‘The Night My Father Was Robbed’
— Nix Thérèse
If anyone asks how to merge the personal and the political, ‘The Night My Father Was Robbed’—a stunning reflection on migration, nationalism, and their accompanying violences—is a good place to start. We’re thrown into the impact of this incident from the outset: I ran downstairs with a hammer & turned on every light. / I said, I hate this country & spat on the ground where I was born.
To me, the hammer feels more emotionally charged than real, a manifestation of how they metaphorically have to pull back the floorboards on the illusion of safety and look underneath. But unlike the hammer, the spit can’t undo their birth or fully move them away from new emptiness. It only marks the country as perpetrator, and as we see throughout, naming is never neutral. Definitions are always centered in gaze: Who first called the country I was born in paradise? / Who first referred to America as a dreamscape? / Who first felt lucky to be here, galloping over vast blood?
The repetition of “first” especially puts a focus on when, as if to say: these statements are shallow hypotheses that need further investigation. These are glosses that obscure the frame because every well-fated break comes at a cost.
This skepticism particularly comes through in every heaven kills its citizens when they don’t sing,
and yet that brings us to the inverse as well—a country is only a country as long as its citizens believe, aka refuse to upheave. Otherwise we’re just pockmarks of land against endlessly rolling seas. There’s a certain comfort in the speaker finally claiming a space after denouncing others: I pour all my money into the ocean to sit.
What would formerly be a reason for robbery instead transforms into a country of one. I imagine a long reel of crisp bills spinning into the waves then wilting under the weight. If you know that currency can’t always be exchanged for safety, why not let the ink run beneath you? Buoy outside a “home” that only seems to ask what more you can pay. When we flip to gallons of red trundle under the earth,
the greed is almost palpable. We can’t turn our eye from the country swallowing its history of bloodshed. The money’s always been tainted, an anchor pushing away from an impossibly large ship, but “I don’t move” feels clear.