Christopher Soto is Them’s 2022 Now Awards honoree in Literature. The Now Awards honors 12 LGBTQ+ people who represent the cutting edge of queer culture today; read more here.
Content warning: this article contains mentions of abuse, racism, and incarceration.
For Christopher Soto, abolition is personal.
In the Los Angeles-based poet's long-awaited debut poetry collection Diaries of a Terrorist, published by Copper Canyon Press, they demand it. Weaving survivor narratives, including their own, through artful stanzas, Soto’s work disrupts our conceptions of violence and safety. The book draw from several of Soto’s encounters with police as a youth, including taking his father’s car at age 15 in an attempt to escape an abusive household. One piece, “The Children In Their Little Bullet-Proof Vests,” reads in part:
The faces looked like
Security cameras
Capturing just one scene
In the movie
The brown boy
The police car
The tow truck
“There are an array of experiences I've had where the police work to criminalize the survivor,” Soto says.
Still, he emphasizes that the book is not meant to be an individualistic account of his own experiences, but rather a multi-faceted rallying cry that draws from multiple sources. The use of the “we” pronoun throughout the collection forces the reader to confront how policing targets, maims, and destroys entire communities rather than just select individuals within them.
“My experiences with policing are not exceptional,” he notes. “I am part of a chorus of survivors and abolitionists demanding abolition.”
In the same vein as Latinx literary activists like Myriam Gurba and Javier Zamora, Soto’s activism and artistry have always been intertwined. Their work leading up to their long-awaited collection included the 2015 co-founding of the Undocupoets Campaign, an effort to undo discriminatory citizenship requirements that barred undocumented poets from entering competitions, and the publication of their 2016 chapbook, Sad Girl Poems, which Eileen Myles called “revolutionary and sad and finely wrought on the fly.”
After earning a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry in 2021, Soto, who uses he/they pronouns, was made a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Occidental College. The year prior, he taught classes such as “Poetry in the Age of Mass Incarceration” and “Poetry and Protest Movements” as a guest lecturer at UCLA.
In his latest work, Soto seeks to disrupt the way in which survivor narratives like his have been co-opted by the carceral state to justify policing and human caging.
Discussing the book with me through a Zoom window, Soto sits at their desk relaxed. Dark brown roots have begun to show beneath bleached blonde hair. After a few minutes of chatting about the collection and, briefly, Bad Bunny’s latest album, we agreed to do the remainder of the interview over email. Soto wants to make sure his message isn’t lost. Deeply influenced by Los Angeles’ Chicanx and Latinx punk scene, they are unapologetic in the way they speak about liberation. Historically, Soto says, media outlets have pulled his most sensational quotes from spoken interviews for publication, omitting the actual intent of his work: a demand for a complete and total abolition of the police and human caging.
“When I first started to identify as an abolitionist, people looked at me as if I was ludicrous and now the movement has grown so much I actually think I may be able to see abolition within my lifetime,” Soto tells me. “Still, I want abolition today. Abolition tomorrow is another name for reform.”
Soto’s new collection unsettles the police state’s myth that abolition is an impossibility. Defenders of the carceral state often ask: What should be done with people who have committed acts of violence if not imprison them? The poet’s work drives at the hypocrisy inherent in that very question.
“This difficulty in uniformly naming violence is part of what makes an abolitionist imagination so necessary to me,” Soto explains. “If kidnapping, human caging, and murder is violence, then how come we accept that as the basis of our justice system in the U.S.? The carceral state is upheld by a contradiction.”
Melodically weaving in survivor narratives, Diaries of a Terrorist explores an array of abolitionist concerns, like the caging of migrants at the Southern border, Palestinian liberation, and intergenerational trauma.
The use of survivor stories serves both an artistic and a rhetorical purpose. A common argument used in opposition to abolition is the idea that undoing the system of policing would put survivors at risk. By redefining our ideas of violence from the perspective of those very survivors, Diaries of a Terrorist challenges that misleading claim.
“I have the narratives of survivors at the center of this poetry book about abolishing the police in order to reclaim our stories,” says Soto. “Too often politicians and police will use the narratives of survivors as talking points in order to bolster carceral budgets, but police do not protect survivors.”
In one poem, “Arrest Us All,” Soto illustrates how the police state fails survivors by narrating the story of 200 Indian women murdering their assailant in a Nagpur courtroom in 2004 after the judge failed to prosecute him:
We never wanted to harm // Only to stay alive &
We could no longer wait // Wishing strangers would // Help or empathize
Growing up outside of Los Angeles, and raised by a Salvadoran family, Soto was always keenly aware of surveillance and imprisonment. El Salvador, where his mother was born, has the fourth highest prison population rate in the world, with 564 people out of every 100,000 currently incarcerated, according to data compiled by World Prison Brief. Their mother relocated from the Salvadoran city of Santa Ana to the United States, which has the world’s highest prison population rate, and specifically to Los Angeles, which operates the largest jail system in the country.
For Soto, these statistics aren’t abstractions; they’re personal. As a domestic violence survivor, he says that relying on the police to provide any meaningful kind of justice in their teens would only have caused his family further harm.
“What I needed while experiencing domestic violence was access to safe housing near my school, food to eat, and access to mental health services,” Soto says. “What I would not need was the police to incarcerate my father.”
As a response to these experiences, poetry poured out of Soto. While they began writing poetry in the first grade, the earliest years of their active work took place in high school, running parallel to his most salient memories of abuse, both at home and by the police. In high school, Soto ran poetry slams, attended shows at Da Poetry Lounge at Fairfax High School, and saw live music at venues like The Smell in downtown L.A. for inspiration.
Soto gravitated toward poetry as a means of abolitionist expression because the medium allowed him to reimagine how a world beyond policing might look. Working closely with words helped him create language that could name violence and the systems that perpetuate it.
“I think that poets are the dreamers, who usually don’t have any answers and only questions,” Soto says. “As poets, we aren’t tied to figuring out legal or legislative strategy, our goal is to imagine the world as we wish it would be. In the abolitionist movement, this is very powerful because poets can propose the most outlandish ideas and then see how close to that dream we are able to feasibly come. Poets get to invent new worlds.”
Since Soto first began writing Diaries of a Terrorist about a decade ago, the United States has witnessed its largest civil rights protests since the 1960s and the COVID-19 pandemic has only intensified existing racial and class inequities. The outrage over the murder of George Floyd in 2020 prompted the Minneapolis City Council’s public pledge to abolish the police and put abolitionist language into the popular lexicon, but the 2013 Black Lives Matter protests also felt like a powerful turning point for the poet.
“In those days, I remember sometimes being scared to outwardly identify as an abolitionist because people would conflate their personal safety with policing, and then they would react to me as if I were a threat to their safety,” they tell me. “One of the only other abolitionist poets that I knew was Jackie Wang. I remember hearing publishers and other literary people saying that poetry couldn’t be political. Now, less than a decade later, a lot has changed.”
While people are more aware of abolitionist concepts today, in large part because of these sociopolitcal shifts, many continue to fire back, setting up a straw-man argument in which the movement is measured against an unattainable goal.
“Abolitionists are often tasked with imagining a world that is beyond violence, as if complete safety is what we are experiencing now under the police state,” Soto says. “Instead, I think the framing should be: how to prevent and more appropriately respond to violence when it does occur?”
Not long after our interview, those words have already taken on a haunting resonance, with a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas claiming 21 lives and the police reportedly taking a staggering 78 minutes to mount an ineffective response.
In a carceral country where violence is often seen as the only logical response to violence, and “good guys with guns” are held out as a solution to “bad guys with guns,” Diaries of a Terrorist challenges us all to interrupt that cycle of harm.
As Soto melodically deconstructs and pulls apart words like “terrorism” and “free” in Diaries of a Terrorist, the poet pushes us to dismantle these concepts for ourselves. Together, the poems ask whether people who have been victimized and incarcerated can ever be free in a police state. Can our communities be the same once even one of us has become a target of state violence?
As more people begin to question their own views on abolition, violence, and policing, Soto is optimistic but resolute. The movement is rapidly shifting and gaining momentum, expanding transnationally, encompassing struggles like Palestinian liberation and migrant rights, and across industries like hospitals and universities. Soto’s recent work with the movement to get Cops Off Campus is part of an ongoing effort to abolish university policing across the country, led by students, faculty members, and staff.
Soto is hopeful Diairies of a Terrorist can be a helpful record of this momentum — a snapshot of a turning tide.
“In the poetry community, I hope the publication of this book is even a small addition to the abolitionist movement, too,” Soto said. “The movement is growing faster than I ever anticipated and it excites me tremendously, all of the places where abolition thought and community is growing.”
Note: This piece has been updated to correct errors about Soto’s personal history.
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