A Review of Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's Beast Meridian

In her 2017 collection, Beast Meridian, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal creates a liberatory cosmology and common sense for her brown girl speaker, who is trapped in the "assimilation rooms" of the United States. Villarreal's style is associatively lyrical and reliant on symbolic imagery that builds across the poems—namely a "braid," the "pines," and a "split" in the self or the "meridian." Through this associative imagery, we see an anti-colonial common-sense develop in the resistant speaker that results not from healing a cleft in the self, caused by colonialism, but from entering deeper into nepantla in an ancestor-guided act of transformation. The poems are rendered across three sections: "An Illness of Pines" chronicles the adolescent daughter of migrants living in a Texas border town; "A Halo of Beasts" features a cosmology of persona poems in the voice of the speaker's ancestors; and "The Way Back," an 11-page poem, recreates the speaker's transformation as a brown girls' apologue.

The first section of the collection spans 30-plus pages and works, ceaselessly, to communicate the headspace—via clauses fractured by white space—of the speaker, a young girl split between the realities of her Mexican household and her U.S. classroom. The first poem of the first section, a justified square entitled "Malinche,"¹ introduces many of the important symbols of the collection. The speaker, like the Mexican/Nahuatl historical figure this poem is titled after, marks a moment of rupture:

I cleave // white the wilderness take / violence into ourself // elsewhere: // I hunt my hunter / the wilderness in // myself I open my illness / to the kingdom I am // cleaved by the old an d/ new world

The cleft, the organizing symbol of the collection, is introduced here, and a large white square opens in the center of the poem, forcing a visual and aural rupture in Malinche's voice. This rupture becomes the major extended metaphor of the collection and disrupts patriarchal narratives of Malinche. As queer, feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa—whom Villarreal uses as one of the book's epigraphs—explains in her seminal Chicana biomythography, Malinche has been historicized as "la chingada—the fucked one. . .the woman who sold out her people to the Spaniards. . ." (44). Here, however, Villarreal presents Malinche—similar to her speaker—as a woman between two worlds, the old (pre-colonial) and the new (colonial). This telling of La Malinche serves as a proper opening to poems seeking to challenge settler epistemes that rationalize brown girl as beast, as bad and morally corrupt.

Another poem in the first section, "Dissociative States," chronicles the rupture in the speaker herself and introduces the associative images of the "braid" and the "pines." In the first section of the poem, Villarreal writes,

11 & we are in pain because our umbilical cords have grown back & root / themselves to object of vice 12 but mine is a braid snaking out of myself 13 to / find its root in the pines

and further down in the first section,

24 I call to someone, try to warn, but I am suspended tighter still 25 my hair / tangled up in leafy branches, toenails twisted into roots—

Here the braid "snakes" from the speaker's head, calling up the Gorgon of Western mythology, Medusa, but something important is happening with the braid as a symbol in the mythology that Villarreal is establishing. The braid is an umbilical cord, a symbol of family lineage, and the subtle "but mine" distinguishes the speaker's actions from the rest of her family—if they're going to vices to deal with the pain, she is going outside of herself at first, becoming a beast with "toenails twisted into roots." Here, Villarreal risks calling up Western, enlightenment strategies of dehumanization, which rationalize brown peoples, native peoples, and colonial subjects as fauna, or features of the land, primitive.

However, Villarreal writing the brown girl as beast isn't an ironic or unconscious move. At the beginning of...