I AM REVOLUTION...TAINO SOY! by Axel Garcia

From a poetic exchange on the Indigenous Caribbean Network, reproduced with the permission of the author, Axel Garcia

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I am revolution.....Being born "Spic" in an alabaster complexion.

My Grandfather couldn't see beyond my green eyes, so it was my skin I grew to despise. But "Papi", hold me, speak to me, tell me about "La Isla" with its swaying palm trees. Tell me bout Don Pedro, sing to me Ramito, dime de los esclavos.

Cause I, Papa, have been searching an eternity of years it seems, to understand the visions in my dreams; of a Taino reaching out his arms, trying to warn me of the harms....That Amerikkka and its democracy, will blind us with its glorious "Land of the free" ....

What price did you pay, Papa, if at my hue, the whiteness of my being, tu rechasa?

I am the victim of "O beautiful with gracious skies", while another of my kind dies! But don't put that on the radio or the TV, there is no room between the weather forecast, the Mets and the Yankees....

You see I am the revolution, as each day I fight, when in the mirror my enemy stares back with might. And yes Papa, I've scarred my skin with my flag tattooed again and again, so when the day comes of the concrete revolution, my "pale" body will lie next to all my fellow Puerto Ricans!!!

And Abuelo, when you see me again, I will be covered in the souls of my Indians....

POR QUE TAINO SOY!!!!

Mami & Papi: This is Not a Puerto Rican Obituary, by tainoray

From a poetic exchange on the Indigenous Caribbean Network, reproduced with the permission of the author, tainoray:

MAMI & PAPI

For many of us Puerto Ricans our parents' childhood was very poor.

Boriken to them was hunger.

Access to a proper education was difficult.

They didn't come to America for a vacation, they came for a better way of life.

When they came here a lot of cheap jobs were waiting for them.

They worked the kitchens, swept the floors, served the food

Sound familiar???

They worked 40 hours for 20 hours pay if they were lucky

"Mucho trabajo, poco dinero," they said

They lived in rat and roach infested buildings but at least they had a roof over their head

Food in their bellies

They played the numbers looking for that pie in the sky

When they came hear nobody ever heard of Puerto Rico

They called them Spics, Wetbacks

They whistled at our mothers they new they were fine

They tried to beat up our fathers until they learned they could fight

They never complained

They never went anywhere

They told us to go to school and become somebody

They took us to the Villas and the Puerto Rican Day Parade

They kicked the St. Patricks Parade to the curb

They fed us rice and beans, pasteles & lechon on Holidays

All that good stuff

And to La Iglesia on sundays

They taught us their culture

They came home tired

We inherited the slums, many paid the price

But we are still here

I'm just trying to tell their story with this soliloquy

God bless them

This is not a Puerto Rican Obituary

Restoration: More Indigenous than the Ancestors, in the Poet's Eye

I was struck by this passage from Derek Walcott's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. I had read this at the time it was released and had forgotten this passage until I accidentally found it again in the last few weeks.

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.

The love that goes into restoration is even stronger than the love which took reality for granted. In the vision of the poet, what some have called the "Taino restoration" brings us face to face with people who are more firmly committed, attentive, and protective of indigenous heritage than even the ancestors that they take care to respect -- what a refreshing difference from scornful remarks about the "neo-Taino" as mere "wannabes" who are not "real," not "real" like "real Indians of the past." I take it that "white scars" can have multiple meanings here: a direct reference to glue, thus of binding, and healing; the sea, uniting Caribbean islands, these fragments of the mainland; and/or, the history of colonialism, white domination, that wrought the breakage to begin with. And finally the poem places the Antilles within a South American embrace, now bringing together the poet with the archaeologist while reminding a region of a history that is too often forgotten, willfully even.

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Rosa

[a poem submitted in connection with the Trinidad Caribs' Santa Rosa Festival. Written by an anonymous Trinidadian author, submitted for use only on this site. Reproduction is not currently permitted.]

Cloaked as she stands
In the stony habit of subjugation,
Saint or cultural shape shifter,
She waits only for the child.

This heart is neither meek nor mild
And that frozen mask of piety
Barely conceals the roucoued face
That stains her robes to flagrant pink.

Such are the small victories,
The toeholds that we must employ
To scale the brazen and impassive face
of ongoing ethnocide.

While roughshod over us they still ride
This infant, this ark of our kind
We will protect and hide
This same child who believed in us
Long after we had been converted
To disbelieving ourselves.

So into this hushed sanctum we will glide
Year after year,
To lift our blazing bouquets against the gloom.
Even under the patronizing smiles
we will slide,
to bring to our bride her infant groom,
To place the baby in her waiting arms.

Rosa lets them sing their psalms
But when the child rests smiling against her breast
The only song to give him rest
Will be her Carib lullaby.