Drawing the Line: Rael San Fratello at the U.S.-Mexico Border and Gabrielle Brant Freeman, Girltrap: Disrupting the Game

Disruptions of the border wall, conceptual and actual: massive hot pink seesaws with glittering bicycle seats and children playing teeter totter, confessionals, a massive greenhouse, a wildlife or horse race or xylophone or cactus map. Also “Reunite,” a yellow warning sign with a child running towards her parents with her arms held out, her parents racing towards her, their bodies frantic, desperate. Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, via their architecture firm Rael San Fratello, have spent more than ten years creating subversive responses to the U.S. Mexico border wall, and the whole idea of border walls, with interventions, dioramas, and games (including a 2017 board game called “Tunneling.”). These disruptions are fiercely playful, defiant, and moving.

At SFMOMA right now, the show Drawing the Line: Rael San Fratello at the U.S.-Mexico Border displays these maps (created on reproductions of the 1882 topographic survey map), the objects (including border wall dioramas in snow globes and the board game and key chains), and a video of the “Teeter-Totter Wall” in action.

My museum-going buddy and I put on our KN95s, took BART across town and under the bay, and went into the museum, initially for the Joan Mitchell retrospective that we’d meant to see but hadn’t gotten to until a friend said she’d been back three times. The show is mesmerizing in its grandeur, ambition, and sheer beauty, and in the connections Mitchell made between poetry, nature, music, color, and gesture. And then we came across Drawing the Line as we made our way downstairs, navigating the crowds with that mixture of friendliness and wariness between strangers, the anxiety of too much closeness, the internal constant reminders of the relative safety of returning to masked, mostly distanced, and heavily sanitized life in the world. It’s a surreal time in a surreal world. Drawing the Line is as real as it gets.  And also as surreal.

It’s a show that inspires action, even as it unsettles our thinking. And it inspires thoughts about resistance and different kinds of games. This let me back to Gabrielle Brant Freeman’s “Girltrap,” which I read a couple of years ago in one of my favorite online magazines, Scoundrel Time (which—disclosure!— has also published my work): Freeman’s poem twines its way through an evocation that still haunts me.

Though I’m a fiction writer, and always read through that lens, I have taught this poem, included it in a craft talk once (parts of that are here too), and now return to reconsider, as I think about how we write about hard realities, how we might understand and resist abuses of power. (Note: this exploration is super craft-focused today. For new readers of the Marvelous Paragraph project, especially those looking for more personal stories about reading, you might look back through earlier posts, especially the guest posts. Here, I’m in opening-the-hood-and-taking-a-look-inside mode.)

Here’s a link to the poem, so you can read it for yourself before seeing my notes. And here are the opening stanzas, the first of three parts:

I

This game is a machine involving bowling balls, sipping
birds, boots, babies, bullets, pulleys, and rope.
Begin at the beginning. Measure the natural waist
with tape and a wandering eye. Correct with strings
pulled tight, tug with a foot in the back, make the ratio
deep. Fingers should meet. This game is a machine

involving spandex, stretch, smoothing machination
designed to counter-weight personality, to sip
politely in public, to slip one past calculation
of worth. Numbers matter as much as how much rope
one needs to hang. Measuring tape as noose strung.
This game is a machine involving verbs: to bind. To gird.

Shush of strings laced, waist to hip, waist to bust ratio
slip […] rope smokes. The trick is a boot to the head.

One of the things that emerged for me as I read and reread the poem is the way Freeman uses a range of voices to direct and redirect our attention. So detailed. So surprising. The poem’s unnerving title immediately announces its focus on gender, but the meaning of “trap” is ambiguous. Maybe it’s romantic – advice for single people. Probably, though, it’s dangerous. As the poem begins with “This game is a machine involving bowling balls, sipping/birds, boots, babies, bullets, pulleys, and rope,” it’s an announcement that we’re playing. Not a children-learning-about-life joyous game.

In this, it’s kin to Rael’s and San Fratello’s games, though it’s also different in crucial ways: some of their games are required by conditions, some would be a delight if played under other circumstances. The game in “Girltrap,” however, is an embodiment of what Rebecca Solnit has described as “The Longest War.” And here the poem itself is the act of disruption.

Though this is a single poem, it takes the form of an unconventional sonnet sequence, a kind of game in itself: there’s something jagged and enraged about Freeman’s use of the sonnet, that classic, lyric form for love poems, and something perfect and machine-like in the rhythms and repetitions of the form, undercut by the fragments and enjambments. The enjambments between lines and particularly stanzas dislocate us further, giving us chances to guess at the finishing of thoughts and to be quite wrong about where the poem is going next.

The first voice of the poem is instructional, fairly calm, explaining the elements of the game in an unsettling, alliterative list, full of plosives, both voiced and voiceless. Bowling Balls. Birds. Boots. Babies. Bullets. Pulleys. Rope. What the hell kind of game is this?  

While our minds are trying to come up with a category for these disparate elements, united by sonic harshness, full of a growing sense that something is wrong (we don’t want any sequence that reads “boots, babies, bullets”), the poem delivers a how-to, a set of guidelines for tasks we don’t fully understand. The repetition of the words “This game is a machine” is both alarming and numbing.

The poetic lines are long enough that it’s hard to encompass all the information before the breaks, but the sentences include terse commands and fragments, reinforcing the sense of compression and being in a tight, bewildering space. We might be making clothes, getting someone dressed in a corset. Weight and anxiety about weight starts to enter in, judgment of worth, a sense of binding. Societal binding and physical binding intertwine. The machine, like the border wall, creates connection and disconnection. The creation of the wall/machine is always going to come from the desire to contain and separate, as well as the brutal pleasures of wielding power.

And then, in the final line of the first section, the poem delivers the first elision, ellipses, absence, between “waist to bust ratio slip” and “rope smokes.”

At first I didn’t even notice this marker – whatever’s been omitted is no more mysterious than what’s included. Finally, we’re told directly “The trick is a boot to the head,” which makes complete emotional sense. We knew there was violence here, we could feel it.

End-stop. No question or further movement. The first section has been tied up tight, and, reading it, I feel the pressure.

The next two sections move into different voices: instructional, but now sneering, then academic, deceptively polite, and blaming, trying to make the trapped girl complicit, a trick for blaming her for what’s happening to her in this “game.” The word “slip” emerges from its brackets. It’s a word for a disjuncture of reality or a small mistake, here paired with degradation and violation.

Another turn of voice in the middle of the first stanza of this last section, instructions that sound as if they could be from the experienced trapped girl to the less experienced:

Just lay there. Think of anything else, babies, how waste
products of trees keep you alive, how machines
think.  

This command reaches the reader as well as the trapped girl, but not the man with the power. And then another elision, followed by the voice of an amused, game-playing cowboy, talking to her as if they’re lovers, as if she’s choosing this. The final “slip” is also part of a command-fragment. “[Slip] this bit.” And then the final fragment: “Into your rebel mouth.” The voice that ran through the binding, holding down, is now ferocious, triumphant.

There’s just enough ambiguity in the ending to leave us carrying the weight of the poem. But it’s pretty clear that the silent eruption, an expression of grief and rage, didn’t solve anything. Any solutions have to be found outside the world of the poem. Artistic work has a role to play in naming aspects of our many peculiarities and outrages, delineating the nature and moves of the ubiquitous violations and power games that surround us, the gaslighting that has come to feel like the new normal and that continues into a new political era.

The games of today are not the games of the old normal. But defiance and disruption create their own exhilaration, giving us a burst of energy to go on with our persistent actions, to take new actions, to work on creating new and better games.