2:37pm

In April 2016 Mayra Santos Febres told me to start writing again; to write for real. Tenemos que escribir. These days I can't stop. Entonces esto es para ti Mayra - unas palabritas imperfectas - con mis gracias y con cariño.  #QueNoSeAcabenLasPalabras

for Mayra

2:37pm or what you do with your stories*

you worry you have no imagination no worlds outside your own

that your stories are a depth too shallow to trouble

you un/convince yourself that no one wants this thing

     your heart     

     dripping with blood and sea and salt

     heavy with ink

     wrapped in tobacco leaves and cane flowers

     and you give it away 

you place it on the stoop of the tenement on garden street

you put it in the center of the four projects 

you dip it in the hudson in the east river in the bay

you take it to vega baja to el cantil to the waterfall your mother never saw

you wash it under the rusty drip dripping from your faucet

you bury it with your father 

you offer it to your sister to sacrifice to her fires

you give it to her son who weaves it beautiful again 

you feed it to your lover and wait for a response 

you dig a hole in your yard and kick it in

your drive for hours to clear turquoise lakes and fling it    you don't look back

you hack at it with a machete 

you tend to it like a wound 

you raise it to the stars and show it to the gods 

you boil it with mint and let it burn your thoughts

you climb up to the roof and toss it to the wires hoping it will swing like sneakers

you relinquish it to the roaches to carry away 

you fold it in four and shove it between the seats of a greyhound bus going south

you light it inhale twice and pass it while you wait for the empire state building lights to flicker your curfew 

you submerge it in your cup of coffee and stir it into your rice

you let your neighbor borrow it then watch her give it away

you let your brother take it and watch him trade it for rocks

you let his daughter use it as paint and helplessly watch her go mad

your let your other brother spit on it and curse you dead 

you read about writers and read writers and you wonder who will teach you what stories matter

you thrash the keys on your typewriter 

you stave off migraines 

you wage wars in your mind 

you slapbox ghosts in the corner 

you play wallsies at the welfare office 

all the while asking 

who is this for       who am i for

[east lansing]

*As I reread this piece this afternoon I felt a part of Alexis Pauline Gumbs' Spill move in me. Our bodies know how deeply we need the words/work of Black women. How powerful that book which enumerates ways of being Black and a woman and femme. How powerful that form which stays with you long after, deep in your knowing. Alexis, mil gracias y mil mas. 

borikén's present past or the archive of disappearances

“She will call you by your ancient name, and you will answer because you will not have forgotten. Water always remembers.” [m. jacqui alexander, pedagogies of crossing] 

48 weeks ago i was floating in the water on the edges of the beach in piñones. this is not a photo of piñones. there, in the midst of the green-blue waters [which uncannily matched my nail polish], i was struck with a familiar dissonance.

i had felt it two weeks prior while i was driving up to el yunque with a beloved writer from equatorial guinea and her partner. she was in awe of how much el yunque reminded her of her own atlantic ocean island, how it looked like home. as we jumped in and out of the car at various points to look at the lush vegetation, the crawling creeks, and gushing waterfalls, a dizzying feeling coursed through me. not the kind of vertigo par for the course when trudging up mountains but a kind of pall. for a brief moment i saw them. i recognized myself as an extension of them, my ancestors, who were fully present in that forest. i felt of the earth then. i saw shadows of a present past. se me pararon los pelos.

a week later i was visiting la iglesia nuestra señora del rosario in my father's pueblo, vega baja. i traveled there in an attempt to track down family records. i arrived with a series of facts and little else: my father was raised by his grandmother born in the late 1860s or early 1870s - before slavery was abolished on the island in 1873. i knew his mother had worked tobacco but the town was best known for pineapple and sugarcane: la ciudad del melao melao. none of those facts mattered because when i asked to access the baptism and marriage records i was told that years 1794-1950 were off-site being digitized. skeptical, i went again a few days later but was told the same thing: the records were not there. the archives disappeared. someone suggested i try sevilla. they suggested that i cross the ocean to find my family whose land i was standing on at that very moment. i felt pulled to the earth. i felt desterrada. the dissonance, me tumbo.

as a consolation for my failure at the church, my my aunt took me to mar chiquita in manatí. this is a photo of mar chiquita. i pulled up my jeans to my knees and walked into the water. the atlantic lapped at my feet then solto una ola that crashed against my thighs. una bendición. i remembered vega baja beach, a littoral space that holds the memory of my father. i remembered tomas de castro and the wild farming my family has done on the side of the mountain. i felt pulled down. a present past. 

somewhere in my basement i have photos of our last family trip to vega baja in 2005. papi, in the throes of the cancer that would spread to kill him, smiles broadly in the photos. he was so proud that he was able to afford to bring us all out to the island for a month-long stay. he took us to vega baja beach almost everyday and told us stories of his youth there, how he would jump off the oft-photographed cliffs into the atlantic. in retrospect, the trip was a kind of goodbye.  i have not returned to that beach in vega baja since. i am haunted by those waters, i am choked by what they demand of me. a reckoning. instead i continually seek other black waters. 

48 weeks ago in the blue-green waters of piñones i meditated on these losses. the disappearing archives. the archive of disappearances that taunt me with an indifferent: you will never know. i snapped a photograph to remember the moment and the feeling. i uploaded it to instagram and wrote this caption:

it's a beautiful overwhelming feeling to be on my land. everyday i am struck with waves of joy and grief. everyday i try to find and touch what that feeling is. almost everyday it leads me to the beach. it leads me to search church records [frustrating and futile]. it leads me to think about my hands, my bones, my skin and kin. more time. there is a reckoning. i ask the waters, the trees, the boughs: do you remember me? do you remember papi? and my people, do you remember them? i beg in whisper: tell me something about them. did they know that i'd love them? that i'd be tied to this land? that i'd go crazy searching for traces of them?

i had been called by my ancient name.

i am called again now. in the wake of huracán maria which has wreaked havoc on our island whose infrastructure was so weak it could only be by design. there was a crisis before this crisis. there was a want before the need and a need before that. we the reaped stand to witness the aftermath from afar. every effort too small. i tend to think that diasporicans are like a moth to a flame when it comes our homeland. we are pulled, hailed, and simultaneously torn away. desterradxs. 

what does it mean to be a colonial subject torn from our home and pulled to it - like the many waves of the atlantic? what does it mean to be erased, disappeared from the archive? colonial subjectship is soul destroying. maddening. enraging. it is the present past. a mind fuck. what's worse is that the veil of ongoing colonialisms can be so thick that at times like these it is hard to see a way out. but there are cracks. there are ruptures. so we write and resist in/through these ruptures. we search for the disappeared and hold fast to the disappearing. we labor to remember. we we are more than colonial subjects. always more. 

afro-latinx nuyorquino novels on the rise

This year I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing two Afro-Latinx YA novels for sx salon: a small axe literary platform. One of these novels was already on my lengthy Afro-futurism reading list and the other was a necessary addition to my arsenal of Afro-Latinx literature. The following is an excerpt of my review of Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older and Show and Prove by Sofia Quintero:

Look a little deeper. Daniel José Older’s Afro-Latinx fantasy novel Shadowshaper and Sofia Quintero’s hip-hop coming-of-age novel Show and Prove are two young adult books that demand readers to take pause: things are not quite what they seem. Shadowshaper, Older’s second novel, offers us a glimpse into the Afro-Caribbean syncretic practice of shadowshaping, a delicate interchange between the living and the spirit world. In creating Shadowshaper, Older opens a critical space for (Afro-)Latinidad in Afro-futurist discourses, while bridging Latinx literature and Afro-Atlantic cosmologies, including Santería, Lucumí, and Candomblé, to the fantasy genre. In Show and Prove, Quintero’s second young adult novel, B-boying is an art form and a battlefield, and the protagonists, Smiles and Nike, are trying to thrive in a city that is contending with the crack epidemic, the rise of HIV/AIDS, and the onslaught of rapid urban decay and arson. Their story, told in a dialectic format, is imbued with the sights, slang, and swagger of the South Bronx, all while revisiting the sociopolitical realities of poverty and disenfranchisement from which hip-hop arose.

 [...read the rest here ]

on faithful witnessing

My article, "Faithful Witnessing as Practice," was a project years in the making. Early in my graduate program (UC Berkeley, Ethnic Studies) I was exposed to the work of decolonial theorists, the possibilities of Ethnic Studies as heresy, and philosophy from the 'underside of modernity'. One of the texts we read was Maria Lugones' Peregrinajes/Pilgrimages (2003) wherein she briefly introduces the politics of faithful witnessing before shifting focus to the crux of her text on decolonial feminist philosophy.

I was moved by the concept of faithful witnessing, jolted by the formulation of the act on paper and struck by its significance in my own life. How do we witness faithfully? When have we been witnesses, for how long, and to what? And most importantly, how do we interpret what we witness? I wrestled with these questions in the context of my own lived experiences as the daughter of Puerto Rican migrants, as a product of a working-poor family and community, and as the living legacy of colonial subjectship. Over the past few years I have written about faithful witnessing as a literary trope in the work of Afro-Latinx and Equatoguinean writers and have discussed what it means to be a faithful witness to history in my Ethnic Studies and Latino & Caribbean Studies courses at Berkeley and Rutgers.

This spring I was invited to give the keynote lecture at CSU Fullerton for International Women's Day. It was in that context that I first shared publicly some of my own experiences of faithful witnessing. My goal was to show how we can take ideas from the page to better examine our lives, or better yet, to share how decolonial feminisms and women of color feminist philosophy take seriously the experiences of people on the 'underside of modernity' and make space for them to be engaged as knowledge. 

I told three anecdotes, one of which I will excerpt below, and then explained what was violent/dangerous about the encounters, who acted as a faithful witness, and why these kinds of interventions matter:

1. The first example was about the commitment to transformative justice in the face of domestic violence - an ethics that I was was aligned with as a personal politic but knew little of as a concept until I attended an incredible talk by Mia Mingus.  
2. I then discussed my experience as an Afro-Puerto Rican graduate student doing field work in Madrid and Barcelona. I shared how my body politic and Caribbean inflected Spanish was interpreted on the streets of Madrid and how one of my interviewees in Barcelona acted as a faithful witness on my behalf.  
3. The third example (excerpted below) was about my time working as a medical interpreter when I was an undergraduate. That experience underscored the reality of medical ethics and cultural competency at the intersections of community clinics, undocumented migration, and institutional/structural racism. 

--

"My job at the free clinic was to be an interpreter between the patients, mostly undocumented Mexican and Latino families, and the doctors. Like many first-generation Latinx children, I spent a lot of time as a child interpreting for my mother at the welfare office, with school officials, and between my father and the landlord of our tenement. Through those experiences I witnessed first-hand the racism, disregard, and lack of compassion that working-poor and immigrant families faced in these institutional/academic/residential spaces. My training at the clinic instructed me to interpret word-for-word the patient’s symptoms and the doctor’s directives. So for example, if the patient said “me duele el estomago,” I would tell the doctor, “my stomach hurts.”  Many mothers came to the clinic with their children and whenever they explained symptoms like headaches, faint breathing, and stomach pains, the doctor would inevitably say “they need to stop feeding the kid so many tortillas” or “limit the tortillas.” As a medical interpreter I was not allowed to interject or to clarify the directive of the doctor or offer more than a direct translation of the tortilla directive. One day a Dominican mother came to the clinic with her son, suffering from similar symptoms. The doctor listened for a minute and said “tell them that the son needs to stop eating so many tortillas.”  Now, because I was Puerto Rican I knew that tortillas were not a staple of my neighboring islanders' diets. I turned to the doctor and said, “Dr. they are Dominican, they don’t eat tortillas" but he instructed me again to translate the 'limit the tortilla message'. The boy's mother then told me to translate “we don’t eat tortillas” but within a few seconds the doctor was ready to move on. This tortilla story is somewhat funny (if you are familiar with difference amongst Latinxs) but also illuminates the kinds of structural and institutional violence that affects people of color and especially women and children which represented the majority of the patients seen in these spaces.

So, how is this violence? The medical institution was exposing families to harm by reducing their illnesses to dietary causes and by making sweeping assumptions about the cultural practices of their Latinx patients - most of which were women and children, an already vulnerable population. Who are the witnesses in this context? Due to the intimate and protected nature of medical care bilingual medical interpreters, health care advocates, and the patients themselves (perhaps child translators in tow) would be some of the few people who could bear witness to these structures of oppression. However, what is important here is not only the possibility of seeing oppression, but also the politics of how we interpret what we witness. Due to my own experience as a child translator on the one hand, and college student on the other, I recognized the difference in treatment depending on the patient's racial/ethnic/class status. What are some possible interventions? I recognize now that at 19 years-old I had a limited perspective on what I could do to help thus, I did not have a method beyond translating to the best of my ability and attempting to develop methods of circumventing the doctors' disregard by further dialoguing with the patients in small and hidden ways. In retrospect, I could have potentially reached out to other translators, clinic staff, and/or tried to access resources to bridge the divide and help build cultural competence or advocated for more Latinx doctors and staff."

--

This clinic experience was the example that most resonated with the students at CSU Fullerton, (a designated Hispanic-Serving Institution), and after my talk many of them shared similar stories. Translating was a formative experience for me as a child and became an act through which I could bear witness to, and attempt to disrupt, the disrespect and oppression that my parents faced. As a young adult in the clinic, I was witness to the kinds of oppression and lack of care these families faced and this too shaped my worldview. Now as a professor at Michigan State University, a researcher, and a writer, I have the opportunity to articulate the significance of those experiences through the philosophical concept of faithful witnessing and as part of women of color feminist ethics. We cannot afford to forget that women of color, children, and peoples on the 'underside of modernity' act as faithful witnesses against oppression. It is a tool for survival and resistance and it shapes our knowing and how we produce knowledge. 

In this way, my article on faithful witnessing was a lifetime in the making.