The Acentos Review

Statement on Being Negra 

I am worn with explanation. It is a constant; it is everywhere. I must school the island of my birth on my blackness, the why I exist. When Mami was around, all those years I was young, I would hear her give everyone the run-down, starting with where she was born and then work backwards till there was a succinct roll call of family, alive and dead, who made her into being. It is almost like the moyuba, when the santera calls out a litany of ancestor’s names during a ceremony, one after another they ring themselves to life with each mention. Except it’s not anything like that. The moyuba is honorific, prideful. It is read in the beautiful language of Yoruba and sounds like a return trip home. However, when I am tested for the heft and weight of my Boricuaness, when I bring back all of those names, it feels I am disturbing the dead from their sleep, if only to say “Look, mira! I’m real.” If only to have them respond with a chuckle in their voices, a shake of disbelief at their necks, “But, no, your father must be Americano.”

At first, I felt it was solely small talk, maybe sprinkled with a little curiosity, natural and innocent. But their eyes betray their lips and I always feel a little excised after it, like I didn’t make the cut but would never know why. Of course, there is always the first person to tell me, “ay pero si yo tengo un primo que es de tu tez. As dark as you are. Lo queremos muchisimo.” Or the common “Es negro, pero es buena gente.”  It is my first heartbreak, my first social distancing. And maybe I wouldn’t be as hurt had it not been a white man at a local Chili’s Restaurant who called me TOKEN because, in his estimation, I was the only black woman at the table. He thought my “token-ity” and his solitary whiteness were somehow in synch, in kahoots. I can’t express how pissed I was. I love being black. I love who I am and where I come from. I was also -- WTF? I’m black and Puerto Rican. I’m black Puerto Rican. No matter what formula, you build, I’m Puerto Rican. I wanted to stand up and shout it some Bette Midler tune.

But this is island and this is where I dreamt I would live. This is where I was born; and so many years later, as an adult, this is where the spirits led me. This is where my abuelita and Mami returned to die. I don’t know if I will die here. This is a difficult place be old, if you are a childless, guerrilla girl. But it is my home now. And Puerto Rico is Puerto Rico – without one definition, without one color or language. A frighteningly beautiful a line of contradictions, marked by its disasters, held together by string, occupied and at times nullified by commonwealth, but always in some shape or form unified by its passion. So, if it is, then I am too held to the island by thread, marked by storm and paradox, formed by all the preoccupations of history and spit out like a new word or a country.

No Country for an Old Woke Negra

Mujer, mouth of salt and cadmium. You did what your mother told you. You did what your bosses told you. You followed the advice of the dead. You are a body born, 52 and riding, you are a hot flash raging, child-less guerrilla girl with a bitten tongue, scratch the skin you’ll find a black Puerto Rican, to the world all kinds of wrong.

Mujer, before they dare diagnose you, go back that they don't see you, that they don't open you. Let them come only as close as the crack of a whip across your back. Be careful and bloody. When you open your legs, instead of a fibroid the heft of a jágua, there will be a history of night watches and pirates to protect. They will want to show you a short movie (your laparoscopy) of your body, black woman, show you the story of when you were a mercantile, a slaver’s wonderland, the movie of you, they will say, a black hacienda bitch. Querída, ignore the tree trunk in Canovanas. He whispers: an island doesn’t have to love you. You are too black to make anything better. The esdrujulas wonder where you came from. The sky rains only on you, the census taker avoids your house. People that love you advise to not wear white -- you don’t want to look like a cockroach in cornstarch.

Levántate, chula! Close your eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, throat, navel, mons, anus to the nonsense. Lie and sleep drunk. Lift your breasts up to the moon. Hug your middle to keep back the seas of spirit bodies, coming up on the waves like needle and thread. Nena, fly between field and night, your dawn a bone neighborhood. You are a compass. You are the axis they need to truly be home. They just don’t want to accept it.

That was the past – you are no longer a protest postponed. Firework girl. The one without enough words – call back your cursed maroons. Look at you, waltzing a bolero with yourself, walking backwards, dancing with walls. Spitting and spinning. Capitulate. Or be complaint. Be all teeth and swollen ankle. You were taught the right songs, to sing high and hallelujah. Call them up, girl. Say that Spanglish! You are finally loved, almost as much as property. As much as a tunnel to a scream. As much as a door to a waving hand.

The Rumor 

In El Viejo San Juan
A shopkeeper heaves with the rumor
His mouth full of its sweetwater 

Bochinchero eyes raised, he murmurs
To tourists new on the island
            All the Dark people live in Loiza –
            You will find them nestled
            Like sleepy black beetles under rocks,
            A termites’ trail, they line barrio walls
            Faces fired by sunlight, bodies ready like spears 

He chatter boxes like an old woman
Forehead pasty as pork rind
About Loiza’s blue people
The color of a puta’s toenails, shades of wounds of bruises – 

Oh, the storeowner is absolutely bubbling over,
A singing pot of black beans
On and on about Borinquen’s dark downtrodden
How their dance scorches cane fields
How their dead carry the Devil’s lanterns
How his father’s bones know the hard plena jigs of their feet 

Wide-eyed as a minstrel
The shopkeep whispers seductively
To Norwegians really just on their way to the Bahamas
Bending into their ignorance like bamboo 

Phosporous by night, litter by day
You should go see them in their habitat
            Go see how brightly they shine,
He breathes hotly, pirate lips pursed,
Sweaty with the import of a conquistador’s dream,
A brittle bread broken and shared
With the first white face he sees.

Transient

God who was born to be a mechanic in Santurce, God who learned to draw in the JV detention center, God who took a summer workshop in color theory, God who spent a winter at his uncle’s in Brooklyn, hustling cigarettes and lottery tickets to tourists, God who soon saved enough to make it to Japan. God who studied under the great Tebori master in Kyoto, who chastised him for being unshaven. God, who had to learn to hold his tongue when master rapped his knuckles after the boy held the bamboo like "a frog eating rice with a spoon". God learning the old ways, way before tattoos were cool, before even sailors and the women they called whores showed them off under the precinct’s streetlights, God learning the lineages of a tattoo, when it was blood, when it was death and life in one. And this was the same God who moved to Berlin, dropped his mother’s last name, grew his hair out and slept with girls he met at the market where he sold charcoal and pastels. They tried to read his markings, tracing their mouths against the corpuscular hieroglyphics drawn along his blue skin. And it was the same God who, after burying his mother in the sky, opened a small studio on the edge of Montmartre, in those days when you could afford it, but he was older then and could survive off his love affair with bread. Later, when love left him wanting, there was poetry and body painting in Provincetown, but a boy's war and a warrant sent God flying back to hurricane alleys, a third floor balcony on la Calle Luna overlooking the fort and its salt militants, where now he leans to see, where his hand grows shaky and the colors aren't as brilliant as before.