I would say the key to understanding The Border Simulator is to consider everything anyone can do a simulation. Drinking a Coke, for instance, could be a simulation of refreshment. Eating Cheetos. Buying a baseball cap could be a simulation of playing a sport. Like naming someone “Primitivo,” just because they want to cross the border. Is it the right name? I don’t know! Would you choose “Primitivo” for the simulation because there is something “primitive” to moving over a landscape? Would you choose the masculine over the feminine of “primitive,” because you first wanted to test the simulation on a man? Or you default to masculinity? Or you were thinking of how many more US Customs agents are men, and you didn’t want chauvinism included in the simulation?
Maybe questioning could be considered a form of simulation. And how different Gabriel Dozal’s book would be if each poem’s simulation was as tentative or inquisitive as a paragraph that asks so many questions. But that’s not his book. For Dozal, simulation is a means to infinite possibilities! Consider the simple difference between writing simulation versus the word “simulation” in quotes. Which is the simulation? The one hiding in quotes? Or is it the one prancing around without even a modest gesture to punctuation. Maybe it feels precarious to point Dozal’s central trope of simulation in so many directions. And that’s exactly my point. For Dozal, poetic simulating is like a style. It permeates the poetry. It eviscerates the poetry. It’s the verbose machine blooming out into poetry to look back at itself and mock that anyone ever looked at it as a poem. His sentences might appear like signposts, like they’re going to reveal the point to a story, or construct a fictional world. Because they want to lure you into certainty. Which might be one of the points of a simulation. For instance, the recurring figure of the “crosser” from “Working for Customs Is Like Building a Cathedral.” There is the reality of the crosser, and the surreality of writing a poem about the crosser, but couched in what is likely the reality experienced by someone crossing the border.
And the ordinary experience is waiting in line
at the bridge to get back into El Paso.
We alter the crosser to unfold the crosser
and unfolded we can see their creases and angles
and appreciate them in their full expressions.
The song “Expressway to Your Skull” is played all day
when Primitivo is detained in my vernacular hut.
You are a guest of mine and I’m the host. (l. 15-22)
The reality of the crosser would be the person waiting in line to get back to El Paso. The surreality would be how easy it is for a poem to reshape the crosser into a cubist rendering that could be unfolded like origami. And the poem’s velocity in crafting a commentary from the surreal. Please understand, if Dozal sees an opening so he can recast a situation into artful multiplication, he’ll take it. Which makes sense if the border is merely a simulation, or totally a simulation, or can only be described in terms that reveal its simulation. Or that seems to be the primary impetus in Dozal’s poems. To complicate the people who cross the border by both playing into the stereotype and exploding the stereotype, all in the same poem. Primitivo can stand in for what feels like the symbolic importance of crossing the US-Mexico border. And Primitivo can be the straw person Customs has devised for dehumanizing the people who cross the border. And in the midst of these two readings for Primitivo, Dozal wants to make clear the distinct motives each person would have for crossing the border.
And the big question is whether The Border Simulator should be read more for its argument or for its mockery that any argument can be made. If the book is going to describe a border as some kinetic stasis whose primary interest is kinesis, does that make these poems performance? How they can keep things moving. Keep talking about “crossers,” and the crossers become an erratic, oops, I mean ineradicable problem (slips of the tongue being another of Dozal’s playful ways to unsettle sense). And, then, by raising substantial questions in the midst of that performance, pointedly topical questions about the border, does calling it a simulation at that point make Dozal’s book more argument? Like how the fiction of the border was highlighted by Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands? Yes. Yes to what? You might ask. And that’s the impasse between performance and political rhetoric in The Border Simulator. Is the book critical of the bureaucratic machine of the border? Yes. Does the border come across as a self-contradicting argument that has no point but can’t escape its poignant existence to each of the people crossing? Yes. In “Customs Resurrected You, Primi, Because They Need More of You to Make the Border Exist,” Dozal plays this line between politics and performance:
They’d show a video of you crossing.
It looked so much like you it must have been you.
But now they need you to cross
and you have passed to the afterafterlife
and risen again and have crossed the desert
and you guess you’re in simulation now,
unable to dissimulate only creating dollar signs and your buddies
can only say four words: work Mylar blank x.
The x is important because it can mean no,
it can mean here, it can mean meet me,
it can mean peligro, it can mean the spot,
it can mean intercourse, it can mean interzone,
it can mean simulation, it can mean reality (l. 4-16)
Dozal’s book explicitly confronts the situation at the border by describing the aggressive stance of Customs officials, pointing to Customs’s inability to see people as anything but types of people (”crossers”) rather than individuals. At the same time, Dozal uses poetic listing and extended variation like they were playground equipment he’s repurposing to feel like nonsense. How else are you supposed to make sense of a border? X marks a spot in the above quote. And there’s a way the poem’s forward momentum makes it feel like the X will land on that meaning. And then the poem reminds you how many things X can relate to, like X calls attention to something. Or X can mean “danger” (peligro). And then X starts to branch out everywhere, until it signals all of “reality.”
For my reading, Dozal’s book is an exaggeration on the slippery slope method of argument. Yes, it’s a logical fallacy, and, yes, the national discussion about borders feels like a many-armed fallacy. So that reading The Border Simulator feels more like Postcommodity’s art piece “Repellent Fence,” where a series of balloons are perched like they’re surveilling the border. Because there is so much conversation looking “directly” at the border. And what exactly are we looking at, say the balloons. And the art makes a point, but it’s not searching for what point to make. It’s political protest with the caveat that it’s art. Which gets into much larger arguments about what art can effectively say about politics if the audience around art generally shares similar political positions. I admire Dozal’s slipperiness. Its commitment to slippage. I had seen his work in magazines leading up to this book. And what I admire is how much of the book amplifies its slippery position. In all the reading I’ve presented in this review, I haven’t even touched its Spanish translations on the right-facing pages. I don’t know Spanish enough to comment on the translations. But I can say the presence of Spanish, the poems’ page-facing-page presence, speaks even louder to who is and who should be conducting a conversation about “border policy” in the US. Though, as Dozal’s book is also saying, who is the one with the facts, and what does those facts even matter if their simulation is indistinguishable from mere “facts.”