Maxime Garcia Diaz
- The Netherlands -
Maxime Garcia Diaz (1993) is a poet and studied cultural analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her debut collection Het is warm in de hivemind (‘It is warm in the hivemind’), published by Dutch publishing house De Bezige Bij in 2021, won the C. Buddingh’ Prize for best poetry debut of the year. She also won the National Poetry Slam Championship in 2019. At the moment, she is doing a MFA in Creative Writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Maxime Garcia Diaz's non-linear girl history
by Frank Keizer
Having first burst onto Amsterdam's cozy slam poetry scene around 2018, a popular launch pad for many Dutch poetry careers during the 2000's and 2010's, Maxime Garcia Diaz's roots in performance are unmistakable. Yet her work has never set well within the milieu of slam poetry proper, as her debut collection Het is warm in the hivemind [It is warm in the hivemind] amply testifies. Rather than a series of poems written for the stage, the book itself can be considered an inquiry into and performance of the mire of unstable identities and affects, ranging from fear, rage, fascination and madness, formed (and undone) by today's penetrating technological landscape and its enchantments as well as disenchantments.
Indeed, Diaz's debut poetry collection Het is warm in the hivemind (2022) is one of the first poetry books to come out in The Netherlands that betrays the author’s origins as a woman who grew up (very much) online. Yet far from being an internet gimmick, the volume encapsulates a complicated promise of both personal and collective liberation – either from History, or into it, an ambivalence never entirely resolved in the book. It is certainly not without a frisson of pathos, as is evidenced by the reference to Allen Ginsberg's Howlgenerational grandstanding – not undeservedly so, as the book struck an important chord among a cohort whose isolated social and psychic experiences were suddenly given a collective expression. Yet unlike that book's male bias, Diaz’s book is ostensibly about femaleness or even more specifically: girlhood. And rather than a normative biography, the book is laid out as a digital, lateral exploration of possibilities, or «Non-linear girl-history» as the writer puts it, borrowing from Audrey Wollen’s Sad Girl Theory. This is by no means the only reference found in this book – glitch feminism and Donna Haraway's cyborg are nodded to as well – that Diaz, as a former student of Amsterdam's Cultural Analysis program, might have in common with a relatively large portion of the younger, internet-educated literary crowd around the globe.
Academic theory in this book fuses with pop culture and personal history, creating a corrupted text in which bodies, matter and voices collide. The book spans the whole gamut of internet culture from the 2010s – xenofeminism (the author cites this collective's 'superior forms of corruption' approvingly), inchoate tumblr politics, the ravishing density of meme culture – and accounts for the fluid subjectivities of a myriad of aesthetical microcurrents that might already be passé. First and foremost, Diaz is fascinated by ensembles which are neither purely human nor purely material and by the problem, reminiscent of the rich countercultural archive this book conjures up – Mark Fisher in particular comes to mind – of how inert objects such as machines can be said to demand things from humans. In fact, it could be argued that rather than any human subject it is the internet itself, where identity and its disintegration become tied up with each other (though never neatly so), that dreams up the desiring flows found in these poems. However, the human never entirely recedes behind the machine, as can be glanced from the harrowing tenderness of these lines:
there was nothing holding your limbs together
you asked the dark please can you hug me
the dark tried to hug you but failed
the dark was also made of too little
you floated together & yearned for more substance
you wanted to be things you didn’t want this mess
of skin & hair & chemicals
What makes Diaz’s poems so engaging is that they are both the product of the conditions – this ‘mess / of skin & hair & chemicals’ of contemporary girlhood – and an attempt to enact and analyze them, without undoing their both somber and giddy affective kernel, through a tired recourse to irony. We’re reading a digitally native auto-ethnography. Still, there is something ambivalent about this book and its treatment of subjectivity. Diaz’s poems both dramatize and cohere into a narrative of becoming a commodified girl and dissolve said subject by pushing against the materiality it turns (in)to, only to match the disembodied flows of the internet. Tellingly, Diaz herself has stated that she is fascinated and unfazed by the rapid obsolescence of much of internet culture, with its singularities decaying in real time akin to the lifespan of fireflies. Yet hints of melancholy, a hankering after a lost substance that would restitute some interiority to the glimmering surfaces of the internet, run strong throughout the book.
This tension adds an extra layer to the texture to a book rich in ideas and sensations, but it also illustrates the limitations it comes up against. Furiously semiological, Het is warm in the hivemind remains in search of a practice outside of its own ambit. The specter of revolution haunts this book, which contains various descriptions of political protest — maybe echoing the 2015 Maagdenhuisbezetting in Amsterdam, a student protest against the neoliberal university that was crushed by the police in a crassly violent manner — but those allusions remain curiously void of actual content. This problem – of poetry's complicated relationship to politics – has been one of the most pressing questions addressed by the vanguard of Dutch poetry of the years after the 2008 financial crisis, in the wake of which a new generation of poets who grew up in the postpolitical nineties set out to forge a poetic language that could grasp the new realities of labor, capitalism, gender and racial oppression, and climate change in an intelligible way.
Het is warm in the hivemind is one of the major additions to this still growing body of work in The Netherlands. Published in 2022 but written throughout the late 2010's, it precariously follows-up on a decade that saw an uptick in mobilizations and new protest movements, but is already enmeshed in the gloomy new era we have just started to inhabit, inaugurated by the ravages of Covid-19 and an outbreak of war, precipitating many developments long in the making. After all, the kind of internet so euphorically celebrated in this book is long gone. So are bustling city centers, which is impossible not to relate to the political economy. Amsterdam used to be a cozy, liberal city with a knack for experiment and DIY culture. If it had already been expensive and gentrified for some time, now it has gotten unaffordable and therefore, as Geert Lovink quipped, boring.
Perhaps sensing the exhaustion that had seized Amsterdam’s once vibrant but now thoroughly marginalized counterculture, Diaz has packed her bags and moved to the US to attend Iowa’s famous Writers’ Workshop. Her newest poetry, not published in book form yet, suggests new avenues and horizons. In dream-like sequences, both speculative and analytical manner, Diaz dissects the uncanny work of mushrooming datacenters in The Netherlands, wondering how long it might take before the internet will have homogenized its inhabitants. These poems reveal a serious engagement with the political economy of The Netherlands, which has incrementally been hollowed out from within over the past fifteen years. We can sadly expect this neoliberal onslaught to continue, now under the dismal aegis of the extreme right, rising not just in Western Europe but across the globe. Poetry, though by definition a marginal pursuit, remains one of the discourses most attuned to the human cost of this assault – as the work of Maxime Garcia Diaz abundantly shows.
Poetry
-
Original Innocence / Original Innocence
-
blood spring fire / bloed lente vuur
-
w@vvy don’t pretend to be analog when ur digital / w@vvy don’t pretend to be analog when ur digital
