Book Review: Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole

moises ferreira

Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole by Ingrid M. Calderón-Collins, Another New Calligraphy, 2019, $16 paperback

Reviewed by Scott Neuffer

My wife tells me not to talk about it: her trauma. She survived the dirty wars in Peru. If you talk, you die, she tells me. People don’t talk about it. The dead are dead. The living go on.

Sorry, it’s not my place, I say. But these ghosts. I can feel them.

Why are so many Latinx immigrants haunted this way, knowing nothing but extremities of life and death, torn between leftist dictatorships and right-wing death squads, the U.S. meddling and often supporting the worst elements? What of these wars that have scarred our southern neighbors? Is my exceptionalism so deep I fail to see how my paradigms don’t matter to people who come here, seeking what I have long taken for granted?

The trajectory of the immigrant life is a deep arc. Listen, I tell myself. Stop talking. Listen.

Ingrid M. Calderón-Collins is a refugee of the Salvadorian civil war. She reached out, told me she was raised Mormon before the war. I know the pain of the Mormon experience, have lived it. The guilt, the self-hatred. And I’m adjacent to an immigrant’s pain, the alienation, the silent resolve, always there. Tell me, Ingrid, do you want to speak? Is it safe to speak? The fascists speak all day long, filling the air with their hollow words, the vile edge of their hollow walls.

Your trauma is yours. What do you want to say about your life?

“I’m 39. I have saggy tits, white pubes and a story to tell…” her memoir starts, like the sparks of knowledge, like the aching dust of creation. Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole it is called. Where are we going, Ingrid?

We are going back and forward at the same time. We are going into the heart of a dark light, heat-giving light.

***

“I have been successful in my undertakings and consider myself a master in this assimilation magick,” Ingrid writes in what is a hybrid poetry-prose memoir. “I have lied my way through life not only to others, but also mostly to myself.”

She says she’s killed the lies she’s told herself about herself. What’s left, then? And how vulnerable the newly conceived self:

“I watched that dirty bath water go down the drain. Making sure to watch it until the end. I stepped out, dried my hair, my body. Rolled frankincense, Russian roses and cedarwood extract on my wrists and let the buzzards eat me whole again…”

Now we are going back to the beginning. To poems of the rupture:

“memories

from war-torn countries

come from people

who saw the dead —

come from people

who saw the living

become the dead —

a body amongst trash

decomposing — ”

But there’s a war within a war, the shadow of sexual abuse. She remembers her family’s escape, her first McDonald’s cheeseburger in the states. She remembers meeting her first Mormon friend. The years blur. We’re getting close to something, a moment of rapture, of reckoning. She masturbates:

“Now

I can’t keep my hands off it,

I’m entitled to it,

this chaos,

this love that’s so damn altered, reformed, transformed, remodeled and stunning —

it’s turned into something resembling

honey.”

But her abuser is not far behind. Her body was never his to take. She learned on her own how to re-build herself, please herself.

“When Don Chepe would rest himself inside me, pieces of my chapel flicked off.

But each time I smelt a dead body, or the acrid scent of a flower in full bloom, or watched an orange-chinned parakeet land on a perch…

I felt reconstructed, understood, immaculate.”

In the states, life is growing, until her family is deported back to El Salvador.

“I am back to where the pain lives,

to where parts of me

are scattered,

to where no parts of me remain.”

She returns to the states but after being split between the two. Her Salvadorian friends demanded she speak in English. Her parents put their Mormon faith first. At least she feels that way. She grows:

“You PBS your way into jobs

and wit yourselves into lovers,

you paraphrase songs with your hands

and beat on hard surfaces just to watch your hands move.”

L.A. reminds of her El Salvador:

“Los Angeles chases you with its heat.

It is a constant reminder of the humid nights I spent during blackouts back in El Salvador.

Long nights of boots trampling, wood burning, stereos pumped and powered with D batteries, humming soccer games and boleros, cold watermelon at midnight.”

But she’s not white, not the heroine of movies, not the object of love. This awareness creeps into her life, that she is different and must love herself. She knows her name:

“The name Ingrid is because of Ingrid Bergman.

Hollywood made it to the smallest country in Central America and made people forget their broken hearts for one hour and forty-two minutes.”

Healing, she says, isn’t finite: “it is constant resurrection.” She is married. She can be happy, through the tears, at least in moments, though the wars are always there:

“Abuse tinges everything.

Not one interaction or look from a stranger is normal. I am in a prison, and then I am set free. This is the struggle, it is a part of you, and the fight is often never won completely. It is a war and a battle and a white flag and a sniper.”

And what in her craves death, the vultures? Is it a negation of pain? A sweet release?

“The child in me sings strange songs of expansion….”

Death is part of the healing process, she realizes. Letting go of eternity. Let the Mormons have it. Facing mortality. Letting the buzzards eat her whole.

***

“There are 3.2 million Salvadorans living outside of El Salvador.

I am one of them.

The country is healing, and so am I.”

These wars, these diasporas, these refugees. Ingrid is healing. Ingrid has found love. “A human needs another human to get through this chaos,” she says.

I’m writing this in the morning, thinking of my wife. I’m sorry you don’t want to talk about it. I’ll be here when you do.

I’ll tell her about Ingrid’s story, this memoir that charges the brain. So much power in these words. Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole is a triumph of language. Of remembrance and confrontation. Of dignity reclaimed and humanity reborn. Ingrid is a warrior-poet in full control of her form. She is a survivor but also a healer of the old magicks. She bridges worlds and transforms pain into something of lasting beauty.

Editor’s note: For every copy of Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole sold, Another New Calligraphy will donate $1 to GirlForward, a Chicago nonprofit providing educational support and safe spaces for teenage girls displaced by conflict and persecution.