and Kizh land (Los Angeles, California). Soto has worked for years as a political organizer in various capacities, including co-founding Undocupoets and the national Writers For Migrant Justice campaign. His long-awaited collection sheds a harsh light on police brutality and state violence in the United States and beyond.
Soto’s book of poems takes aim at the ego by decentering the “I” pronoun in favor of “we.” With punk ferocity and rebellious staccato rhythm, Soto recounts experiences of teaching young incarcerated poets, lambasts corrupt politicians and police, mourns the aftermath of domestic violence, and pays homage to predecessors that this generation of queer artists lost to AIDS, specifically Cuban visual artist Félix González-Torres who is directly invoked in tender long poem “Two Lovers In Perfect // Synchronicity”. In the poem, Soto writes defiantly of the tenderness he holds in a world where Black and brown people are constantly targeted unjustly by racist police:
Police harassed us // Sooooooooooooo much
// We stopped driving // We stopped biking //
We moved to a different city // Police asked //
Driver’s lice sense // Our red-rubbed eyes //
Our brown skin // Our brown // We didn’t jog
the stop sign // We didn’t pass the speed limit
// Our music wasn’t too loud // No queremos
hablar // Contigo jodón // & It’s amongst these
conditions // We love // We try to
It’s no exaggeration to call this a crucial text of our times, a book of poems bold enough to incinerate this world’s broken and oppressive systems and imagine, bravely, the better world we can (and should) build from its ashes. Soto spoke to the Columbia Journal via email about his new book, abolition, survival, collective liberation, faggotry, and honoring queer ancestors as we dream up and mobilize toward a new world.
One of the main draws of this book is your use of “we” as a pronoun throughout. The book jacket tells us it’s your way of “emphasizing that police violence happens not only to individuals, but to whole communities,” but as I read through I was really enamored by the way your “we” is a way of insisting that our liberation (from police, from the boundaries of gender, from abusers) is collective in its essence.
The “we” pronoun was my way of pushing away from american individualism and also decentralizing the self in the work. A movement is not made from one individual but rather various communities and coalitions. My experiences are not exceptional. My voice is not solitary but rather it is part of a chorus of many other voices singing against police violence. The “we” pronoun allowed me to express this most directly.
I think this pronoun choice felt possible because of how I saw Claudia Rankine shift the gaze of the reader in Citizen where she only uses the “you” pronoun. As I continued working with the “we” then the address became more explicitly directed towards survivors and abolitionists. And then my pronoun choice became more aware of how porous the “we” can be, as no community is monolithic in its experiences. Nonetheless, this craft choice felt like the closest approximation to what I wanted to accomplish politically.
There is one place where the “I” pronoun is used near the end of the book. I discuss the aftermath of domestic violence and the experience of looking for an old version of myself before discovering that person no longer exists — what I have now is an altered version of who I once was. It took me a long time to embrace this new self that formed in the aftermath. I had to discover parts of me that were not there before, anxiety and PTSD. I had to learn how to talk to these new parts of me and how to love them. My new self, what has survived, is definitely not shiny and perfect, but there is a future before me with oceans and sky and love and possibility. For a brief moment in the book, the “I” pronoun was used when looking for myself in the debris of domestic violence before rejoining the chorus of survivors. I needed that moment to myself near the end of the book. It felt almost as if I was mourning and relinquishing the self that existed before, and acknowledging what had happened has shifted me forever. There is no going back to whoever I thought I was before.
I was wondering about the // as a form and motif in this book. It made me think about the duality of a lot of experiences, but also about fragmentation, the way that there is a before and after to violence and to joy.
There is no punctuation in the book, aside from the double forward slashes. It is punctuation that I created for myself and coming to such craft is not an easy process. Punctuation is breath, the rhythm of a poem. Punctuation is emotion, the spirit of a poem. It is a huge decision to walk away from the rhythm and the spirit that is most frequently used in your language, the technology from which your being expresses its desires. Why I created this new punctuation for the book is because it allowed for a broader range of interpretations of the text. The reader can pause at my double forward slashes, or they can ignore it and keep moving. The reader can insert a period or question or exclamation mark where a double forward slashes exists. I have no control over that. This punctuation allowed for more internal tensions in the work and it also allowed for the reader to have multiple interpretations of the same text, as if refusing to solidify around a singular truth.
I was particularly moved by the long poem “Two Lovers In Perfect // Synchronicity.” The way that the love story of Ross Laycock and Felix Gonzales-Torres [and his work Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)] was used to unfurl not only a love song to a childhood in LA — and shed a light on police brutality in Latinx communities there — but also as a remembrance and honoring to our queer rebel ancestors really made me emotional. The political inherent in here (in the whole collection, but particularly here,) is not lost on me, with Gonzales-Torres making the work as a response to Laycock dying of AIDS. How did this poem come to be?
This poem was written, in part, because of an isolation I felt while editing Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color years ago. I remember just wanting so bad to call Essex Hemphill and other poets on the phone. People who’ve passed away before me that I felt should still be around. As a Central American abolitionist faggot often I feel like I’ve walked into the wrong house while in the inbox of literary gatekeepers. Not as if I don’t deserve to be a writer, but I feel as if I’m walking into the living room of a white Connecticut suburb where Jill compliments my accent and has no way of computing my works or understanding how I came to make art. I was yearning for my queer of color mentors who passed away during the AIDS epidemic. Since I wouldn’t have an opportunity to reach them on the phone or via email, I wanted to talk with them in the spiritual plane of the poem. This poem for me is a bridge. Ross and Felix were leaving their breath in Los Angeles, just as I was being birthed into their footsteps. For a moment, we spoke.
Queer love and sex is as strong a theme in this book as abolition, often coming on the heels of it or pointing to sex as the ultimate freedom, and queerness as am ultimate freedom that has been cracked down upon. I’m thinking of the release of a poem like “Transactional Sex with Satan” or “Orgies For The Elderly” or even the overt queer sexuality of “We’ve Been Yearning For A Riot” (I’m thinking of the cheetah crop top and becoming a cheetah). Can you tell me about weaving sex and revolt together in your poetics, and how they clash, coincide and often work hand-in-hand in this book?
I don’t think of queerness and abolition as mutually exclusive: they are both unobtainable horizons that I spend my life walking towards. Though, as the term queer is being used these days it is starting to feel less interesting to me. There are so many people identifying as queers that are super happy existing in communion with the capitalist state. For the last year or so I have been identifying as a faggot again: a life defined by sexual and social deviance that has little interest in legibility by, assimilation into, or appeasing capitalist and white supremacist systems. I think the word faggot is more quickly able to celebrate difference than queer, at the moment. For me, faggotry feels like chaos, an open field with no rules, with so much risk, and few limits on how to LIVE. Faggotry is fresh air in an otherwise stale room. Pertaining to your question, maybe sex can contain a moment of freedom, if freedom is defined as a place where there is “no fear”, as Nina Simone says. Maybe this convo about sex as freedom is an abstraction that shifts focus from the physical encagement of 1.9 million people currently incarcerated in the United States.
What do you want readers to take away from reading this book? Is there a particular poem or moment that you find defines the whole text?
The book starts by naming state violence — “police killed my neighbor” — and it ends with a call to action for the self: “get the fuck up and fight.” I’m interested in community action. There are so many opportunities to engage in abolitionist organizing at the moment. I really hope that this book adds to abolitionist conversations so that our coalitions and our people power will continue to build, so that more abolitionist writers and artists and activists continue to come. We all have different ways that we can contribute to this movement’s work. If we fight for it, I think we can see abolition in our lifetime.
E.R. Pulgar is the Online Poetry Editor of the Columbia Journal and an M.F.A. candidate in poetry & translation
About the author:
E.R. Pulgar is a Venezuelan American poet, translator, and critic based in Harlem. Their criticism has appeared in i-D, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and elsewhere. Their poems have appeared in PANK Magazine and b l u s h. They are an MFA candidate in poetry and literary translation at Columbia University, and serve as the Online Poetry Editor of the Columbia Journal. Born in Caracas and raised in Miami, they live in New York City.
