Renée Nicole Good, another poet martyred by power

(About “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs”)

In the campaign of terror unleashed by the Trump administration—whose publicly stated targets are “criminal immigrants,” just as communists, Jews, and others were in Nazi Germany, minority groups turned into scapegoats—the true objective is the intimidation of citizens and the construction of a praetorian repressive apparatus.

This is laid bare by the broad daylight murder of the American poet Renée Nicole Good.¹

Renée Nicole Good, who in 2020 went by the last name “Macklin,” published that year on Poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets, her award-winning poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs.” We reproduce it here, in English and in Spanish (our own translation), as a posthumous tribute to the poet, as a celebration of her spirit, and as a banner for the struggle of Americans against the State Terror being imposed by the fascist regime of the MAGA movement and its leader.

“On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs”² reflects on the spiritual and intellectual growth of the human being—not only as a passage from childhood to adulthood, but also as the abandonment of the child’s vision of the world, full of magic and inherited meanings, in order to start seeing it with critical, analytical eyes and to accept the—sometimes uncomfortable—truths that science discovers. The poem thus embraces the value and necessity of scientific understanding. But it also recognizes what can be lost along the way: our sense of wonder, of security, and of the sacredness of life itself. Therefore, it reveals the inevitable tension between all faith codified (or ossified) into dogma, and the act of thinking, which advances, changes, and discovers spaces among the vital organs of the world it dissects.

Neither the poem—nor any human being who dares to be free—can resolve this dilemma. What will the next incision reveal? What is the soul’s true path, toward itself? And yet, human existence cannot dwell on any other ground except that on which this conflict lies. The topography of this terrain is what “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” sketches with surgical skill. We have no alternative, unless we return to absolute ignorance and the refusal to think, or unless we renounce the search for meaning in human existence: we must preserve the “space for wonder” the deeper the scalpel of reason penetrates the entrails of the “fetal pig.”

To be human, the poem suggests, does not allow us to choose between the security a child derives from inherited fantasies and the knowledge that the adult learns to build rationally. We need the latter in order to attain true dignity. But we also need an existential faith, lest life itself perish (echoes of Unamuno).

There is no escape from this dilemma. Can there be a clearer validation of it than the poet’s tragic end at the hands of assassins under the Trump regime—grotesque, better-equipped clones of the “Chavista motorizados” (irregular motorcycle squads used for intimidation in Venezuela)?

Renée Nicole Good, victim and witness of power, could not escape the clash between the fantasy of the American creed (human rights, equality before the law, the “protective” role of the State) and the eyes of reason—which observe how the fantasy unravels in the dissection of the fetal pig of real power.

Thus, the true anatomy of oppression is revealed.

We invite the reader to discover the strength and relevance of Renée Nicole Good’s poetry. May her voice continue to illuminate the conscience of those who resist.

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs

by Renée Nicole Macklin

i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,

& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores

(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—

the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat

               ribosome

               endoplasmic—

               lactic acid

               stamen

at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—

i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to anymore, maybe my gut—

maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.

it’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.

can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom

               now i can’t believe—

               that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how welland what dies there.

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 ¹Who also published as Renée Nicole Macklin
 ²Source: https://poets.org/2020-on-learning-to-dissect-fetal-pigse