I’m on my way to la casa de una prima, where I have never been. Or to a house she owns or that is somehow in the family (no me queda claro). I remember my cousin from when we were kids pero we just reconnected upon the death of my mom’s tío who helped raise her. My mom will be driving there del otro lado de la Florida o más bien she will be driven there ya que my mom is Disabled and does not drive. She moved to Florida from Puerto Rico a mediados de los 1990s para hacer su Ph.D. Her dissertation fue sobre el neoestoicismo, el tiempo y la poesía y prosa del Barroco español (algo así, no puedo explicarlo bien). Mi mamá is brilliant y difícil; if she were queer, de seguro I would ask her about crip time. Pienso en ella y pienso en la frase “brilliant imperfection,” como el libro de Eli Clare, which was recommended to me by la escritora y mentora Aurora Levins Morales.[1]
As a queer Boricua living in diáspora (lxs diasporosxs, algo así como nos llamé en ese primer poema improvisado que grabé como para el 2011), Aurora’s book Kindling shook me to the core almost a decade ago y desde entonces I’ve struggled with how to respond to its beauty and rage, su fuego y su fe.[2] While Aurora is now back in the mountainous Indiera de Maricao, where she was raised, Kindling was shaped by the many years she lived and organized in the Bay Area, all the way back to the This Bridge Called My Back era (I hope to one day soon write about my own much more distant Bay Area and California history). Aurora’s epilepsy journey is central to Kindling (the title refers to a medical model of how seizures emerge) pero pienso en mi mamá as Aurora writes about impaired mobility, chronic pain, survivor trauma, and the gendered, racialized, and colonial histories that shape our Boricua bodyminds across our many differences. I gave my mom a copy of Aurora’s book (le encantó) y fue para esa fecha that she was diagnosed with epilepsy (I could have told her that years before—and I did). Ahora mi mamá y yo tomamos el mismo medicamento y almost the same dose (de una neurona las dos alas, dendrita y axón). Epilepsy linked for me our very different bodymind experiences y me acordó de por qué no volveremos permanentemente a nuestro amado Puerto Rico (neither of us), given we have the privilege of not doing so, at least as long as I can support her financially, which I do lo mejor que puedo from up here in a cold, gray Bronx, even as I depend for my survival on the very same medical complex against which I inveigh.
Ahora que ya no me queda familia cercana en Puerto Rico, Florida has become my difficult second home. I have written and improvised about walking its unwalkable geographies as an epileptic nondriver and adopted New Yorker y sencillamente como alguien que se da cuenta de lo que puede, the weirdness of the place and the increased hostility of the past decade and of an ever more naked white supremacy that accommodates some of us. Como alguien cuyas three main geographies son Puerto Rico, el Bronx y Central Florida, I am pretty much a statistical cliché, and yet here we are: mother and only child alone playing música jíbara navideña (La Calandria sobre todo) en los suburbios lejanos de la Florida sin carro y tratando de no sumirnos en la pena penita pena que nos seduce como fans de Lola Flores que somos (mi abuela aún cantaba esa canción cuando ya casi ni hablaba ni me reconocía). Por eso aprovechamos la invitación de mi prima, and I reflect on the irony of my mom leaving Puerto Rico and having to seek remedy via the colonizer state en estos lares poco floridos que no ofrecen casi nada sino doctores que solo ven Fox News, gig economy con o sin papeles y extracción de los pocos recursos que quedan (one time an anhinga flew over me as if seeking a way out from the subdivision).
El estado as in Pedro Pietri (another mentor of mine) and his archives at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, which document how he struggled for years to have his PTSD recognized, only to be told over and over again (los papeles están ahí, en el Harlem donde Pedro se crió) that after carefully evaluating his file, it was not considered disabling.[3] This was PTSD he suffered from fighting empire’s unwinnable war en Vietnam (they sent the freaks to the front, decía) and still the state said no. After countless appeals (documents submitted, specialists consulted, letters written—ni hablar de polemics and pleading, me imagino), he was finally approved in late 2003, just in time to be diagnosed with the cancer that took him from us far too young while flying back from treatment in Mexico (todo demasiado), a cancer he always linked to his exposure to Agent Orange while serving during the infamous Tet Offensive. Pedro fue quien me enseñó, en pleno Nuyorican Poets Cafe, that I should follow my own path at a time when I was trying to become more like the slam poets then in vogue, diciéndome—and I paraphrase—“We’re Puerto Rican; we’ve been improvising our poetry our way for hundreds of years—don’t let them tell you how it’s done!” It only took me over two decades, pero aquí va: pues fue en parte gracias a Pedro que empecé a improvisar y experimentar, finding my way to this hybrid of essay, criticism, poetic prose, lyric memoir, performance text y no sé qué más, todo a fuerza de cuantos bodymind rhymes I find or leave behind. Pedro en su anarquismo ético, en su mad pride, en su indomable pulsión, me anima a seguir soñando suenos soberanos desde el privilegio del tenure, dreaming other ways outside the institution and the disciplinary or disciplining silos de la academia. Todo esto me acuerda a cuando traje a Aurora a NYU y ellá leyó su hermosa versión (post-Huracán María) del “Puerto Rican Obituary,” donde el estado no nos define (no el nuestro, que no puede, y mucho menos el estado del imperio, que no quiere).
Mi volver es anarco-comunitario como el de Nicole y Amanda de La Impresora, the Risograph press that will publish some of my short poetic texts on returning. (I remember when Nicole, whom I met in New York, took my partner and me to visit Aurora up the steep, wet hills of Maricao’s Indiera, where my bisabuela was apparently from según my mom’s online sleuthing and where Nicole has roots–Nicole came back and stayed for good pero yo sueño a la mala más sueños convulsivos). At NYU, I taught Pedro’s short monologue/experimental play The Kid with the Big Head, where a Disabled veteran in his 20s (da demasiado duro todo) sits “in the waiting area of a hospital emergency room where a bizarre group of low-income people are desperately awaiting treatment.”[4] Pedro makes clear there is sadness in the piece’s satire, and indeed it is a piece about being sent to die for the state but also about imagining an alternative to a colonial necropolitics (Mbembe), a revolutopia (my term, utopian revolú al cual aspira mi escritura porque captura la fractura de mi mentecuerpa, única libertad que hallo digna, esa fractura) that keeps us alive beyond how the “recently-dead and the not-so-recently-dead were exhumed and given a complete physical at the government’s expense.”[5] Pedro’s humor breaks your heart and blows your bodymind, as in his performance with his begging can (la latita que dice “HELP ME I CAN SEE”) y su poema “Telephone Booth (number 905 1/2),” que nos acuerda que el capitalismo es la enfermedad and our bodyminds are perfect in their state of refusal (only state he’d recognize?).[6]
What could I bring to this synaptic tick that resembles an analytic sin reificar cierta medicalizing logic of “analysis”? Mejor acabar parafraseando a Sami Schalk, who reminds us that Black disability politics are not always strictly about disability and may not name themselves as such as they cannot afford (en muchos sentidos, tal vez) to do so, given the many struggles of Black bodyminds and how Blackness itself is marked through ableist power.[7] I didn’t get that right: digamos que leo a Schalk junto a Levins Morales, sobre todo cuando Schalk argumenta que articular a Black disability politics requiere abordar “histories of anti-Black violence, scientific and medical racism, health disparities, health activism, and environmental racism” y explorar “how Black people have conceptualized not only disability, illness, and disease but also health, wellness, and healing within our own communities.”[8] (Gracias a Sandra Ruiz por empujarme a leer y escribir about and from my bodymind in conversation with Schalk and others.) Pienso en “Listen, Speak” (performed for Sins Invalid 2011 with Antoine Hunter, aka Purple Fire Crow, the Black, Indigenous, Deaf, and Disabled choreographer), sobre todo al final cuando Aurora escribe: “We mark the trail for each other, put lanterns by the door, scratch our signs in the dirt, make signals with fingers in palms, sing coded freedom songs.”[9] No hay lengua en el sentido filológico y ciudadletrado de tantos latinoamericanismos, solo lo intraducible de nuestras mentecuerpas en su interdependencia como contranarrativa a la espectral dizque independencia de nuestra América (yes, the untranslatability of our bodyminds in their interdependence as counternarrative to the spectral so-called-independence of our America).
Capaz que el capacitismo muere donde nace lo intraducible is one way to put it. Another way is in the intersections between queer and Boricua (anti)eugenic histories in Justin Torres’s Blackouts (about which Zorimar Rivera Montes wrote tan perspicazmente in Intervenxions).[10] Another is Jorge Matos Valldejuli (who welcomed me and hooked so many of us up hace tantos años at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies) in his reading of Puerto Rican activist Bernard Carabello across “a complex terrain of race, class, and disability that has been largely absent from historical narratives of both disability activism and civil rights activism.”[11] Otra sería Mariposa Fernández (my now neighbor aquí in her and my partner’s native Bronx) in the queer forms of her early poems as they reckon with mental health (inseparable from a collective Diasporican bodymind).[12] Y otro más aún el flow neurodivergente/divertido/pervertido/subversivo de Roque Raquel Salas Rivera in his Trans epic Algarabía (forthcoming from Graywolf Press) dándonos vuelo y revuelo. (The only bodyminds we’re gonna be? algarabí…!) Or as in the work of Texas-based, Disabled Diasporican poet and activist Valois J. Vera (aka Crip Lyrical), cuyo Thunder & Lightning Poetry Collective me ha inspirado a (por fin) come out y no solo nombrar mis truenos y relámpagos neuro corporales sino escribir desde ellos, como los siento, para que usted, queride lectore, baile con el son de mi sinrazón y la sinrazón somática aunque sea por par de páginas (sorry, not sorry).
As someone who teaches en la intersección de los estudios latinoamericanos and U.S. Latinx Studies, aprecio all the work I teach and learn from (e.g. Antebi and Jörgensen, 2017; Minich, 2013), pero quiero hold onto la intraducibility/untranslatabilidad of Disabled Boricua bodyminds, of those of us who understand ourselves as displaced by and displacing the governing bodymind (whether raised here [Pedro, Mariposa] or que nacieron allá y volvieron [Aurora, Roque] o como sea y donde quepa yo).[13] Aquí o allá, interdependence—as disability justice activists have long argued—is key: independence as a state formation will not save us, even as we dream sovereign dreams.[14] I deepened my thinking a few years ago when I began visiting La Impresora in Isabela, el pueblo de la familia de mi abuelo. During one of those trips, conecté con familia que nunca había conocido or only known briefly as a child. I did so while walking el camino incaminable, en este caso bajo un sol febril de flamboyanes o cruzando la autopista del pueblo de Isabela al Barrio Llanadas, esquivando carros y sudando chorros hasta que el llano se volvió montaña. As I edit this, the bunion on my left toe is throbbing: el juanete flared up after my longest Isabela walk and has come and gone since then, a reminder of the somatic grammar of diasporic mindscapes. Por eso faltan letras. Porque nos hacemos falta. That’s why there are missing letters. Because we miss each other. My connection to land, al archipiélago de donde vengo, is that interdependence that sustains us from Isabela to Florida to the Bronx, esa mentecuerpa que me traiciona y me permite la libertad de un fuego que nada extingue y que se extiende (por ahora, por lo que dure), iluminando el mar neural (that neural sea) donde nace un lenguaje intraducible.
Forma de Volver. Way of Going Back.
No hay forma de volver a casa. No way of going back home. A cliché. Un lugar común. Pero por algo (for some reason) me pides que vuelva y vuelvo a la voz. You ask me if I’ll go back. Well, I’m only going where my voice is. Cuerpacerebro en fuego. Bodymind on fire. Lejos de Borikén en plenos lujos. Far from Borikén in pure luxury. Emporios de imperio. Empire’s emporia for which I have no words (para los cuales carezco de palabras). Maybe, “Fuck Zionism!” will do. Quizás con “¡Abajo el zionismo!” me dé. Quizás me doy por vencide. Maybe I give up. Become old shores I carry. Y me vuelvo esas viejas orillas con las que cargo. Familia en Isabela a quien apenas conozco pero que al fin conoczco igual. Family in Isabela I barely and even so I know I know. Ecos de ecocidio. Echoes of ecocide as fall leaves fall. Al ver caer las hojas que auguran el invierno. Y hay algo cuir en esa carencia de mi lengua que es puro exceso. And I name a queer dimension in my language’s lack which is sheer excess. My language is missing sounds. Sin algunos sonidos mi lengua. Civilización que mengua. A civilizing power wanes and a necrofreedom becomes possible. Y se vuelve possible la necroposibilidad de amar sin reproducir viejas lógicas. Loving and never reproducing worn logics. Me nombro en la epilepsia. I name myself in my epilepsy. My seizure skies. Mis cielos convulsivos. And as much as displaced from my beloved Río Piedras. En calidad de persona desplazada de mi adorado Río Piedras. Ríos neurales que nado. Neural rivers I swim. Ríos de sexo y no sexo. Rivers of sex and no sex. Sílaba ineyaculable. Un-ejaculable syllable. I know jack of my home. Me duermo en las pajas sin saber nada de mi casa. Mi ocaso Bronx. My Bronx sundown. Mi Río Piedras inalcanzable. My unreachable Río Piedras. Mi silencio pleno. My full silence. La plena de mi voz. Plena of my voice.[15]