An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance – Diana Oropeza

[Future Tense Books; 2024]

I always liked the adage, “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.” I think about it every time I move when, invariably, something important—like a bottle opener or phone charger—is tossed into the wrong box and lost in the shuffle. These are the kinds of somethings you suspect will go missing even as you pack them.

Meanwhile, a letter is tucked away in a book, some trinket folded into the pocket of a bag within a bag within a bag, which you don’t remember missing until you stumble upon it years later. These are the kinds of somethings that slip away quietly, the kind that make me wonder whether a thing has to be missed in order to be considered “missing.”

In her mesmerizing debut, An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance, Diana Oropeza investigates this and many more forms of disappearances, accounting diligently for species collapse, displacement, grief, “the shape of absence,” and institutional memory. A recent graduate from the Pacific Northwest College of Art’s MFA program, Oropeza dances between fact, fiction, poetry, and word play, stretching the fabric of storytelling to its limits, in order to meditate on the transient space between appearance and disappearance.

In “Deprong Mori,” Oropeza tells the story of a child who, following a miraculous event, retells only fantastical versions of it, such that “as time wore on, the child could no longer recall what actually happened.” In effect, the truth of what happened dissolved from the child’s memory over time or, put another way, was made to disappear a little more every time the story was altered. In “Calle,” Oropeza writes that “An artist hired me to follow her around in order to prove that she existed,” exposing our deep desire to be seen and to be worth seeing—or, for some, simply not to disappear.

By investigating a wide variety of disappearances, Oropeza’s work clarified the ways each leaves behind a residue on the soul—an aching for the movies your will never see, the songs you will never hear, the meals you will never smell wafting from an open window in a place that I will never visit. While most of the literature you will read in your lifetime points toward truths or common experiences outside the work, Oropeza points toward things that have already disappeared and will likely never appear again. In “Mabe,” she establishes this vague sense of grief and loss poignantly, describing “an abstract portrait of the self, painted by a Japanese-Brazilian artist” that, “along with 50 other paintings and six crew members, vanished on Flight 976 somewhere between Japan and Brazil. … Sadly, no survivors, no wreckage, no art was ever found (see Untitled, and Untitled, and Untitled, and.”

In this way, the subject of her work is intangible by definition. Not in the surreal sense, exactly—every installment records something distantly recognizable, like a dream you’ve forgotten or a name on the tip of your tongue. But the focal point of her work is always just out of reach. Oropeza summarizes this effect in one of the closing lines of the book, where she writes, “Remind me to ask: who is the blurry-faced person in the foreground?”

Oropeza’s series ironically titled “(Image)”—ironic because the book does not include any images—epitomizes this effect. In one, Oropeza writes, “The kids in the foreground are gawking at something that can’t be seen from this angle, their eyes are wide with wonder.” In another, Oropeza describes, “A collection of images I saw but was not able to capture, enlarged, printed, and framed.” Each “(Image)” challenges the very notion of looking, seeing, appearing, and disappearing.

By teaching her readers how to look for things that are not there, to consider the peripheral instead of the obvious, Oropeza widens her reader’s conceptual lens, questioning everything that is left out of focus—or entirely out of frame. In this way, Oropeza contributes to a chorus of contemporary of writers invested in interrogating parallel themes like memory, extinction, and grief. While Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses examines the disappearances of specific things throughout history (like a species of tiger or an island in the pacific.), Oropeza leverages fiction to point her readers toward the disappearances of things both real and surreal.

In her “Notes” near the end of the book, Oropeza employs this effect toward a very different end, writing “Don’t forget to include a list of everyone who ever went missing… try to include the names of all those displaced, and if you can’t find the names, include a list of those missing names as well.” Whether that missing list of missing people was disappeared intentionally or simply as the result of a clerical error, I had to set the book down for a moment just to wrap my mind around the gaping hole in recorded history that Oropeza evokes.

At the end of the book, in her acknowledgements, Oropeza describes the work of cataloging each discrete kind of disappearance as a “work of journalism distorted by creative license” or a “documentary poem.” The latter comparison made me think of the British poet and translator George Szirtes, who once argued that “the truths the poem deals with are not evidentiary truths,” because, “as far as I know, no poem has been adduced as evidence in court.” The further I made it into the book, the more it became clear to me that Oropeza was abundantly aware of the irony of her chosen medium. After all, it would be an absurd task to make a list of the missing names of displaced people or to “prove the absence of wind.” And yet, in asking her readers to do just that, Oropeza coaxes you to lean in closer, embrace the precarity of invisibility, death, and all other forms of disappearance, and begin to see things that just aren’t there.

Oropeza’s opening prose poem, one of my favorite passages, reads: “What you are holding in your hands is a cardboard box. Inside the box you will find the document you are currently reading, which says: THIS BOX IS HEAVY BECAUSE IT IS FULL OF HOLES.” Of course, it is not strange for something to be “full of holes”; and, on that note, boxes tend to be heavy, especially when they are full of things. Yet this particular box is heavy because it is full of holes—a whimsical deviation from expectation and exactly the kind of poetical magic that Oropeza offers in this debut.

Justin Duyao is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. His writing has been published by the Financial Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Southwest Contemporary, Clackamas Literary Review and the Northwest Review, among others.