“Yo sería borincano aunque naciera en la luna.” Y lo somos todos esta noche. En Nueva York, en Chicago, en Filadelphia, hasta en el espacio. The four of us met in cyberspace and in the meta-diaspora made of Puerto Rican poems. When the storm hit, that’s where we began to build—an immaterial way to survive the very material grief of our own survival. But with so much loss, we knew we’d have to make something we could hold—and something that could travel, and fly out from us as birds of protest against failed recovery and the policy that preceded it. We hope these handmade broadsides will participate in the vast ecosystem of care that calls our community into being.
These broadsides also elaborate a long, existing Puerto Rican tradition of printed work. Produced in studios across the diaspora—and at La Impresora, in Santurce—these broadsides testify to the necessity of collaboration and a repudiation of the American call for “self-reliance,” so often a brittle mask for colonial neglect. In what language does this body—of poems—speak? “America” brands us with citizenship and in the same strike asserts the supremacy of its own national dialect. To quote Lara Mimosa Montes, speaking it finds us: “snarling behind the barricade (because) at some point we stopped feeling (like language could say).”
The Caribbean is one of the most linguistically rich regions in the world. So many creole languages came into being in response to slavery and forced migration, only to be devalued and repressed in our lives and literatures. We cannot understand empire, especially U.S. empire, without understanding the violence of monolingualism. The decision to connect island and diaspora is also rooted in language. Poets in Puerto Rico have long gone unrecognized by poets in the mainland U.S. It’s time to end the tradition of readings with only diasporic writers. And in Puerto Rico, the literary community needs to acknowledge and welcome diasporic writers who desire to build and learn alongside Boricuas on the island.
When we decided these broadsides would have to be bilingual, we were not declaring the “equality” of English and Spanish or initiating a “cross-cultural” exchange. Ours is one culture whose bleeding edges cannot be bandaged. Ours is a tongue forked by cutting. To quote Joey de Jesus, many poems in our purview “have a mind halved / into open compendium.” To quote Yara Liceaga, “este calor me hace desdecir / así que / paladeo la distancia / con una mueca.”
In other words, many of the poems here are already bilingual before the task of translation officially begins. Or they strain against words worn out by mindless repetition. With Puerto Rico en mi corazón the task of translation has been intimate work, like helping a friend spit out her words between spasms of laughter or tears. Poets writing in English confided in me that seeing their own poems rendered in Spanish made those poems feel complete, as if translations were not doubles or supplements but animating spirits breathing back into the body.
Puerto rico en mi corazón is not, ultimately, an anthology, but a hole in our hearts through which the voices around us–and those we strain to hear–rush with astounding force. These voices make an ensemble whose chorus is yes. Although these voices are original and extraordinary, we do not stand before you as curators, if to curate is to offer a canonical narrative. Although we’ve made an effort to reach widely, this ensemble is reflective of our own connections, our own positions, and we ready ourselves for new configurations.
Of course, new configurations are only imaginable in the wake of former visions. The slogan of the Young Lords, the radical Puerto Rican liberation group, was Tengo Puerto Rico en mi corazón // I have Puerto Rico in my heart. To the untrained ear, the phrase may sound simple and sentimental, validating the notion that Puerto Ricans are a simple and sentimental people. But we see what that phrase means now. Even when no one could see us, we knew where we were at. We didn’t need a map to find ourselves.
With that we ask you to close your eyes. Darkness, with a rim of light beginning to glow at the horizon. You’re on a raft on the sea. When you dip your hand in the water the movement of the current tells you an island is near. What are you carrying with you? And when you reach the island, what will you find?
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