Tamez, Margo: Father | Genocide

Turtle Point Press, paperback

Publication Date: August 31, 2021

Publisher Marketing: On the night before he "walked on" in 1996, Margo Tamez's father recorded two questions with a handheld cassette recorder: "Where did the good men go? Where did they go?"

Decades later, Tamez, an enrolled citizen of the Lipan Apache band of Texas, reconstructs her father's struggle to "be a man" under American domination while tracing the settler erasure, denial, and genocide that preceded his generation. Tamez reclaims stolen territory in the felt and known history of colonial Texas, looking unflinchingly at Ndé Dene [Lipan Apache] place, memory, and poetics of resistance. She refuses the qualifier "Native" in order to insist that all Americans come to terms with the roots of their identity: violence, fractured kinship, bitter lands, distorted memory, and haunted consciousness.

"I was raised up in American violence," Tamez writes, "and I have to explore all of its possibilities and lessons through art." She invites readers to experience those possibilities, "timebending" with a form that she calls "Indigenous fusionism"--pastpresent, bodyknowing, intertext, bent tradition, landguage, familial blood-knowing. Father / Genocide reveals why impunity on the Texas border is the key to understanding American identity violence, with a lightning poetry that strikes the nested seeds and unburies the truth of "these bitter lands."