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Benjamin Alire Sáenz, the Texas-based poet and author, was the man to speak to if you wanted to learn about the ‘world of in-between’ of the US-Mexico border
“You’ll hallucinate out there, on the road. ” I was standing in Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s kitchen in his home in El Paso, Texas . It was after midnight, and we had just finished a meal of Mexican stew, a recipe Sáenz learned from his grandmother.
I had arrived after a 15-hour flight from Dublin . The desert skies over El Paso were dark and filled with stars. I knocked on Ben’s door, and when he answered, I was greeted with his lined face, open eyes, and wide smile. The moment I crossed the threshold into his sittingroom I was hit by the smell of stew simmering on the stove.
We sat and ate for several hours with a group of people I didn’t know. Ben had hundreds of friends, and any were likely to turn up for dinner, any night of the week. The conversation was lively, a mix of Spanish and English. I did my best to keep up.
I told him my plans. I was going to travel the length of the Texas-Mexico border, from El Paso and Juárez in the west to Brownsville and Matamoros in the southeast. Driving along the scarred, rigid spine of one of the most contentious borderlands in the world. And I was going on my own.
Ben raised a glass of wine and toasted my journey.
“You’ll hallucinate out there,” he repeated. And then added, “tonight, you sleep in my bed. I’ll take the couch. ” I slept fitfully and rose before dawn, loading the few things I brought from Ireland into a tiny white rental car.
Ben stepped out on to his front porch and handed me a bag full of leftover food from the night before. He lit a cigarette, took a drag, and coughed into the wind. We were both dead tired, and I was suddenly daunted by the journey ahead of me. Ben smiled and offered one last piece of wisdom.
“At the other end of the border, in the southern valley, they can’t cook for shit. ” We both laughed. I settled into my compact car and reversed out of the driveway. In the rear-view mirror, I saw Ben standing still on the porch, his lit cigarette glowing in the dark.
I pulled away and set off into the desert. That was the last time I saw Benjamin Alire Sáenz before his death in July. In the intervening years, we shared dozens of hours of phone conversations, many of which I recorded. Only weeks before he died, we completed a manuscript of a collaborative book, an account of our shared experiences on the border.
My enduring image of Ben is of the poet standing alone in the dark, puffing a cigarette against the high desert winds, sending me off into the borderlands. Smiling. When I first started visiting the US-Mexico border, more than a decade ago, I was asked one question over and over again: “Have you met Benjamin Alire Sáenz? ” The name itself sounded like a mystery.
Friends and fellow writers across Texas assured me this was the man I needed to speak to, if I wanted to learn about the “world of in-between”. In 2015, as writer-in-residence with the Lannan Foundation, I met the border journalists Angela Kocherga and Alfredo Corchado. We spent evenings under the cosmic Marfa sky, chatting over tequila in the Hotel Saint George. When I asked them about Sáenz, Angela answered quickly.
“You want to meet Ben? Sure, I’ll take you to him. ” A year later, I flew from Ireland back to El Paso and met Angela at the airport. She drove straight to Sáenz’s house downtown, passing long stretches of border fencing along the Rio Grande.
The river was barely a stream. Concrete slopes on either side were painted with colourful murals and slogans, words and images defying the barriers erected between people who see themselves as one. From the hill above Sáenz’s house, I could see the border crossing into Juárez. One city split into two.
Many border dwellers refuse to acknowledge such crude divisions. Angela and I interviewed Ben for a documentary film. He invited us into his kitchen, where he was kneading dough to make polvorones. We talked as he baked.
When our interview ended, Ben pulled me aside and said, “you’re a poet. That’s why we understand each other. As poets. ” For Sáenz, poems expressed the contradictions of life on the border.
He lived many lives on the page. After that first meeting, Sáenz and I shared a correspondence and friendship over 10 years, grounded in poetry and its possibilities. When he died in July, at the age of 71, we were working on a collaborative poem. I showed Ben how to use a shared Google doc, where we wrote back and forth, across continents.
That doc is bookmarked in my search browser, above the words I’m writing now. Our collaborative piece, We Live Most Days in Light, was planned to be much longer than it turned out to be. But it might well contain the last lines of poetry Ben Sáenz ever wrote. Benjamin Alire Sáenz was born in 1954 in Old Picacho, New Mexico, near Las Cruces, in a borderland floodplain along the Rio Grande.
His family ran a small farm, and he grew up speaking both Spanish and English. From an early age, he was drawn to Catholic ritual and discipline, which led him into seminary and the priesthood in his early 20s. He was influenced by Latin American liberation theology and liberal Catholic figures like Dorothy Day, the Berrigan Brothers, and the poet-monk Thomas Merton.
After a few years serving as a parish priest, Sáenz left the church – not because of his as-yet unacknowledged homosexuality, but because of the painful sense that he had not been given a religious vocation. Travels and study in Europe opened his eyes to histories of oppression and colonialism, and back on the US-Mexico border, Sáenz engaged in the anti-war and anti-poverty actions of the Chicano Movement.
Though he left the priesthood, a sense of vocation, justice, and discipline never escaped him. Ben once told me, “I didn’t leave the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church left me. ” With characteristic conviction, Sáenz set a new path, as a writer.
First, he won a scholarship to the University of Iowa, home of the famous Iowa Writers Workshop.
“I hated Iowa,” Ben told me. “There were no Mexicans, no Latinos there at all. When Los Lobos came to play the auditorium, every Mexican in the city came out of the woodwork! ” Ben beamed at the recollection.
One day in the sub-zero Iowa winter, he received a phone call from sunny California. He’d been awarded the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, perhaps the most prestigious and competitive writing award in the country. When the woman calling from Stanford broke the news, Ben blurted out, “I want to marry you! ” “I get that a lot,” she said.
“I love my job. ” At Stanford, Sáenz realised, “I understood what it meant to have a calling. As a former Catholic priest, I know that word is serious business. You have to respond to it.
I wasn’t afraid to write, to experiment, to discover what was inside me. ” The most influential figure Sáenz encountered at Stanford was the poet Denise Levertov, who became Sáenz’s champion and mentor. She told him, “You have a passion for history. Don’t lose it, it will be part of your work.
” Ben reflected to me, “She believed poets have to look outward, listen for the people who talk about necessary things in whatever form they come in. ” At Stanford, Sáenz produced his first book of poems, Calendar of Dust , which won an American Book Award. Literary success meant that Ben could pursue artistic and academic opportunities in the major cities on the east coast, or in Europe.
Instead, he decided to return to the border, where he helped found the first bilingual creative writing programme in the US, in the University of Texas at El Paso. Sáenz would go on to publish six poetry books and 11 novels. He was a prolific painter and a revered figure on the border for his politics and public addresses.
After decades as a “kept secret” in the borderlands, at the age of 57, he published Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe in 2012, a novel for Young Adult readers. It sold 11 copies in its first week.
Ari and Dante, a coming-of-age story about two gay boys on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1980s, went on to sell more than 30 million copies and be translated into 70 languages. It’s a modern classic. In 2013, his collection of border stories, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club, won the Pen/Faulkner Award, making Sáenz the first Latino writer to receive the honour.
Ben always told me that it was a blessing to have commercial success late in life because it allowed him to develop his art without overwhelming scrutiny, and to enjoy success without ego. He continued to live modestly in El Paso, in view of the border, and he gave most of the money away. Perhaps Sáenz’s bravest publication is the poetry book, The Last Cigarette on Earth .
It’s a deeply personal reflection on his coming out, in middle age, as a gay man; and his descent into drug use and addiction. Ben recovered, always telling me that his brush with the El Paso drugs underworld was “anthropological”. But the suffering of that period, and his clarity in writing it, is not to be diminished.
In a poetic prologue to the book, Sáenz writes about himself in the third person: “He wants to remember/ and understand the crooked roads/ he has walked. He will step into the landscapes/ where he lost and broke himself. ” Ben traversed many borderlines – those in the land, in the body, in the spirit. For a man filled with warmth, he had a raging politics on the side of the disenfranchised.
He would laugh as quickly as he would cry. He was my guide. And he was my friend. Sure enough, I did hallucinate driving along the border.
Mountains rise out of the desert, with a kind of unreality surrounding them. Hot, unrelenting sun. Endless miles of highway that blur your vision. I drove late into the night and early into the morning.
I was alone, but Ben travelled with me. A stack of his books on the passenger seat. I kept returning to a sequence of meditations on the border that appear in Sáenz’s The Book of What Remains: “Jesus spent his entire life living in the desert. / This is why he is not bothered by the impure language/ and the impure thoughts and the impure people/ that inhabit the border.
/ He knows what it has cost us to survive. ” Along the border, I visited poets, painters, conservationists, and historians. Many of them were introduced to me by Ben, and they contributed to the vast picture Sáenz had been painting for decades. When I arrived back home in Ireland, Ben and I began work on our collaboration.
I said before that my enduring image of Sáenz is the poet smoking in a dark doorway, bidding me off on a journey. But I think now mostly of the lonely cursor flickering on my computer screen, marking the final, unfinished poem Ben and I were meant to make. His last contribution was this: And here we are – two lost but stubborn archaeologists sifting through desert sands searching for the right palimpsest that will take us out of exile.
In our final phone conversation, Ben couldn’t contain his excitement at the idea of visiting Ireland when we were on book tour together. He had been hospitalised for months, but was home and planning for the future. On the call, we ranted over politics, talked about art and poetry and publishing, and we laughed. We always laughed.
He ended the call, as ever, with a simple, “I love you. ” And the phone went dark. Jonathan C Creasy is a writer, film-maker, musician and broadcaster based in Dublin.
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