Katie Ward

GENG 573

Dr. Emily James

May 16, 2023

Subversive Palimpsest:

Transculturation Art as Social Critique

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A lover, once: You can’t say every action is political. Then the word political loses all meaning.

He added: What is political about this moment?

I was washing his dishes. I had left the water running.

-Solmaz Sharif

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        The word “document” comes from the Latin documentum, meaning “example, proof, lesson,” a descendant of docere (“to show, to cause to know”), from the Proto-Indo-European root dek, meaning to take, to accept, as in dignity, as in dogma, as in orthodox, paradox, synecdoche. When used as a verb, “to document” means to teach, to instruct, or to furnish with evidence. Sometimes “document” feels like the word “thing”: empty, all-encompassing, a container into which anything might fit and sit, unclarified, forever.

But then there are times when “document” becomes heavy. Documentum: example, proof, lesson. Docere: to cause to know. Dek: to accept. Documents are what catalogue our ways of knowing and seeing. They prove existence. They cause us to know what they know. They tell us what is accepted. There is an invincibility about them; they are their own evidence. They represent reality. And this is no meager feat. We are increasingly concerned with the truth, with whether or not our news anchors are relaying facts or espousing opinions, with the difference between information to share and information to keep secret, with what we are told, why we are told, and whom we are told by. We are so driven with the need for solid footing, a concrete and insurmountable reality, that when we are presented with something labeled as “proof,” we leap for it, we cling to it, and we do not wonder where it came from.

Social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson defines a document as “the result of a transference of reality, both objective and subjective, to its reproduction [...] a document is any sign that is perceived or recorded to represent, reconstitute, or prove a phenomenon” (33). Jurgenson makes the important distinction that a document is not a literal recreation of history, but a reproduction of a perception of reality. Reading any document as “fact” is only half a reading. Documents, like news stories, infographics, and textbooks, are made by people, and are thus fallible. When we document events, we are recording what we see through our eyes, and not an objective truth. The perspective in which we view history is not the perspective of the conquered, but of the conqueror, who could create an entire lexicon coding themselves as hero and the vanquished as a finite consequence.

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Term: Our Peculiar Institution. Meaning: slavery. (Epitome of all euphemisms.)

Term: Removal. Meaning: expulsion and dispossession of people from their lands.

Term: Placing out. Meaning: expulsion of abandoned children from the East Coast.

Term: Relocation. Meaning: confining people in reservations.

Term: Reservation. Meaning: a wasteland, a sentence to perpetual poverty.

Term: Removal. Meaning: expulsion of people seeking refuge.

Term: Undocumented. Meaning: people who will be removed. (Luiselli 255-256)

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In Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, a blended family grapples with identity in the midst of a field study gone road trip. The protagonist, known to the reader only as Mama, is searching for the daughters of a close friend, who are missing in federal custody after crossing the Mexican-American border on foot, while her husband, Papa, is on a quest to track the trails of the last Apache. A family of documentarians and documentarists, Mama, Papa, and their two young children mix theory, fiction, photographs, and sound to make sense of their literal and metaphorical journeys, begging the reader to consider what it means to document. This question is certainly not unique to Luiselli; artists from “conquered” cultures and communities^[1] have complex and extensive traditions of exploring the implications of a history documented by their oppressors. In her book, Arts of the Contact Zone, artist and theorist Mary Louise Pratt calls this kind of exploration transculturation, or

processes whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture. The term, originally coined by Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s, aimed to replace overly reductive concepts of acculturation and assimilation used to characterize culture under conquest. While subordinate peoples do not usually control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what gets absorbed into their own and what it gets used for. Transculturation, like autoethnography, is a phenomenon of the contact zone. (36)

Transculturation seeks to question the value and implications of documents created by the conqueror. Transculturation can be found across artistic communities of historically oppressed people, from ledger art in indigenous traditions, erasureture in Black writing, reflections on victimhood from feminist artists, and Valeria Luiselli’s Migrant Mortality Reports. Through transculturation, artists explore the ways in which the United States violently dehumanizes groups of people it does not want.

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Ledger art is an indigenous art form with centuries of history. “In the early nineteenth century,” writes Richard Pearce, “warriors painted pictographic narratives of their heroic deeds on their robes and tipis as a way of bringing honor to their families and tribes as well as themselves” (1). As white settlers and explorers increased the contact these tribes had with European culture and resources in the nineteenth century, paper became more and more readily available. This paper was not, however, the same paper that classically trained artists on the East Coast were using, but rather “autograph books, sketch pads, note paper, stationary, and balance sheets— which were generically called ledger books” (2). Ledger art was born on the documents used to justify the theft and destruction of native land, resulting in a subversive palimpsest that combined two conflicting identities, what Richard Pearce suggests “became a group record, which Castle McLaughlin argues appropriated the power of written documents— treaties and deeds that were responsible for taking away their lands” (Pearce 3).

Ledger art evolved as the United States’ methods of attacking indigenous people shifted. In the 19th century, the government focused on mandated boarding schools, “another chapter of federal Indian policy that attempted to eradicate Native culture through the forced education and assimilation of Native children” (“Tracing” 1). The boarding school campaign was headed by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, whose “Kill the Indian, save the man” mantra led him to found the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Before this, Pratt served as warden at Fort Marion in Saint Augustine, Florida, where, “between 1875 and 1878, seventy-two Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Caddo men were imprisoned there because of their involvements in events connected to the Red River Wars in Indian Territory (later Oklahoma)” (“Keeping”). These men created some of the best known ledger art during their imprisonment, producing “hundreds of drawings and a number of books detailing their former lives as warriors, hunters, and suitors as well as their new lives as prisoners and students” (“Keeping”). These artists include Bear’s Heart, Koba, Wohaw, and Shave Head, whose early work in transculturation serve as the foundation of contemporary ledger art.

A Man Receiving Power from Two Spirit Animals, Wohaw, 1877

One such contemporary artist, Dolores Purdy Corcoran, expands the transculturation tradition of ledger art with modern materials and global influences^[2]. Corcoran (Caddo) has a family history with ledger art; several members of her family attended Carlisle Indian School under Pratt’s reign, and kept their own family ledger records. Corcoran’s art uses real antique ledgers and colored pencil to highlight the transculturation at work. Of her piece, Turkey Dance, Pearce writes:

The turkey dancers are performing a victory dance, dating back to when the Caddo were wealthy farmers and traders living in their homelands in what are now Louisiana, East Texas, Arkansas, and the tip of Oklahoma. They are drawn on an 1895 ledger page, dated June 6, which records the payment of $1,240 in taxes by W. L. Bledsoe to the Treasurer’s Office of Kingfisher County in the Territory of Oklahoma. These taxes were financing the settlement on what had been Indian Territory [...] the ledger, then [...] is a material record of federal and state governments displacing native people, including the Caddo [...] the balance sheet, turned on its side to accommodate the Caddo historical record, must be deciphered through the strong, colorful, and highly controlled figures of two contemporary Caddo turkey dancers.” (56)

Turkey Dance, Dolores Purdy Corcoran, 2006

Corcoran combines elements of tribal traditional art with those of the dominant cultures that committed genocide against the artist’s people in radical acts of reclamation. Corcoran employs the literal documents used to steal from and profit off of her tribe to make art that celebrates the resiliency and strength of the Caddo people. While she cannot control “what emanates from the dominant culture,” (in this case, the commodification of native land), she does control what gets used, and how (Pratt 36).

Ledger art generally refers to visual art done on literal ledgers. However, I argue that some native writers do the same work through poetry. Layli Long Soldier’s 2017 book of poetry, Whereas, takes its title from the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans, a document signed by President Obama, folded into an unrelated piece of legislation, witnessed and received by nobody (Long Soldier 57). Whereas contemplates erasure and minimization, the discretion of cultural obliteration, the ease with which minority injury is band-aided by the majority. The second half of Long Soldier’s book consists of “Whereas Statements” and “Resolutions,” in which she responds to the Apology using “the language, crafting, and arrangement of the written document” (57). Long Soldier’s Whereas Statements borrow the structure of the Apology by starting each poem with the word “WHEREAS,” followed by independent thoughts on a theme. Long Soldier’s poems stray progressively farther from the format of the Apology as the book goes on. The first poem follows a traditional form, with four free verse stanzas, and lines directly referencing the Apology: “WHEREAS when offered an apology I watch each movement,” “I listen for cracks in knuckles or in the word choice,” “I ask the strength of the gesture to move like a poem,” “Expectation’s a terse arm fold,” “I am often / crouched in footnote or blazing in title” (Longsoldier 61^[3]). The poems then shift to prose form, solid paragraphs reflecting on ways in which indigenous people are othered, while still remaining connected to Long Soldier’s dissection of documents:

In a note following the entry for Indian an Oxford / dictionary warns: Do not use Indian or Red Indian to talk about American native peoples, as these / terms are now outdated; use American Indian instead. So I explain perhaps the same could be / said for my work some burden of American Indian emptiness in my poems how American / Indian emptiness surfaces not just on the page but often on drives, in conversations, or when I / lie down to sleep. (62^[4])

        “Whereas Statement 6” begins to shift forms again, introducing couplets, followed by prose poetry stanzas in “Whereas Statement 7.” “Whereas Statement 9” begins deconstructing stanzas, with the penultimate stanza reading “I cannot” and the final stanza continuing the phrase: “syntax or poem the Creator nor differentiate one Creator from another Creator, much less. / That is, mine from theirs, theirs from ours, or why a Creator-split. At the mirror, who can;” (70^[5]). This deconstruction expands in “Whereas Statement 18,” in which the page is split down the middle by a serrated line, and each half contains outlined stanzas, suggesting the way indigenous identity has been cut up, separated from itself, isolated. In “Whereas Statement 19,” Long Soldier leaps back into the Apology, the second half of the poem reading as an erasure of the original document:

^[6]

        Long Soldier follows this poem with the final Whereas Statement, whose second half is made up of the words cut from the Apology in “Whereas Statement 19”:

^[7]

        Long Soldier, like Wohaw and Corcoran, uses documents given to native peoples by the United States government as a medium for her art, and in doing so, attacks the document itself. The repetition of “Whereas,” lifted straight from the Apology, seems almost to mock the formality and bureaucracy evident in the document, and Long Soldier’s constant attention to diction leads readers to question the meaning of every word in the Apology. In the eighteenth and nineteenth “Statements,” Long Soldier extracts what has been taken from her people: spirituality, belief systems, traditions, lives, language. The dramatic visual effect of this dissection stresses the gravity of loss native peoples have suffered at the hands of the government that now tries to placate them with a Congressional document. Long Soldier is drawing on every element of ledger art, from the reappropriation of government documents to the focus on community rather than individuality to the triumphant persistence of tradition unconquered.

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Black art, like indigenous art, also has a fruitful take on transculturation. Professor Kinohi Nishikawa^[8] of Princeton University uses the word “erasureture” to describe a “mode of Black writing (écriture) whose expression is the constitutive difference of all expression and thus can only be read in adjustments or supplements to the text itself” (297). Erasureture consists of documents modified through poetic erasure to yield an independent artwork that comments on the original text. Nishikawa distinguishes erasureture as a Black art due to the way in which Black artists:

do not take for granted the blankness of the surface or the fit of the medium to record their words. Instead, they reckon with the racism structured into our very writing technologies, epitomized by the associations we bring to the whiteness of the page. For these artists, the right to inscribe is unevenly distributed among people and populations. To address this disparity, erasure becomes a mode of media reflexivity in their art, where writing emerges not as inscription of our mental processes and affective states but as deconstruction of our socialized habits of reading [...] These minor subtractions serve a critical function vis-à-vis whiteness, but they also create space for Black plenitude, an overflow of meaning that comes with being able to see language differently. (297)

Like ledger artists, Black erasureture artists reappropriate documents of oppression as mediums of art that critique their original context while creating new beauty. M. NourbeSe Philip pursues such a mission in her 2008 poetry book, Zong! Philip’s work applies a form of erasureture to the 1783 court decision, Gregson v. Gilbert, the only known document chronicling the Zong Massacre. In 1781, the slave ship Zong was captained by Luke Collingwood and carried 470 enslaved Africans to Jamaica. Facing overcrowding, navigational errors, and a lack of food and water, Collingwood decided that rather than running the risk of slaves dying of starvation or illness, he and his crew could murder the slaves, and collect insurance for lost cargo. Collingwood and his crew murdered at least 150 enslaved Africans by throwing them overboard the ship during their transatlantic passage. After legal dispute between the ship’s owners and insurers, a jury found that the murder of the slaves was legal, and that the Zong’s owners must be paid. Philip uses this court decision as a wordbank for her poetry, using only phrases found in the source document to construct the story of the murdered, rather than the story of the ship. In doing so, Philip creates “a story that can only be told by not telling,” chiseling words into poetry that is more like visual art or music than it is lyric (191). In limiting herself to only the words contained in the original court document, Philip reflects on the absolute dehumanization of the murdered slaves, their reduction to cargo, then liability, then profit. The result is not a narrative story, but an emotional one, in which the reader is thrown into chaos and confusion just as the captives aboard the Zong must have been, a reading of the text that is not “for meaning, but for something else”; as Philip herself put it, “the story that cannot be told must not-tell itself in a language already contaminated, possibly irrevocably and fatally. I resist the seduction of trying to cleanse it through ordering techniques and practices, for the story must tell itself, even if it is a partial story” (193, 199).

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        Transculturation is perhaps easiest seen in visual art, where artists can very clearly juxtapose their art on top of the concrete image of a land sale or a court document. However, as I argue with regard to Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, written art can just as effectively use transculturation by borrowing form and diction from a document to create a tapestry of commentary. Carmen Maria Machado is a master of incorporating traditionally visual art forms into her writing, as she does in her short story, “Especially Heinous.” In “Especially Heinous,” Machado uses the form of episode synopsis to deliver her story, as well as her critique of true crime media. Machado reimagines 12 seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), following Benson and Stabler as they carry out investigations of depraved sex crimes in New York City. Machado’s story works through the episode synopses; Benson is haunted by the ghosts of girls whose rapes and murders she investigates, Stabler comes to terms with his inability to protect his wife and daughters from men, and two doppelgangers try to usurp the protagonists’ positions. While SVU is not the same kind of document as the ones used by ledger artists and erasureture poets, I would argue that any television show is “a transference of reality [...] to its reproduction” that is “perceived or recorded to represent, reconstitute, or prove a phenomenon,” in accordance with Jurgenson’s definition of a document (33). SVU does not claim to be a factual depiction of crime, but does attempt to accurately portray sex crimes, police investigations, and the judicial process. These topics have become increasingly popular since SVU’s inception in 1999; true crime TV shows, podcasts, and Internet forums seem to attract a wide audience interested in human psychology and the justice system.

However, many social critics, myself included, feel that true crime media has a tendency to sensationalize violence and trauma in order to engage audiences, resulting in stories that dehumanize victims and desensitize viewers. SVU is especially culpable because of its focus on “especially heinous” crimes, which are usually carried out against vulnerable women and girls, and usually involve sexual assault. This poses a problem for our social perception of sexual violence. 1 in 6 American women will be the victims of an attempted or completed rape at least once in their lifetimes, and, of these rapes, 8 out of 10 are committed by someone known to the victim with only 2.5% of rapists facing incarceration (Deparment of Justice 2019; 2010-2016; 205-2019)^[9]. Portraying rape as something primarily committed by mentally ill strangers does a disservice to 10% of the American population by publicizing a false narrative to captivate viewers in the same way that a horror movie does: by sensationalizing crime and using victims as objects whose suffering is not dealt with sensitively and serves as the foundation for an interesting story. Therefore, Machado’s use of elements of police procedurals and episode synopses serves as an example of transculturation; she uses SVU’s format to critique the way true crime media exploits and overlooks victims and desensitizes viewers to violence against women.

“Especially Heinous” is told through short, segmented paragraphs that serve as episode synopses. Machado delivers the story through short, reporter-like sentences that are uncharacteristically cold and direct: “Two underage models are attacked while walking home from a club. They are raped and murdered” (65). She also overuses certain words that are common in true crime media, such as “investigate” and “discover,” as well as visceral verbs that capture the violence of their action, like “pop” and “crack.” These diction choices immediately saturate the story with the cold drama of a police procedural and helps the reader create a vivid image of the world of “Especially Heinous.” Machado achieves the same goal by situating the reader in the story through the new DA, who joins the team after the old DA “loses the case,” “packs three changes of clothes in a suitcase” and “hit[s] the road” (66). The new DA tries to adjust to the job, providing the reader with a character whose naivete and perspective matches their own. With Benson and Stabler lost in the trauma and gore of their work, the reader can anchor onto the DA’s disorientation. The first case we see her in happens in the episode titled “Russian Love Poem,” in which the mother of an unknown victim takes the witness stand and begins to sing in Russian. The new DA “looks to the judge for help, but he is staring at the witness, his eyes distant as if he were lost in the forest of his own memory” (67). Here we not only see the DA struggling to adjust, but also the way that the judge has become almost desensitized to the trauma he sees every day. The DA looks to him for guidance, but he is absorbed in the tragedy of the singing mother, perhaps relating his own pain to hers. His desensitization is different from the lack of sensitivity we see from other members of the justice department in “Especially Heinous” because he is not dehumanizing a victim (or in this case, a victim’s mother); rather, he is pulled into the depth of her humanity, feeling her grief so heavily that he is practically despondent. This introduces both the DA and the reader to the surrealism that shrouds the story.

In the 272 episode synopses, Machado aptly dedicates a large amount of space to depictions of gratuitous violence against women. However, where the real SVU might play this violence for drama, Machado uses it to critique the over-the-top depravity so common in police procedurals. In “Disrobed,” “a disoriented, naked, pregnant woman is discovered wandering around Manhattan'' and “is arrested for indecent exposure” (67). Machado places this episode early in the story, establishing quickly that vulnerable women will not be portrayed as sympathetic, helpless humans, but as objects for action to center around. Machado also includes what I read as a four-part series on the same woman in the first half of the story, beginning with “Closure”:

“It was inside of me,” the woman says, pulling the bendy straw out of shape like a misused accordion. “But now it is outside of me. I would like to keep it that way.” (67)

“Closure: Part 2” picks up the same woman a few pages later:

“It’s not that I hate men,” the woman says. “I’m just terrified of them. And I’m okay with that fear.” (70)

These two episodes are linked clearly by their title, and introduce us to this unnamed woman through the same syntax; her episodes include a line of dialogue, a brief cut of narration, and a final line of dialogue. Based on this repetition, it appears that the same woman’s story comes back in “Coerced”:

“I made it up,” the woman says dully. Benson looks up from her yellow legal pad. “Are you certain?” she asks. “Yes,” the woman says. “Start to finish. I certainly, definitely made it up from start to finish.” (86)

This is immediately followed by “Choice,” in which Benson and Stabler attempt to escort “the woman” through a crowd of protesters outside the courtroom, until someone shoots into the crowd, and “the woman crumples [...] and she dies with her eyes half-open, an interrupted eclipse” (86). Though this episode does not follow the dialogue-heavy format of the other three, it refers to “the woman” without the context of her case, just as the others do, and its title (a single word beginning with the letter C) and proximity to “Coerced” suggest its relation. Assuming these four episodes follow the same woman, this story appears to be about a sexual assault investigation in which the crime is highly publicized and the victim^[10] is eventually threatened out of her testimony, then killed on her way to court. However, Machado does not say this; she tells the story almost exclusively through the woman’s spoken voice. In contrast to a real investigation, or a fictionalized one, which would focus on the details of the crime, the pursuit of the assailant, and the success of the detectives, with the trauma of the victim merely touched upon, Machado’s episodes are only concerned with the victim. In leaving the rest of the story out, Machado centers the victim’s experience while showing the undue power of outside influences on sex crime investigations. We see the episode through the victim’s eyes only: she is afraid, yet bravely works with Benson until something scares her so much that she retracts her testimony, only to be shot down for appearing outside the courthouse. Her story is not a mystery. There is nothing to solve.

Machado also critiques the flippant nature with which true crime media handles extremely sensitive topics with pure sensationalism. In “Criminal,” a man robs a bank with a fake gun only to get fifty-seven dollars, and “the teller saves the day by slicing off his face with the machete that he keeps under the counter” (91). In “Scavenger,” Benson and Stabler are investigating an apartment where a grisly crime scene took place when the landlord asks “when he can get to cleaning up the apartment for rental,” and Benson begins repeating that “OxiClean would get [the blood] right out” (93). In “Spooked,” a woman, presumably the victim of a violent crime, is told by a “bored officer” that she “‘just gotta learn to live with’” whatever has happened to her (117). These synopses play up the gratuitous violence and hard-boiled snark that true crime media uses to charm audiences, leading the reader to question the perceived “good guy” in each episode. The bank robber in “Criminal” barely makes a profit, and explicitly does not hurt anyone, and he is brutally apprehended and mutilated by the bank teller. After episode after episode of rapists and murderers getting away, this sudden spectacle of civilian justice shocks the reader and questions why police procedurals seem to be so much harsher on non-violent crimes. The victim of the murder in the apartment is not even mentioned in “Scavenger,” and the only image of the crime scene that we get is through the question of commodification. The gory death of an innocent victim is of no concern, as long as it doesn’t slow down a paycheck. The police officers we see outside of Benson and Stabler, especially the one in “Spooked,”  seem oblivious to the trauma of the population they work with, emotionlessly telling victims to “learn to live with it,” suggesting their own desensitization to violence against women after being so inundated with it. Machado twists the portrayal of procedurals to highlight their moral dubiousness. Are these shows leading us to root for extrajudicial executions? Are they teaching us to value life and profit equally? Are they making us used to seeing women being horribly tortured, assaulted, and killed?

Machado pushes these questions even further as the episodes go on. In “Slaves,” we are introduced to the precinct’s interns when we see them answering phones with “‘SVU, Manhattan’ rapiest police department!’” and drugging Benson and Stabler so that they can arrange their bodies in compromising positions to suggest a sexual relationship (69). The narrator calls them “monsters,” and in “Snitch,” we learn that the interns were employed by “the gods” to “do their nefarious bidding” (69, 110). With this, Machado introduces us to the metanarrative that drives this story; there are Creators who seem to orchestrate everything that happens to the characters. First, they work through the interns, attempting to force Benson and Stabler into a relationship and making light of the crimes that come through the precinct. Eventually, the interns are “annoying everyone in hell,” so they get written out, which they are glad about, as they “never liked New York, anyway. Too expensive. Too sad.”

Next, the Creators work through Henson and Abler, the doppelgangers of Benson and Stabler who crack every case. Henson “sleeps through every night” and “wakes up refreshed” (80). Abler “spoons his wife, who laughs in her sleep” and whose “children make pancakes,” “hardwood floors [flooding] with pools of light” (80). Henson and Abler are secretly sleeping together. The girls that are haunting Benson are uninterested in working with Henson. The doppelgangers have “the same face, but prettier,” look just like Benson and Stabler, only perfected. They are what the Creators want Benson and Stabler to be. Most of all, they do not feel. The ghosts tell Benson “‘You are the only one we trust,”’” because Henson will not listen to them. Henson and Abler are so successful in solving crimes because they do not care about the victims. Machado questions what it would mean to be a “good cop” in the world of Law and Order; is it Benson, who is borne down with the weight of the girls, or Henson, who doesn’t care about the girls but solves their crimes?

Sometimes, the Creators act on their own, providing brief instances of characters breaking the fourth wall and implicating the reader in the plot. In “Design,” a survivor of rape questions the benevolence of God:

“If this child is part of the Plan, then the plan was that I would be raped. If this child is not part of the Plan, then my rape was a violation of the Plan, in which case the Plan is not a Plan at all, but a Polite Fucking Suggestion.” (98)

        The survivor kills herself after delivering this monologue, hitting readers with the futility of looking for justice in a world that is created like this one. Henson, too, feels cheated by whoever has put her here. After the DA begins to date her, Henson keeps her in bed by telling her stories so numerous that the DA calls in sick repeatedly. “The sixty-fifth story” is especially poignant:

“The sixty-fifth story,” Henson whispers into her ear, “is about a world that watches you and me and everyone. Watches our suffering like a game. Can’t stop. Can’t tear themselves away. If they could stop, we could stop, but they won’t, so we can’t.” (108)

        Shortly after this, Stabler, incensed by Abler’s increasing infringement on his life, makes a similar realization in “Authority”:

Stabler runs out into the street and stares up at the sky. “Stop,” he begs. “Stop reading. I don’t like this. Something is wrong. I don’t like this.” (111)

        The survivor, Henson, and Stabler are all aware of a Creator presiding over their misfortune, whether it be God or, as Machado suggests, the creators and viewers of true crime media. The survivor commits suicide when she realizes that either the Creators wanted her to be raped, or they do not care whether she is raped or not. Henson explains the reality of her own situation to the DA by calling this a story, but she seems to actually be talking about the audience, watching the drama of trauma for entertainment, forcing fictional characters into violent ends in order to hear a good story. Looking only at Henson’s story, we may assume that Machado is referring to the audience of true crime media like SVU, but Stabler’s epiphany brings Machado’s own audience under fire as Stabler begs the Creators to “stop reading” so that whatever happens next won’t come (111). Here we are forced to consider our own role in the sensationalization of violence against women, to ask ourselves if we are interested in the wellbeing of victims, or in being disturbed for fun.

        Machado’s thesis here is not to attack her readers. The most common image of the Creators we get through this story is that of the City. Benson and Stabler feel the City breathing, hear its heartbeat. The City seems to be made up of both victims and perpetrators. In “Name,” the City stops for a moment, and everyone forgets their own name. Instead, the only names that come to the City’s minds are those of the missing and murdered girls that haunt Benson: “In graves and ditches, in morgues and mortuaries, in rushes and bogs, names trace the bodies of  the dead like flames along kindling, like electricity. For four minutes, the city becomes filled with the names, with their names” (99). In contrast, after Henson is defeated and Benson begins seeing the DA, she tells her this story:

“In the beginning, before the city, there was a creature. Genderless, ageless. The city flies on its back. We hear it, all of us, in one way or another. It demands sacrifices. But it can only eat what we give it.” (123)

        The City is a cannibalistic hive mind that feeds on victims and spits out entertainment. As “Especially Heinous” progresses, Benson and Stabler realize this. They realize that their real power is not in their badges, but in their ability to choose whether or not to partake in the spectacle of violence. Machado presents the reader with the same choice: will we continue to watch the mindless destruction, to be fascinated by the suffering of the vulnerable, or will we fight for our humanity?

        The emotional throughlines of the story are Benson and Stabler’s personal lives, and it is these personal lives that allow Machado to make her strongest thesis against crime media. Stabler’s story revolves around his wife and daughters. Stabler’s wife tells him that she saw a UFO in her twenties, and Stabler wonders “if this explains the memory loss, the PTSD, the night terrors” (68). When he asks her about it, she is only able to talk about tiny details from the night in question, and after she wakes crying one night, “for the first time, Stabler understands” (76). Stabler finds the police report on his wife’s rape shortly after. This is the point in the story where writers often begin to warp rape narratives by sending in a benevolent man to rescue the victim from a temporary character flaw that is trauma. Machado aggressively subverts this. When Stabler confronts his wife with the police report, she is betrayed, furious, and heartbroken:

“Why did you look it up? [...] Why? All I wanted was to bury it. I wanted it to be hidden. Why did you do it? Why?” She cries. She pummels her fists into a giant, overstuffed throw pillow. She begins to walk from one end of the room to the other, holding her arms so tightly to her torso that Stabler is reminded of a man who once came to the precinct, covered in blood. He held his arms like this, too, and when he let them drop, his wounded abdomen opened up and his stomach and intestines peeked out, as if they were ready to be born. (87)

        Machado sets up this plotline as if Stabler’s discovery will somehow help his wife, then titles this episode “Control” as a stark reminder that what Stabler has done is actually a violation of trust that retraumatizes his wife. She won’t speak to him for much of the remainder of the story, except in “Identity,” when Stabler takes their children trick-or-treating and wears a plastic mask:

She reaches up and snatches the mask off his face. He seizes it back from her and slides in back on. She pulls it off again, so hard the band snaps and catches his face. “Ow,” he says.”What are you doing that for?” She shoves the mask into his chest. “Doesn’t feel very nice, does it?” she hisses through clenched teeth. (95)

        Not only is Stabler’s wife’s anger graphically apparent here, but this scene also functions to develop Machado’s motif of masks as what victims hide behind for protection rather than cowardice. Stabler’s invasion of his wife’s privacy hurt her like a mask being ripped off her face.

As his wife fumes, Stabler begins worrying for his daughters’ safety, seeing opportunities for men to hurt them everywhere. In “Prodigy,” Stabler is watching his daughter dance when suddenly “he sees her in two years’ time, swatting a boyfriend’s hands away in a backseat, harder and harder. She screams. Stabler starts. She has fallen to the ground and is clutching her ankle, crying” (77). Stabler “wishes [his daughters] were never born,” that “they were still floating safely in the unborn space,” calling back to the image of the man’s organs tumbling out of his wounded torso “as if they were ready to be born” (88, 87). As Stabler realizes that he can’t protect the girls and women he loves from other men, he decides it is safer for girls to not be born, and sees birth imagery as evidence of destruction and penetration. The wounded man was holding his arms close to his chest before his organs came out, just as Stabler’s wife did after he exposed her secret, and Stabler sees these as gruesome, forced births, something he desperately wants to protect his daughters from experiencing. This fear manifests in his oldest daughter’s eating disorder. In “Starved” and “Fat,” Stabler “tries to convince his oldest daughter to eat something, anything” (99):

“Just one more bite,” Stabler begs his oldest daughter. “Just one, baby. Just one carrot. Let’s start with one carrot.” He sees her being carved away, the way the wind shapes a dune into nothing. “One. Just one.” (102)

        Stabler, usually the bearer of justice, never silenced, cannot say or do anything to protect his wife or daughters from the violent dangers of the City, or society, or the Creators, and every attempt he makes is either futile or actively damaging. Stabler is forced into the role of victim, which seems to be new to him, and this terrifies him. When he fully comprehends the extent of horror that his wife and daughters live in, he is rewarded with a brief and beautiful encounter with his wife in “Rockabye”:

After the children are asleep, Stabler sits next to his wife, who is cocooned under the blankets of their bed. Even her face is swaddled. Stabler gently pokes at the opening in the comforter, and soon the top of her nose is revealed, a heart of skin around her eyes. She is crying. “I love you,” she says.”I do. I am so angry with you. But I do love you.” Stabler takes her into his arms, her whole cloth burrito self, and rocks her in his arms, whispering sorry, sorry into her ear. After he turns out the light, she asks him to cover her face again. He lays the tucked bits back over her, lightly. (99)

        In this episode, Stabler becomes a real hero in his wife’s story by taking the backseat. He is confronted by her extreme and dueling emotions, and knows that he cannot say anything to make it easier for her. Instead, he holds her and comforts her. She asks him to cover her face, to replace the mask he ripped off, and Stabler gently lays their blanket back over her, silently taking on the role of actual protector, someone who will allow her to control her own mask, to give her the shelter of safety, however small it may be. Only after this is established do Stabler and the reader finally get to hear from Stabler's wife in an episode titled “Confession.” It is implied that she tells Stabler about her rape, but all that the reader witnesses is her synthesis of “Especially Heinous” as a whole:

“He hadn’t tied me up, but I couldn’t move. That’s the worst part. No excuse. You fight to put names on all your dead, but not every victim wants to be known. Not all of us can deal with the illumination that comes with justice.’” (112)

        With these lines from Stabler’s wife, Machado comes the closest she ever does to directly telling the reader the point of this story. She does not show us any graphic details here, she does not depict the rape, she does not play for drama. Rather, she centers the victim, the paralysis of a woman preyed on by a man, comparing her to someone who has died. This is a comparison Machado returns to throughout “Especially Heinous”; the words “raped and murdered” appear frequently in succession; the woman in “Closure” is assaulted and killed for her testimony; Stabler’s wife mimicks the body movements of a man on the verge of death in “Control.” With this comparison, Machado simultaneously expresses the gravity of pain rape victims feel and raises the perception of rape as equal to the perception of murder.

        Machado completes the metaphor of rape as murder in Benson’s private life. As Benson learns to accept the ghosts of the girls into her body to allow them to experience living again, she finds that she can free the ghosts by solving their cases, and the team begins to fly through cases as if infected with success. In “Wet,” Benson “doesn’t know how she knows, but she does,” and locates eight missing bodies, and Benson “names them as the gurneys go rumbling past her” (120). In “Spectacle,” Benson and Stabler “catch so many bad guys that Benson throws up seventeen girls in one afternoon,” liberating both herself and the ghosts from their haunting (122). In “Pursuit,” the team becomes perfect: “They chase. They catch. No one gets away” (122). The discovery of so many dead bodies should be sad, but Machado presents them joyously. They have already been murdered, physically, sexually, and spiritually; even when their bodies were missing, this was true. But when Benson finds them, she names them, identifies them as distinct individuals, not nameless bodies to be mutilated and tossed away like set pieces episode after episode. She reunites them with their humanity, with their dignity, with their autonomy, even through death. Machado thus uses the format of a show that, at its core, profits off of depictions of gratuitous violence against women, to critique the way that true crime media creators and audiences perceive victimization and implore her readers to maintain their own humanity.

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Let us return, finally, to Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. When the protagonist’s family arrives in Arizona for the final leg of their trip, their individual journeys come to a head and merge into a collective when the two young children decide to run away into the desert to find the lost migrant children they have heard about and to delay their parents’ separation. The older child, a boy who nicknames himself Swift Feather, takes over the narration of the novel at this point, and the reader uncovers the final box of documents the family has brought with them: Box V.

In Box V, we see a wide variety of documents, photographs, and notes relating to the peril of migration and relocation. Luiselli includes two maps, one hand drawn by the boy, tracking a route to find the lost children, and one taken from Humane Borders/Fronteras Compasivas which shows the locations of migrant deaths in the Sonoran Desert, a warning sign put up to deter migrants from making the dangerous crossing. In the box there is also a poster advertising the Orphan Train Movement of 1910, as well as a photo of the train itself. This is followed by a note reflecting on the history of the movement, which was an attempt to relocate homeless children in New York, where children “joined street gangs for protection.” The proposed solution in 1853 was to “put children on trains and ship them to the West,” resulting in 200,000 children being relocated between 1854 and 1930 (Luiselli 253). As the writer of the note, presumably Mama, states, “Some ended up with good families [...] others were taken in as servants or slaves, enduring inhumane living conditions. Sometimes unspeakable abuse” (254). Box V also contains two books chronicling the legend of the Children’s Crusade of 1212: Jerzy Andrzejewski’s The Gates of Paradise, and Marcel Schwob’s The Children's Crusade, both of which build on the story of a boy leading thousands of children from Europe to Jerusalem to convert Muslims to Christianity. In both stories, as in the legend, the children never arrive, either being taken and sold into slavery or drowned on the journey. In the box, there are two more notes detailing the enslavement of children during the Transatlantic Slave Trade; children were “an attractive asset on the auction block” and were overlooked or used as pawns by some white abolitionists (254). Luiselli includes a photograph of “Geronimo and fellow prisoners on their way to Florida, September 10, 1886,” which shows Geronimo and several Apache gentlemen seated in the grass before a train, with white men in uniforms watching them from the background. Several other notes reflect on the role of documentation in the preservation of history, in which the writer connects migrants crossing the Mexican-American border, the Orphan Train riders, the Children’s Crusades, child enslavement, and the relocation of the Apache into one concept: the documentation of disposal.

Finally, Box V contains six Migrant Mortality Reports for children between infancy and age 15: Nuria Huertas-Fernandez, Baby Boy Arizaga, Josseline Janiletha Hernandez Quintero, Rufino López Duran, Vicente Vilchis Puente, and Sofia Beltran Galicia. These reports seem to be models of the reports done by Humane Borders, and record minimal identification, reporting date and location, and cause of death. A search of these names in the Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants reveals that almost all of these reports are fictionalized versions of real Migrant Mortality Reports, sometimes with the first name or age altered slightly. When I first found this, it stunned me. Is this exploitative? Does Luiselli have, or indeed need, permission to use real people as art? Why does Luiselli bring these six people who were once alive and now are not into a fictional story? The answer, I think, is about honor. At first glance, these mortality reports are cold, reducing children to statistics, dehumanized. They present like graphs in a research paper: they invite the reader to skim them, to find their translation somewhere more familiar. Especially in literature, it is easy to skip over what we don’t know, to see a name in another language and subvocalize it as an incomprehensible melange of letters, which I would argue is a problematic symptom of belonging to a dominant culture. Words and names need not be Anglicized in order to be worthy of our attention, as Gloria Anzaldúa notes in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza: “Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having to translate [...] and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than have them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate” (59).

If we apply this same logic to Luiselli’s inclusion of the Migrant Mortality Reports, if we slow down and read each name, each young age, each cause of death, and keep them in the context Luiselli presented them in (that is, evidence of what the United States does with the children it does not want), these documents of death become profound witnesses to life. It is not as if Luiselli lacks the creativity to come up with fictional names and information. She chooses real reports, altering the facts slightly to protect real identities, in order to elevate these people, to include them in her platform, to invite a whole world of readers to say those six names to ourselves and know that they belonged to children who had dreams and journeys, despite being unwanted by the government that documented them only in death. By exposing the documents of the undocumented, Luiselli furthers her thesis that the United States violently rejects the humanity of children it does not want.

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Any information that we, ourselves, do not directly witness must go through at least one human filter to be conferred to others. No documents are objective or or without an agenda; the lie that a purely factual statistic or document might exist is built on naivete and perpetuated by the dominant culture’s self-preserving narrative. The original writer of the land receipt used by Dolores Purdy Corcoran in Turkey Dance no doubt recorded the land sale in an attempt to prove its legitimacy, codifying his profit in legalese that should not have applied to the Caddo people in the first place. The judicial decision deconstructed by M. NourbeSe Philip was not intended to document the massacre of 150 human beings, but to track the exchange of money between white property owners. Law and Order is not a show about advocating for victims and preventing sexual violence; it’s about two heroes whose personal conflicts are given more attention and delicacy than the graphic tortures, rapes, and murders that the show is built on. The power of transculturation lies not only in artistic prowess, but in its ability to rewrite these narratives. When Wohaw recorded his personal and tribal history on paper that symbolized the forced assimilation of indigenous people, he put his own story on par with the story of the United States. Luiselli uses real Migrant Mortality Reports, not to profit off of the unimaginable suffering of strangers, but to say that the children who die pursuing asylum are more than statistics in a campaign speech. The radical and subversive power of transculturation explains why a wide variety of marginalized artists rely on these cultural palimpsests to express the gravity of their experiences; a story about slavery cannot be told without the context of white supremacy, institutional dehumanization, and capitalism, and it also cannot be told in a way that centers the oppressors. Transculturation becomes the answer to the question of how to tell the stories that cannot be told, of how to deliver centuries of subjugation into a single piece of art. These artists implicate themselves and their readers in historical and creative nuances in order to show how the issues depicted in these pieces are not simply subjects of a project, but representative of real oppression.

Works Cited

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera, 4th edition. Aunt Lute Books, 2012.

Corcoran, Dolores Purdy. Turkey Dance. 2006, Richard Pearce, Women and Ledger Art: Four

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Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime

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Jurgensen, Nathan. The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media. Verso, 2019.

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Smithsonian National Museum of American History, 2009-2010.

Longsoldier, Layli. Whereas. Graywolf Press, 2017.

Luiselli, Valeria. Lost Children Archive. Vintage, 2019.

Nishikawa, Kinohi. “Black Arts of Erasure.” ASAP/Journal, Vol. 7, ed. 2, May 2022, 296-303.

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University of Arizona Press, 2013.

Philip, M. NourbeSe. Zong! Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession, 1991, pp. 33-40.

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Wohaw. A Man Receiving Power from Two Spirit Animals. 1877, Metropolitan Museum of Art,

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