Abécédaire: Errantry

Now That I’m Thinking
Christopher Rey Pérez

“Chiltepín, a chile I love from my home,” I texted, sending a photo of the green chiles Ty said were like edamame and capers. For a salsa, you add a handful to a molcajete and grind with garlic, salt, and oregano before squeezing lime juice and adding oil, but the way my father ate the chiles that the birds also ate off our tree—since birds lack the receptors that trigger the delicious pangs of heat—was one-by-one alongside a meal, in direct contact with the burn. Another version using chiltepín mixes raw apple and a bit of cider vinegar into boiled and pureed tomatoes that feature the trio of garlic, salt, and oregano, adding allspice to create a sweet-savory salsa that goes well with just about everything. (In Manthia Diawara’s documentary, One World in Relation, Édouard Glissant says, sitting in the boat he’s been on for most of the documentary, that contrary to what one might think, borders are necessary, although they must be permeable and imbued with new meaning—“that of a passage, a communication—a Relation”—for us to appreciate the flavor of crossing from one place to another. Rather than operating in the spirit of antagonism, Glissant’s errantry proliferates out of measure, just beyond the monophagous humdrum of “descriptive realism” depicting who and what I am. Thinking like so is no discovery on my part, more like a feeling of supreme confidence in not getting lost in the sauce.)

Etel Adnan’s “Letter from Murcia” mentions Ibn Arabi’s qutb, a “human, living, pole” holding up the world in balance like a spiritual axis, which to me doesn’t sound like the kind of ICE-like fixity that refers back to the nation-state and its coordinates, but like what we imagine costs the energy to rotate the earth that we face from one place among many in a Whole-World poethics, like Glissant savoring the passage of flavors that comes with a new perspective of the sunset seen through Laurent Valère’s concrete bodies, or Adnan driving along Spain’s coastal landscape, flowing through Al-Andalus as a memory, no tourist herself. Revolutionary movement has me trembling in this phenakistoscope when in Texas we dance everything in a circle, and Muslims conducting tawaf around the Kaaba walk counterclockwise, in tandem, like they’re dancing, and the terrestrial journeys of relation relocate me from center to periphery, then to the middle, left out in the open.

And then there’s my Instagram feed on March 6, 2026. What to make of reports that Israel bombed “helicopters” painted as decoys on the ground? Even if what I’m reading’s fake news and AI-generated, is this how we imagine a geography there and add salt to these images that are nearly impossible to give thought to, holding up the world? There is an imagination of a military base, an imagination of a silhouette of a helicopter seen from a “bird’s-eye” view, an imagination of the bomb’s impact, of the actual birds and other small animals that are not in the blurry picture but surely flew out of the way in time.

Christopher Rey Pérez is a poet from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. His first book, gauguin’s notebook (Northwestern University Press, 2017), received the 2015 Madeleine P. Plonsker Prize from Lake Forest College. He is also the author of Fayuca, a book on markets and movement, with diSONARE Editorial in Mexico City; and Future Tourism, a chapbook with Sputnik & Fizzle, on love, travel, and class. Together with Gabriel Finotti, he runs the nomadic and multilingual publishing project, Dolce Stil Criollo. Forthcoming is Authenticity Drill, a new book of poems with Futurepoem in 2027.

Walking Errant Archiving
Sónia Vaz Borges

“Do you know the distance between you and your country?”¹

The walking archive is errant. By walking archive, I mean an archive that does not reside in a single place, institution, or material, but rather moves across borders and generations, carried in bodies, gestures, silences, and fragmented recollections. It is shaped by displacements, by colonial ruptures, and by the urgencies of ongoing struggles for liberation.

My conception of this is the result of a journey I undertook through six countries over a period of five years in an attempt to reconstruct the history of the educational system developed by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). Their armed guerrilla struggle, accompanied by their strong educational initiatives, circulated widely through broadcast radio, pamphlets, and journals, led to the self-proclamation of the independence of Guinea-Bissau in September 1973, and had a significant impact on the military coup of April 25, 1974, in Portugal—the Carnation Revolution—that put an end to the dictatorial regime. The PAIGC’s radio programs and their use of print media in the form of pamphlets written and directed to the Portuguese military through focused distribution, conveyed the message of liberation: to render the Portuguese aware of their oppressed condition under the dictatorial regime that had led them to wage a colonial war. My archive carries many histories. It has calloused hands and swollen feet. At times, it is missing an arm or a leg; it is missing its strength, even.

My archive carries traumas—sometimes without even knowing it, acknowledging it, or perhaps without knowing the word for it. My archive migrates and has been an immigrant. At times, it is blind or suffers from cataracts. It speaks to me, looks me in the eye, and walks down the street. My archive is old and wrinkled; sometimes its hair is white, or a faded, sunburned yellow. Braided, protected with a white scarf. My archive is almost bedridden, with very good memory and a sharp tongue. It speaks truths—its truths, which are also memories, lost in time. It tells History without counting clock time or calendar months. It only calculates on its calloused fingers. It lives here and there, planting memories at kitchen tables and in family conversations. It is in constant motion, errant.

¹ Muhammad al-Idrisi, Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi'khtiraq al-afaq 4.1, ca. 1153.

Sónia Vaz Borges is a militant interdisciplinary historian and social-political organizer. She received her PhD in History of Education from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU). She is the author of the book, Militant Education, Liberation Struggle, Consciousness: The PAIGC Education in Guinea Bissau 1963–1978 (Peter Lang, 2019), and, with Maria Isabel Vaz, co-author of Ragás, because the sea has no place to grab: A memoir of home, migration, and African liberation (Common Notions, 2024). As a result of her research, she co-directed the short films Navigating the Pilot School (2016), Mangrove School (2022), and Weaving Stories while Walking (2024). She co-curated the project Greenhouse for the 2024 Portuguese Pavilion at the La Biennale di Venezia, and co-edited the exhibition catalogue, Greenhouse: Art, Ecology & Resistance (Skira, 2024). Vaz Borges is currently an Assistant Professor in History and Africana Studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and is working on her book on the PAIGC walking archives.