Juárez/Ecapatec
We were taken down to the river, all eleven girls.
We had stopped being useful for one thing.
A man took a poor view
on what one of us had said.
Or on the fact that some of us had gone AWOL to eat gorditas
when we’d promised to diet during the day.
A man had the theory that we
throated better when hungry.
With that kind of hunger that pulls you down
into yourself, your thoughts clinging
to your ribs, vacuum-packed,
and words are emptied out of you,
and you live second to second like an animal.
In any case, the janitor
led us here on foot.
Hands tied.
Tape on mouth.
Bound to each other by the waist,
a necklace of girls.
He was sent because the job was considered
not worth the while of an expert executioner.
We had to watch as one by one he
hit us in the face with a stone until we stopped moving.
Tied by the waist to the girl to our left; the rope
pulling our middle, stomach tied tight.
Off jaw, out teeth. Nose,
eyes, and between the eyes.
We watched. Right until our eyeballs
rolled back into their sockets
and we gazed into the night of ourselves.
The last of us had already asphyxiated when it got to her turn;
vomit behind duct tape,
burn through the nose
swallowed back down.
Then he left us to feed
the wild boar and the coyotes.
Two years later we were found,
bones dispersed, sunned.
All marked
by the same –
How much machinery
to make that dress, to raise
and put down
that stone?
§
I was looking, in vain, for the newspaper article
that told our story among the deluge of pages
on the thousands of women of similar fates.
At the graves we
summon up our dead
ask them for strength
chant as we gather the remains
clink clank xylophoned in our zurrón
each bone a different timbre
for our song.
We blow on their bones.
With our breath
we build
an army
§
I go round calling for our
bodies in the house
of the dead:
Wake up grandmother
wake up grandfather
wake up 43
wake up 49
wake up 22
wake up 72
wake up 193
wake up 45
wake up 332
wake up 16
wake up 52
wake up 55
wake up 400
wake up 300
wake up 300
wake up 18
wake up 17
wake up 68
wake up 70
wake up 23
wake up 20
wake up 120
wake up
landless workers burned alive
gamblers burned in the casino
children burned in the day center
the witches burned
wake up
men hacked to pieces
women tortured
migrants suffocated in lorries
lying on the bed of the Seabetween
North, South, East
wake up extinct beasts
forgotten birdsong
torn mountains
quarried stones
corals lost
Stand before us now.
Lend us your voice.
Too long we have walked on our knees
our blood a path
of cempazúchitl petals.
Let us be a bridge.
A bridge
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2019. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2019 was Roseanne Watt.
Editor’s note:
I was very fortunate to be gifted Juana Adcock’s English-language debut, Split, last year. What a linguistically-scintillating collection, and with such startling range; poignant, funny, and always breath-taking, the poems occupy borderlands and wildernesses in all their resonances. This poem, one of Adcock’s more overtly political offerings, tore through me. I found the detachment of the speaker’s voice from her physical body to be a particularly powerful turning point, especially in the juxtaposition between the detail of physical violence with that of the brutally impersonal language of statistics.
Author’s Note:
There is currently a femicide crisis in Mexico and throughout Latin America, and in an era of growing inequalities, our justice systems are failing to protect women. Juárez and Ecatepec are two of the most infamous places for the amount of women and girls being killed in ways that are particularly violent, with the perpetrators going largely unpunished. The reason why we use the term femicide is that the murders are on account of the victims’ gender, and in the vast majority of cases the killer was an intimate partner of the victim, or someone known to her. Cf. male murder victims, where in 95% of cases the killer is a stranger. The issue of gender needs to be specifically addressed in legislation and in the way cases are treated within the justice system, where victim-blaming is still rampant today. In Scotland and the UK, though we may see fewer violent murders, the above gender distribution is still the same. The poem is both an exercise in empathy and a call to arms for women and our allies everywhere.
