Consider the Banana

Shopping at the local Costco last month, I staggered in a stimuli-induced stupor across an improbably large display of enticingly cheap bananas. Bending around nearby shoppers, I reached down to extract a hefty bunch, which I added to my growing pile of Goldfish crackers, granola bars, and various carbonated beverages. As I moved on to the sample chips and salsa, I considered the bananas hardly at all.

I recalled this experience recently while reading banana [ ], a new book of poetry from Seattle-based author Paul Hlava Ceballos, winner of last year鈥檚 prestigious Donald Hall Prize. As the title indicates, Ceballos is very much concerned with the banana: its significance as a commodity of American empire; its cultivation as an instrument for the subjugation of Latin American people; its deliciousness as a source of pride for the same. But Ceballos is also interested in language: the ways the 鈥渘eutrality鈥� of official communication can obscure profound violence; the process by which the 鈥渙bjectivity鈥� of journalistic reporting can sanitize unspeakable horror.

颁别产补濒濒辞蝉鈥� banana [ ] is divided into three parts: two sequences of individual poems, many of them Ecuadorian 诲茅肠颈尘补蝉 (an oral form developed by Black artists in northwestern Ecuador), bracketing a longer section composed entirely of language borrowed from other sources (CIA documents, Hollywood movies, botany textbooks), each containing the word 鈥渂anana.鈥� By combining disparate texts, Ceballos links intersecting histories: his own family鈥檚 with that of the banana trade in Latin America, European colonization in the Americas, and experiences of other immigrants in the United States. Who gets remembered and how, Ceballos seems to ask, and to what extent can subverting the language of colonization create new meanings, new histories, new pathways for remembering?

In one of the book鈥檚 early poems, 鈥淐BP Statement on Agent Involved Shooting [Verb?] in Hidalgo, TX,鈥� Ceballos rewrites the journalistic account of a fatal shooting in Texas. The phrase 鈥�~~was involved in a use-of-force incident~~鈥� becomes 鈥淸shot a person].鈥� The words 鈥�~~The incident occurred~~鈥� are changed to 鈥淸The State employee freely shot the unarmed man].鈥� But Ceballos isn鈥檛 satisfied with simply adding specificity to a bloodless, euphemistic report. Instead, his additions grow more lyrical as the poem progresses. The word 鈥�~~subject~~鈥� transforms into 鈥淸Language emptied of meaning is a haunting].鈥� The person who 鈥�~~sustained a gunshot wound~~鈥� and died 鈥淸enters here a domestic American archive].鈥� By contrasting these opposing idioms, Ceballos shows how certain kinds of language can be prisons, vacuuming whole worlds into their void.

鈥淐BP Statement on Agent Involved Shooting [Verb?] in Hidalgo, TX鈥� is only one of several poems that memorialize immigrants who have been killed by the U.S. state. And if the poems themselves amount to a kind of archive, it is one that seeks to extend their lives, not to erase them. 颁别产补濒濒辞蝉鈥� mother herself immigrated to the United States from Ecuador, and several poems, including the moving 鈥淚rma,鈥� recount the challenges of growing up in a household where 鈥渆very dinner was lentejas and huevos鈥� and 鈥減latanos sizzle[ed]/so sweet and so brown,鈥� yet his mother鈥檚 language was minimized so her children would more easily assimilate. 鈥淪he cut her native tongue to protect her kin,鈥� writes Ceballos. 鈥淲hat I get mezclado/are words she never said.鈥�

The word 鈥渕ezclado鈥� translates here to 鈥渕ixed up鈥� or 鈥渃onfused,鈥� but it can also mean 鈥渕ixed together鈥� or 鈥渂lended,鈥� and this latter definition, I think, provides some insight into the nature of 颁别产补濒濒辞蝉鈥� project as a whole. By 鈥渕ixing together鈥� reflections from his childhood in California with meditations on the origin of the banana, elegies for the victims of U.S. government violence, and poems written from the perspectives of Incan kings and queens, among many other sources and texts, Ceballos makes the argument for a continuum, for connection, for many parts of a single, still unfinished story. 鈥淎n accent is a spirit/summoned by a candle in the mouth,鈥� he writes in 鈥淚rma.鈥� 鈥淚t depends on every/war, every foot-worn path.鈥�

Nowhere is this assertion more evident than in the book鈥檚 middle section, a 40-page collage of words and images drawn from dozens of incongruous sources. Depictions of the massacres of unionized banana workers are juxtaposed with marketing materials for Hollywood movies. First-person narratives describing the working conditions on banana plantations are situated next to sources that speak of military coups and covert operations. Government documents are erased, distilled down to their sinister essence. In one poem that spans several pages, each line consists of two words, all ending with the word 鈥渂anana,鈥� and each taken from a different source: 鈥渟cale banana/wound banana/can banana/make banana/a banana/wound banana/seem banana/smaller banana.鈥� Read horizontally, the passage offers one meaning. Read vertically, however, it provides another: 鈥淪cale can make a wound seem smaller.鈥�

The wounds of empire. The wounds of exploitation. The wounds of immigration. The wounds of assimilation. 鈥淚f culture鈥檚 root is care, it matters/the object of care is visible,鈥� Ceballos writes in the book鈥檚 opening poem. How can one be expected to care about something they cannot see? How can they see if the relevant knowledge has been obscured? 颁别产补濒濒辞蝉鈥� book seeks to intervene in our collective ignorance, to illuminate dark chapters of our interconnected histories. His artwork challenges us to look more closely at the fruit occupying our grocery stores and breakfast tables.