Aurum by Santee Frazier (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Aurum by Santee Frazier No'u Revilla (bio) Aurum by Santee Frazier University of Arizona Press, 2019 IN HIS SECOND COLLECTION OF POEMS, Santee Frazier is attentive to the work of shaping sound to place. An enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and director of the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Residency MFA program, Frazier has composed a collection that capably builds a world in which the unwanted, discarded, and forgotten of extractive capitalism sound their stories. To read Aurum is to listen. The sounds in Frazier's collection are at once desperate, menacing, and redemptive. Instead of the so-called postcolonial question of "now what?" Frazier's characters haunt the equally, if not more, prismatic problem of "now where?" What do these places sound like? Who is listening to the "where" of second, third, and fourth chances, to the "where" of hustling and hunger? The first poem of Aurum is faithfully driven by sound. Bladed by runs of alliteration and consonance, "Lactification" portrays a scene in which settler violence diminishes an Indigenous man to a mere body, an object to be inspected, punished, and domesticated. The poem's title gestures to the work of Frantz Fanon and the notion that white supremacy incentivizes (if not threatens) people of color to reject their racial identity, spurn their communities, and assimilate. Or, as "Lactification" rehearses: "a culling of melanin" (2). In the next poem, "Ore Body," the sound of machines interrupts land, and rituals of progress are juxtaposed with rituals "before mineral, polygon, the invention of the wheel, story of flat, firing / of clay" (4). Whereas progress is a linear narrative with clear winners and losers, Frazier's poems are non-linear and lyrical. Arguably, in "Ore Body," the "tongue of digging" works on two levels (4). First, it represents the language of labor on which industry and its fixation on all things pickaxed, dug out, and stolen are based. Second, the "tongue of digging" captures the intensity with which Frazier records the afterlives of industry. Enter: Mangled. Mangled Creekbed is a persona who appeared in Frazier's first book, Dark Thirty. In Aurum, he continues to embody Indigenous struggle for belonging. [End Page 193] We first see Mangled pretending to play music with an imaginary accordion. Apropos of Frazier's lyrical work, Mangled's gritty survival is defined by music rather than victimhood. In the "knife-etched stall" of "Mangled & the Accordion," for example, he tamps the tiled floor. Frazier adds: "When he mashes the keys and squeezes, daylight tunnels to fuzz" (18). Readers are subsequently privy to the crunching of bugs and the "shine of their bodies" between Mangled's fingers and teeth (21), to the rev and rumble of a demolition derby and the cheering audience Mangled imagines for himself (22), and to "the music of frying meat, of squirrel thighs dredged in corn meal" and the "[m]usic of lice wilting in kerosene" (23). In the final sequence of "Mangled & the Accordion," it is affirmed: "It was Mangled's tune, his humming of the knife, the slow slimming of his lips / to song" (25). The places we meet Mangled crunch, wilt, and buzz alongside him. Importantly, he is both witness to and maker of this music. In addition to sound, readers can also track motifs of light and dark in Frazier's collection. Aurum, itself, is the Latin name for gold. In the context of Frazier's worldbuilding, the title points to genocidal campaigns waged against Indigenous peoples for the promise of gold and to ongoing acts of environmental racism that yoke Indigenous lands and bodies to extractive capitalism. In fact the motif of gold throughout the book is anticipated by the repetition of the word "shine" in "Ore Body." Yet who or what is shining? And why? What relationship between light and dark are we readers invited to consider? As a Native Hawaiian woman reading Frazier's collection, I dwelled here. Light and dark are frequently rendered as antithetical, but how useful is this opposition? Where did it come from? How is it used? American settler colonialism perverted my ancestors' sense of dark and consequently corrupted our relationship to light. This...