Poetic Form as Détournement in the Documentary Work of Layli Long Soldier, Marwa Helal, and Reginald Dwayne Betts

Abstract

Like many writers have done, Ruth Wilson Gilmore considers Audre Lorde's powerful statement that “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house” (2007, 112) in order to wrestle with its parameters and deliberate on its terms. In Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation, Gilmore, in effect, further develops what Lorde states and poses a similar premise in question form: “Rather, who controls the conditions and the ends to which any tools are wielded?” (2022, 79). Gilmore follows this line of inquiry by asserting an expansion of Lorde's original idea: “If the master loses control of the means of production, he is no longer the master” (2022, 79). In other words, if those who labor determine the manner in which something might be made, or, if those who labor decide upon the circumstances in which a tool might be employed, the status quo could then be destabilized. Here, then, lies a possibility for rupture, and, when applied to poetry, the likelihood of something politically provocative as well. A clear parallel can be found between Gilmore's reformulation and the practice of contemporary documentary poetry, which is broadly defined as a subgenre that references, considers, or reformulates historical happenings or integrates sociopolitical, cultural, or historical documentation into poem form wherein the poet themselves may be regarded as “documenter.” With this practice in mind, it is possible for a poet, as text-worker, to identify a tool used by the master and to redeploy that tool for other purposes. An example of such redeployment exists in the documentary poems of Layli Long Soldier, Marwa Helal, and Reginald Dwayne Betts, all of whom repurpose tools in order to disrupt, reclarify, or provide a counter-narrative to that which is declared by the state to be accurate.

To better examine the manner in which these three writers determine the purpose of poem production, I turn to the concept of “détournement” as developed by Guy Debord in collaboration with Gil J. Wolman. In The Society of the Spectacle, for example, Debord argues for “the reversal of established relationships between concepts” so that the “reversed genitive” may serve “as an expression of historical revolutions distilled into a form of thought” which would intend to “resto[re…] subversive qualities to past critical judgments that have congealed into respectable truths—in other words, that have been transformed into lies” (1994, 144). Debord claims that such a reversal allows for a restoration of a “kernel of truth” that is “capable of disturbing or overthrowing any existing order” as it emerges from a sense of “self-knowledge in conjunction with historical action” (1994, 146). Ian Buchanan synopsizes Debord's and Wolman's use of the concept in their “A User's Guide to Détournement” in his own A Dictionary of Critical Theory. Buchanan writes that détournement “must negate the ideological conditions of artistic production” while simultaneously “negat[ing] this negation [by] produc[ing] something that is politically educative” (Buchanan 2010). This negation may be realized through “revealing a previously obscured ambiguity” (Buchanan 2010). Similarly, in Détournement as Pedagogical Praxis, James Trier reaffirms how Debord's explication of the practice centers the “‘re-use of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble’” (qtd. in Trier 2014, 1). The master's tools then, or, in the case of documentary poets, their chosen forms, can be re-fused, as in “fused together again,” in order to serve another purpose than what was initially envisioned.

Given the above considerations, the concept of détournement may be found relevant to the US-American tradition of documentary poetry, which often utilizes, in the words of Sarah Ehlers and Niki Herd, repurposed “documents of empire” to draw attention to historical or contemporary sociopolitical circumstances and create “oppositional value” through new “landscapes of resistance” (2022, 17). In this regard, what Betts, Helal, and Long Soldier achieve in their employment of poetic form via a documentary mode is indicative of Debordian-Wolmanian deceptive détournement, which is, in essence, “the détournement of an intrinsically significant element, which derives a different scope from [a] new context” (2022, 16). These poets thus engage in acts of revision. Through this revision, Betts, Helal, and Long Soldier utilize structures present in state discourses in order to reveal historical truths and push against the accounts projected by governing forces. With these articulations in mind, it can be argued that the poetic forms chosen by these three poets demonstrate a shift in deployment for a shift in result, thereby deviating from power's expectations of, and desires for, (literary) production. In this, their poems have the potential to “recuperate historical memory and public space” (Nowak 2020, 117), which is a purpose common to the region's documentary poetry and reflective of détournement's focus on creating a text that is decidedly “politically educative” (Buchanan 2010).

For Harrington, “form” is a significant term that confirms the poem's chosen structure as one tied to intent, where form does not solely reference a received stanzaic structure like that of the sonnet or sestina, but includes all structural manifestations upon the page, whether the poem emerges as a found text or an echo of a legal document. In this way, one might describe documentary poetry as a mode with multiple, or unlimited, poetic forms available for usage. Whatever form is decided upon, it is “a dynamic medium that informs and is informed by history” (Metres 2018, 65), regardless of whether this history is recognized by the makers of a master or mainstream narrative. Part of the form's engagement may come in its relationship to government documentality, “sometimes echo[ing] and mimic[king] legal discourse, historical accounts, or victim testimonies” (2018, 64). It is for this reason that a chosen form in the documentary tradition is particularly pertinent, as the form may evidence the text-worker's practice of détournement. The chosen form may work to “reveal a previously obscured ambiguity” in order to “produce something that is politically educative” (Buchanan 2010).

It is necessary, then, to extend what Metres, Leong, and Harrington present regarding the usage of form in the documentary mode and push the definition further in order to explicitly identify the ways in which Debord and Wolman's call for détournement is epitomized in documentary poetry and why this practice holds significance. Détournement itself amplifies both political resonances within documentary poems and the poet's conscious decision to remake what has been produced and declared truth-bearing by the state apparatus. In examining the various forms chosen by Helal, Betts, and Long Soldier, it is clear that Debord and Wolman provide reason for socially engaged poets who choose to work closely with a structure that usurps government discourse. It is through form that writers can clarify practices deployed by systems of power and provide a counter to what these systems present as historical accuracy. There is, in the employment of form, a deliberate re-making that supports alternative narratives. It is this combination of documentation and form that, as Tony Trigilio shares in an interview with Harrington, “expos[es] the gap between our ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ histories of an event” (qtd. in Harrington 2016, 78).

Through their varied employments of tools—including their chosen forms—via the documentary mode, Long Soldier, Helal, and Betts demonstrate how individual histories may expose national injustices; in this, their poetry evinces historicity and reveals the attempts at erasure that come from government and the blanket acceptance of master narratives. An analysis of the documentary poems by Long Soldier, Helal, and Betts allows for a more thorough comprehension of détournement's applicability to the subgenre. This applicability, in turn, provides confirmation of its relevance and significance. It is imperative that the practice of détournement, as evident in the documentary poems produced by these three text-workers, is openly acknowledged for its potential to recuperate meaning. Reading these poems as counternarratives, or as transformations through the disfigurement of discourse, allows for a better understanding of the subgenre's possibility to participate in meaningful political activity. Due to present-day efforts being made by political leaders, at both state and national levels, to censor, prohibit access to, or reject outright historical and literary texts that reveal the machinations and policies that maintain a system of hegemony, a poet's choice to practice détournement on the page becomes all the more urgent and necessary.

Layli Long Soldier's debut collection Whereas reveals and examines the vast differences between narratives composed by the state and those confirmed by the Oglala Lakota Nation in which she holds citizenship. In the very structure of Whereas, Long Soldier establishes a tone that resonates with officiality. This is achieved through her organization of content and through the verbiage that outlines what is included in the text. Whereas is divided into two sections, with Part 1 being titled “These Being the Concerns” and Part 2, “Whereas,” which includes three subsections: “(1) Whereas Statements,” “(2) Resolutions,” and “(3) Disclaimer.” The tone of officiality informs the reader of the gravity of the poems that follow, in subject matter and in purpose. The tone also serves to confirm the position of Whereas as being in direct response to what has been declared truth by the United States government, thereby affirming that Whereas was composed as a correction to what has been asserted. The collection's table of contents, then, provides a guide to how the poet wants the text to be received and digested. Long Soldier thus grounds readers in the formality of an official text, similar to a proclamation or treaty developed by governing forces, before readers come to encounter the poems themselves.

Long Soldier's employment of official language parallels what is presented in Jeffrey Gray's essay, “‘Hands Off’: Official Language in Contemporary Poetry,” where Gray examines “the role of […] corporate, or bureaucratic language in poetry—whether this language is ironized, critiqued, or (on the face of it) unexamined” (2016, 88). Gray determines how poetry that takes on these word families steps into a specific discourse for a specific purpose, and this purpose is not one of lyric interiority, but instead one of political engagement. This language, which Gray describes as “‘official,’ ‘hegemonic, [and] ‘institutional[,]’” is located within a discourse “characterized by a purported erasure of subjectivity, a projection of neutrality, and an unproblematic authority” (2016, 88). Perceived or performed “neutrality” and “unproblematic authority” are indicative of (users of) language's power to position itself as separate from historical, or ongoing, actions. Within the context of the United States, we have been taught that certain discourses themselves demonstrate correctness (or trueness), trustworthiness, and a claim to objectivity, like the written decisions made by the Supreme Court, for example, in which citizens are expected to believe the interpretation of the law as unimpacted by those bodies who drafted said interpretation. These discourses serve the nations’ power-holders and attempt to create distance between colloquial language and state language, where the colloquial corresponds to the citizen and is less likely to be perceived as accurate. With that said, however, the decision by contemporary poets to take on the discourse of the official turns these notions upside-down. Utilizing the same language allows poets to trouble problematic authority and reveal the lack of neutrality. In doing so, poets remind readers that there is always a body who forms the words, and therefore a positionality and context, behind the use of language. In Whereas, Long Soldier seeks to reflect official discourse back upon itself, in order to call attention to what has been erased and demonstrate a historical account that is either not recognized or not aired publicly. Long Soldier disfigures the discourse she opposes in order to reveal how US-American treaties themselves represent the original violence committed against Indigenous communities through dispossession. It is through Long Soldier's employment of détournement that she epitomizes the concept's ability to disturb the existing order (Debord 1994,146).

These stanzas urge a return to Long Soldier's earlier poem, which is located at the end of the first section (“These Being the Concerns”), titled “38” (2017, 49–53). It is “38” that leads readers to the second section of the collection (“Whereas”), which is organized so that it participates clearly in the tradition of the official or congressional. “38,” like Long Soldier's other poems, ties together the personal and the public with the present and the past, because, as she articulates, “these issues have been ongoing” (2017, 95). “38” is written predominantly in monostiches and employs language that reflects a state-sanctioned mode. Here, Long Soldier demonstrates that the work of a poem can be multiple. Through a form that mimics government documentality, the poem can disrupt the master narrative while concurrently reaffirming the history of a community through one's individual experience.

Through Long Soldier's employment of official discourse and form that mirrors the structure of government documents, she deviates from the dominant narrative and makes clear the connections between Lincoln's decision to execute the men, the 2009 U.S. Congressional Apology to Native Peoples, and the contemporary US-government's response to the nonviolent movement of water protectors at Standing Rock against the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline.

As evident in “38” and “Whereas,” Long Soldier's approach to documentary poetry is in conversation with Natasha Trethewey's “Providence” and “Incident” in Native Guard, where, as James McCorkle describes, Trethewey's “poems address specific histories, familial and intimate ones; yet they also define a national history that has been dislocated so it does not implicate white America with its own violence” (2016, 159). It is in Trethewey's pantoum, “Incident” (2006, 41), that the speaker chronicles a particular evening when the Ku Klux Klan set up a burning cross outside her parents' home: “We tell the story every year— / how we peered from the windows, shades drawn” (lines 1–2) and “At the cross trussed like a Christmas tree, / a few men gathered, white as angels in their gowns” (lines 9–10). While Trethewey articulates a trauma that she and her own family were forced to withstand, their experience speaks to what was happening across her home state of Mississippi, the US-American South, and the country during the Civil Rights Movement. As McCorkle claims, the personal can indeed provide definition to the national. What Trethewey does, then, in the same vein as Long Soldier, is participate as historian or documenter. What Trethewey steps into with her poems in Native Guard is what Long Soldier steps into in Whereas, where the personal experience corresponds to both an individual body and a larger community, thereby serving as confirmation of what has happened, or is happening, at a national scale. A re-making of the historical narrative occurs through the poem's composition, refusing what has congealed as truth and providing a restoration of meaning.

Marwa Helal's first collection, Invasive Species, blurs definitions of borders, genre, and national identity. Through poems that engage in the documentary mode, Helal demonstrates that the US-American immigration system is unwelcoming. Helal's poems draw to the surface pervading issues of neocolonialism, racism, religious prejudice, and the need for protest, and this is achieved, in part, through Helal's poems that employ forms that present as official communication and utilize journalistic registers.

In the second section of Invasive Species, Helal includes an expanded abecedarian titled “Immigration as a Second Language,” where each letter corresponds to an individual strophe. Helal's decision to utilize the abecedarian form, a stanzaic structure that includes the English alphabet, is enhanced by the title of the poem, which refers to the acquisition of language and serves to amplify the conscious decision-making of the poet to simultaneously subvert from the mainstream narrative and expose its fallacies. This chosen form hearkens back to Helal's usage of a statement by Chinua Achebe (“Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it”) for the collection's epigraph (Helal 2019, 3). When the title and the form are understood in light of the earlier epigraph from Achebe, it can be argued that Helal's chosen strophes indicate a counter-representational strategy (Trier 2014, 10). This counter-representational strategy of Helal's places her poetry within the parameters of détournement.

Helal's abecedarian narrates the 912.5-day impasse she experienced when applying for a new visa to the United States after aging out when her family's applications were destroyed by Immigration and Naturalization Services due to fears of anthrax (2019, 76; 35). Helal was forced to leave her family and return to Egypt alone after 18 years spent in the United States (2019, 43–44). In these strophes, Helal details what occurred at the US-American embassy in Cairo and how she was treated by officials. Helal's abecedarian reveals how the institution accommodates corrupt behavior and functions to maintain power and privilege.

In strophe “E,” Helal employs two structural forms that mirror reportage and correspondence, both of which utilize registers that resonate with that of journalism. By choosing to employ these forms, Helal addresses the questions of validity and truth-telling. Because the forms appear similar to that which is accepted as journalistic accounts, the texts will be read as legitimate. Helal is aware of this reading and thus positions the forms in a way that supports what she chooses to reveal. Helal is thus cognizant of poetry's ability to communicate a truth in ways that government report writing or mainstream reportage may not. Because she presents her material as a poem, she is provided with the opportunity to develop meaning as it is tied to her understanding of experience, discarding the supposed claims of objectivity that bureaucracy purports to uphold, and formulates a counternarrative steeped in her reported evidence.

As evident above, Helal utilizes syntax that mirrors journalistic language and avoids imagery or figurative techniques. Structurally, Helal develops stanzas that look comparable to a report submitted by an officer or a correspondent, complete with timestamps. These features serve to legitimize and confirm, leaving unambiguous the ramifications of the actions against her person. Helal thus situates herself in relation to her particular subject matter, which, according to Ehler and Herd, grounds Helal's work in a documentary practice (2022, 14). With this in mind, it can be posited that Helal's chosen form contributes to the perceived level of historicity. Through employing forms that are perceived as truth-bearing, Helal reveals the disparity between state narrative and state practice.

Following the depiction of “Visit 2” and “Visit 3,” Helal composes a one-line stanza. This line includes the fragment (“Witnessing my own erasure”) and is printed at the bottom of the page with the synopsis of the two appointments (2019, 49). It is through this statement that Helal confirms the intent behind the strophe. By providing her readers with forms that are seen as legitimate when presented as reportage or evidence, Helal is better able to demonstrate how corrupt behavior accommodated by a state institution serves to reject and nullify one's presence when one is othered by the state. The employment of this specific form, in combination with the clarity provided by this one-line stanza, serves to undermine the attempt at erasure and instead argue for validation.

In “Immigration as a Second Language,” Helal again focuses on how the United States's actions depart from, and are, in fact, antithetical to, the values that are supposedly touted. Helal's chosen form in strophe “E” allows for the suggestion that claims of values are performative and used to cover behavior that is destructive. This is achieved through the truth of the poem, which emerges through the presentation cultivated by Helal, where meaning is made manifest via the merging of facts with the manipulation of form.

Poems like the ones found within strophe “E” take on the look and feel of official documentation, including structures mirroring that of correspondence and reportage, which are presented in conjunction with a journalistic register in order to push back against institutional efforts to erase. It is through Helal's chosen form, reflective of “the poetic commitment to the ‘direct treatment of the thing’” (Ehlers and Herd 2022, 5), that Helal's personal experiences give credence to what has occurred at a much larger scale, impacting lives far beyond her own. Helal's chosen forms in Invasive Species reveal what state institutions attempt to obscure, which is a requirement in the practice of détournement (Buchanan).

Reginald Dwayne Betts's third collection, Felon, inhabits the interstices of time through an examination of the self, the years Betts' spent in prison as a teenager and young adult, and the complexity of his life as a husband, father, and friend after his release. Through these descriptions and ruminations, Betts exposes the ways in which US-American incarceration dehumanizes individuals both during their imprisonment and after their re-entry into society. Felon includes four poems (“In Alabama,” “In Houston,” “In California,” and “In Missouri”) whose chosen forms differentiate between erasure by artist versus erasure by state through the utilization of court documents. In these examples, Betts creates found poems by using legal papers that were filed by the Civil Rights Corps, an organization that works to counter injustice at the systemic level through challenging the US-American courts. The documents Betts employs as the base of these “redaction poems,” as he terms them (2019, 91), were filed by the Corps in order “to challenge the incarceration of people because they could not afford to pay bail” (2019, 91). In an end note at the close of Felon, Betts provides readers with his own methodology: “These [specific] poems use redaction, not as a tool to obfuscate, but as a technique that reveals the tragedy, drama, and injustice of a system that makes people simply a reflection of their bank accounts” (2019, 91). Betts erases a document whose purpose he supports—the work of Civil Rights Corps—in order to distill what he believes to be most pertinent. It is through this pointed distillation of the found text that Betts's poems confirm that “the main impact of a détournement is directly related to the conscious…recollection of the original contexts of the elements” (Debord and Wolman 1995, 17).

Betts uses this form to highlight the inequitable, classist, and racist practices of the state as typified in its prison industrial complex. In this, Bett's documentary practice is not, as Leong writes, “‘overheard’ or ‘feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude,’ as John Stuart Mill puts it. Rather, [it consists] of the already heard or already written[;] it is rhetorically oriented toward a wider and ongoing epistemological conversation” (2020, 195). The documents used by Betts in his redaction poems were initially created in order to positively impact the lives of those who have been deemed available for predation by the system and had already been shared, circulated, and read by organizers and lawyers. Because Betts is re-using these documents, he is drawing attention to specific phrases and ideas present within the pre-made texts. As such, Betts engages in a larger discourse regarding the role of the prison industrial complex and its aim to financially exploit marginalized communities.

Through Betts' chosen form, he employs an outward-facing lens, but not one of a distant or disconnected observer. Though he is drawing attention to what is now happening to other individuals, he himself has not been untouched by the prison industrial complex, and there is a pivotal sense of recognition due to the positionality of the poet. Betts unites his own experience with what is currently happening to members of African American communities who are taken advantage of by the nation's court systems and reduced from human to prison statistic. This unification demonstrates the root of the problem, thereby indicating that the “us” Betts cites is deliberately targeted by government policies to benefit city or state officials. What Betts reveals, then, through the focus on particular phrases and lines within the court documents, is the disposability of certain populations from the lens of the government, manifest in the making and interpretation of law.

Because these poems are formed from court documents, Betts utilizes a structure deemed acceptable in the eyes of the state in order to reveal, and thus correct, the state. Though Betts indeed engages in an act of erasure, arguably one of “the master's tools,” he does so to draw attention to and demand readers focus on a particular message that Betts finds embedded within the materials themselves. Betts makes use of a tool often employed to silence the marginalized and wields it in a manner that subverts from typical purpose. He takes control, then, over how erasure is used and for what end.

In regard to Betts's redactions, it is also important to note how, through his organizational decisions within the collection, Betts addresses the notion of proximity. In her essay, “Against Witness,” Cathy Park Hong asks: “What kind of proximity do I need to write as witness? Do I have to experience the event myself? […] Do I have to be related to the victim? And what do you mean by relation?” (Hong 2015). Where Helal and Long Soldier embed the first-person “I” within their poems that build an individual-to-the-national bridge in their depiction of historical events, Betts leads with the “I,” and his personal experience, so that his documentary poems of redaction are prefaced by the self. Betts thereby provides context, confirms personal impact by US-American systems of power, and influences the way in which the court documents are digested by his readers.

This pattern continues throughout Felon, where Betts repeatedly delivers a poem grounded in the “I” and the personal before positioning another poem that utilizes an official document through the mode of redaction. It is a different structure, or organizational choice, from Long Soldier's or Helal's respective collections, but the effect is the same; each of these three poets utilizes chosen forms in manners that subvert the forms' original purposes or usages and therefore demonstrate resistance against master narratives that aim to quiet or diminish. This rejection is a negation of what has been presented as true and demonstrates the poets' deliberate efforts to recontextualize events or state policies, whether historical or contemporary.

Though I have described the re-wielding of tools related to stanzaic structure in the poetry of Long Soldier, Helal, and Betts, I am not suggesting that forms chosen for their employment of détournement are without their limits. The poet's choice of form cannot change policy or remove politicians from office. However, Lorde's original claim (“the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house”) did not prevent her from writing poems and essays that directly and powerfully address oppressive regimes (such as “A Litany for Survival” and “Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report”). Lorde continued to document what contrasts to historical accounts cultivated by government. Likewise, Gilmore's consideration of Lorde requires readers to identify constraints within the present system, while also working to imagine otherwise.

Long Soldier, for example, openly addresses the boundaries of her chosen form, even while she engages in its use. On the tenth page of her “Whereas” section, Long Soldier writes: “Though ‘unalienable,’ they're rights I cannot legally claim if placed within a Whereas Statement. Meaning whatever comes after the word ‘Whereas’ and before the semicolon in a Congressional document falls short of legal grounds, is never cause to sue the Government, [so] the Government's courts say” (2017, 70). In this statement, Long Soldier addresses the limitations of her poetry's political work. Her recognition is in parallel to what Debord, Wolman, Buchanan, and Trier theorize, in that the practice of détournement is not necessarily a liberatory measure.

Despite these limitations, it is important to remember that practice itself still matters. In acknowledgment of this, I ask that we recognize the potential subversion present in the poetry of Long Soldier, Helal, and Betts. Détournement allows for deliberate disruption and a reworking of purpose so that, as text-workers, they may decide upon the poem's outcome in a way that is not desired by the oppressor. Similarly, through the employment of structure that both mirrors and subverts that of the state, Long Soldier, Helal, and Betts practice a documentary mode that engages in a distinctly Debordian act of resistance, one that Gilmore and Lorde might also argue as valuable. This mode effectively demonstrates the way in which détournement may be implemented through a poem's form, thereby rejecting hegemonic narratives and overturning the wants of the state by employing the very terms, phrasings, and structures utilized to maintain control of the record. In doing so, Long Soldier, Helal, and Betts draw attention to sociohistorical accounts that are otherwise made peripheral. It is through the practice of détournement that we are given evidence of documentary poetry's ability to deliberately participate in political activity, which, given the present-day efforts by politicians to censor, ban, and prohibit access to historical texts and literature, is ever more necessary.