Loaded deck
The Lottery: Nocturnal Sweepstakes, Elizabeth Torres, reviewed by Gavin O'Toole, 16 February 2023
The Lottery: Nocturnal Sweepstakes, Elizabeth Torres, 2023, University of Arizona Press
It is in our nature to wander: we are all migrants, everyone is displaced, home is where the heart is, but only there.
Stating this might be one way of approaching the latest collection of poetry by Elizabeth Torres, a prolific US writer of Colombian origin who dwells upon displacement in her latest bilingual collection, Lotería/The Lottery.
Her angle is the unfairness of it all: the lottery of life by which some displaced people suffer while others less so. This collection won the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize.
These are the competing narratives of post-post-modernity, in which the migrant is a fused subject and object, revered and reviled by political opposites at one and the same time. The displaced have become the metaphor of our epoch, especially in a Manichaean liberal culture trapped in divisions of identity because its dominant narratives have exiled issues of class.
But who really are the displaced, when home itself is a realm of probability, chance, injustice, and unfairness? We are all wandering in search of hidden roots, even within the cultures that are our refuge. We can be displaced in ourselves, because the human world is harsh, unforgiving, cruel and frightening. We can work all our lives yet be alienated from what we make. We can live in a society from birth to death yet have nothing in common with it. It is called anomie.
There is a discernible tendency in Latinx poetry coming out of the US to obsess about the migrant condition against the backdrop of majority racism and by extension, or even default, to explore the meaning of home, memory, lost opportunities.
Torres writes with evident symbolic flair and has a long track record of publication to her name. Her poetry itself is accomplished and passionate, using allusions that are mostly rich but at times hard to fathom and, above all, predictable.
In “The Wall” she tells us of a white picket fence dream that is in fact a wall where the dream “is always on the other side”. In “The Outlook” she infuses black dreams with more tiresome moral force than white dreams. In “The Incongruence” familiar tropes about her family’s adopted homeland fuel an inner resentment. These are all valid observations in this reality, and probably to be expected—but they do not offer an original metaphysics.
The device of the lotería, a beloved allegory for all the things that life can throw at people in Latin American culture, is a clever way of exploring fate, but even that feels foreseeable. Of course life is a gamble, but isn’t it so for everyone?
And why does the despair of some have more moral weight than the despair of others? The prodigal son, after all, lived an extravagant life but was spiritually lost.
Each individual is born with a hand of cards: it is how they play them in a game that can only be undertaken alongside other individuals that determines where their real home is.