Part 1: "Our good faith"
Migratory Poetics in Practice is a sit-down questionnaire with contributors of ni’hikeyah tʼáá jííkʼe, all free nations, todas las naciones libres: migratory in verse.
In this intimate exploration of creative diaspora, I ask these artists and poets about their venture into the unknown, into the space of reimagining textual beginnings, and where they can end up. In this migration, these creatives offer practices we can take as artists in our own right, to give language the malleability it needs to express our more complex thoughts and feelings.
CH: “The Day George W. Bush Confessed” evoked, for me, a resonance with Sappho’s Fragment 31, particularly in the way that poem ends in unresolved ambiguity.
In Diane Rayor’s translation, the fragment concludes with the line “yet all must be endured, since...,” leaving the reader suspended in an open-ended moment that invites interpretation and speculation about its addressee and context. I sensed a comparable ambiguity in your piece, particularly in the way George W. Bush’s speech concludes with an ambiguous phrase, “Good night, and may God continue to bless America.” This line, while seemingly definitive, also gestures toward a broader, perhaps unresolved narrative, one that your piece appears to begin unraveling, much like how readers are left to reconstruct meaning from Sappho’s fragmented texts.
With this parallel in mind, could you elaborate on how you arrive at the decision to frame Bush’s post-presidency through the lens of a confession?
RR: We all seem to live most of our lives with a mask. We think, erroneously, that we can use it as armor to shield the world from what the world already knows about us. Politicians wear particularly secure masks that they rarely take off. I wanted to use the confessional and the confession as a tool where President George W. Bush could momentarily take the mask off and tell the truth. That he could admit that he had done wrong in so many ways.
I lived through the election and the war. I had always wanted him to tell the truth. He should have stepped aside and let Gore win. He should have gone to Vietnam and fought like all of the mainly Black, Indigenous, and Brown people who did. I wanted him to admit that Iraq was a mistake and to plead forgiveness for all who had died and for all the destruction that had unnecessarily occurred. I wanted to write a poem that did not gaslight me. I wanted the truth. And then, having the truth, I wanted to ask myself and the reader, would I have enough forgiveness in my soul to forgive knowing that all he had said was a lie? What form would that forgiveness take if I were able to forgive, and would it matter? I don't have the answers, so I wanted to leave it open so that we could all ask ourselves, could we handle the truth, and what would we do once we knew it?
CH: The performance of the “I” in your piece is also particularly interesting. It made me think of Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, where the narrative is initially told in the third person, yet gradually we find ourselves slipping into the interior world of the protagonist, so much so that it begins to resemble first-person narration.
In “The Day George W. Bush Confessed,” a similar effect occurs: the reader slowly becomes the “I.” There’s a kind of narrative migration happening here, an invitation to move with the piece toward a certain understanding. You don’t need to tell us exactly where we’re meant to arrive, but I’m curious: how do you see this idea of narrative migration?
RR: I like prose poetry told in the first person sometimes to bring the reader in, and it almost requires them to participate in the story. The role between a writer and a reader is sacred. The writer seeks truth ultimately, and the reader is to empathize with them. Without the reader, the writer is alone, but with the reader, the signals on the page take on a magic. Symbols get transformed into words, sentences, and ideas, almost by magic. I wanted the reader, in this case, to wrestle with what the truth is and how we can find it. Can we find it in a confessional? A place meant for sinners to confess sins and be absolved of them. And if not there, where can we?
CH: Lastly, there’s a strong sense of “wonder” that runs through your piece, a kind of reflective openness or curiosity. I’m interested in whether you found any element of that same wonder in the original text of the speech itself. Was there something in Bush’s address that prompted or elicited this tone in your response?
RR: I have to admit that the whole exercise stunned me. I was so surprised that a speech of this kind would elicit all of the thoughts that I had. I did find wonder in the process of seeing the speech as a jumping off point to think about so many concepts that I know I would not have dealt with, but for the exercise. So I am grateful to you for organizing this prompt and allowing me to discover wonder in surprising places. It was a powerful reminder to seek light in dark places.