Bombazo! (from Kindling: Writings On the Body)
by Aurora Levins Morales, 2012
Ponce, 1881. Controlling women’s bodies is the key to the gate, the beams under the floor, the roof on the house of race and inheritance, and dark women’s bodies are the fence posts on the boundaries of power. On one side of the fence there is honor and virtue, which means white women who only give it up for the one man they have a contract with, before family, God and law, and the white men who hold the deeds to them. On that side of the line, decent isn’t about how you treat people, it’s about whose fingers go where. Controlled women make everyone respectable.
But to have decent, honorable, white, you have to have indecent, scandalous, Black—something to be the opposite of. To keep a tight hold on White in a Caribbean nation full of mestizaje, where it doesn’t take but a minute to mix the red wine blood of a straying Mallorquina or a pale criolla kept out of the sun just to be safe, with the burnt sugar amber fire of a seventh generation barrio Mandinka, or put green eyes from Galicia on the brown baby of la negra Malén, you can’t just rely on the color of skin. People have to act white; there has to be a whole list of white ways to act, which means you have to have an opposite list of Black ways to act and not act that way.
High up on the list of how a woman can act white is to never walk alone, talk loud, or go out without a chaperone, to dance with decorum and keep her skirt down and her shirtwaist buttoned. The dark people who get rewarded for acting white are mostly men, and no matter what they look like, most poor women in the cities and coastal towns act Black. They talk back, they don’t obey, they walk all over the place, and what they dance is not European. A woman who “acts Black” is an uppity woman and an uppity woman is a loose woman, immoral, scandalous, without shame, because every slaveholder’s grandson knows that dark women are just like that. You could be the best behaved dark skinned girl in the barrio, but no white man will believe it. You could be a moon white jíbara girl just down from the hills, but if you go to the bomba dance you just got five shades darker. Let me hear you say Bomba!
White men loyally supporting the power of the Spanish Crown, white men daringly and eloquently calling for autonomy, mulato artisans arguing for their own citizenship in these changing times, sober working men of all colors, and ardent white feminists demanding to go to school all agree: unruly scandalous disrespectful streetwalking bomba dancing out of control dark skinned women who don’t know their place have got to be dealt with for civilization to march into the coming century. Time to start rounding up the women. Bomba!
Its been twenty years since abolition, and now dark women fill the streets of Ponce, working for themselves. Market women, laundresses, seamstresses, the coins they earn go into their own pockets. They rent houses together. They talk loudly in the streets.
And if wrongful power still stinks up the air they breathe, these days they can breathe a whole lot more of it. At night the hardworking women of Ponce pool their money and hire coaches. They go in laughing groups to taverns where they drink and flirt. They sing and strut and call out teasing verses, clap their hands and then they all shout Bomba!
1894. A woman you can’t control is a prostitute. No proof needed. If you are a suspect you have to register. Things for which you can become a suspect: Talking back to a shopkeeper. Being outdoors at night. Having a man in your house. Unseemly dancing. Most of the women accused of prostitution are dark. You know why.
OK, lets’ get something straight right now. It was a time of ruined crops and failing markets, of women drifting into the towns from countrysides of hunger, when poor folks lived in piles of sticks and mud and palm thatch that rotted in the rains, and every mouthful counted, every loaf of bread, every half pound of beans. The ones who had work, who had a pretty dress and ate enough, and whose children had something to wear, all knew how much worse it could get, so don’t get all shocked.
Of course women traded sex for food. We always have. Sex for food, sex for shelter, sex for clothing against the cold, and even in Ponce, when it’s raining and it’s nighttime and your walls are made of sticks, it gets cold. The ladies did it for life and the women of the barrios temped, and mostly it was just one of the dozen things they did to hold things together and feed their kids: wash the señora’s sheets, make dulce de coco to sell in the plaza, sew dresses, hem pants, and lie down for men.
Sometimes there was a man with a bit of money, a blanquito or a well paid craftsman who wanted a mistress, and that was better than marrying because there was not even the dream of divorce, and he might set her up in a house, pay the bills for a while, give her something for the children they made and she raised. So I’m not saying that some of the women who got hauled in and humiliated, pass-booked and segregated didn’t trade bootie for cash. If you think it’s indecent, so’s making toxic sneakers for pennies in a sweatshop, stitching cheap t shirts in a high death rate maquiladora, or having to serve styrofoam wrapped carcinogenic fast food to children for minimum wage. Talk about obscene. Everybody shout Bomba!
Meanwhile back in Ponce it’s 1895. Arrests are up and more and more of the arrested end up in jail. Anything a woman does that draws attention to herself is grounds for suspicion: walking by herself, dancing with a registered woman, leaving her parents’ house after dark. Dancing in an African way. Any man can denounce a woman as having a venereal disease and that’s that. Rejected lovers, angry boyfriends, resentful neighbors, people with grudges—anyone can accuse her and there is no trial. Her name goes on a list and now she has to carry a passbook. Maybe she’s forced to move to a different part of town, away from the big houses.
The people with power are obsessed with the idea that she is infectious, that something about her will sneak into their houses and destroy the foundations of their lives. It isn’t really VD but they say it’s VD. So every two weeks registered women have to come to the station and have a public pelvic exam. Yes, you heard me right. The public hygiene doctors make them lie down on a table, in front of the policemen and any spectators who happen to have wandered by, spread their legs and have unsterilized metal instruments shoved into their bodies while all these men stand around and watch. If it turns out some guy did give them syphilis or gonorrhea they lock them up in a special hospital with spiked fences, bars on the windows, rotten food and violent guards, and since hospitals are not jails, they don’t have to set any date for release. Don’t think the poor women of Ponce surrendered. They forged passbooks, denounced men who didn’t pay what they promised, shouted insults at the guards from the windows of the hospital, made ropes out of sheets and climbed out, and every chance they got, they danced. Bomba!
Now the authorities start cracking down on bomba dancing, which they call bailes de prostitutas, shutting them down every chance they get, because let me tell you, if the men’s hands rising and falling on the taut heads of the drums, surrendering to no one, raising up a beat full of the spirits of slave revolts, reminding them of Cuba’s Black general Maceo who right that moment is riding across sugar fields leading a multitude of dark men with machetes in hand, if the flying hands of the men scare them—it’s the women’s hips that terrify them into a cold sweat panic, those white skirts hiked up to show ankles, legs, even a glimpse of thighs that belong to no one, unlicensed willful women, imitating hens in heat, shaking their backsides at the drummers, because if women like this belong to nobody, if no one can make them fold their hands in their laps, if they can be possessed of their own selves like that, then anything can happen, and maybe some people think it’s the drummers who matter most, but it’s the uncontrolled fire of brown women’s bodies that shakes the ground beneath the feet of church and state.
But to have decent, honorable, white, you have to have indecent, scandalous, Black—something to be the opposite of. To keep a tight hold on White in a Caribbean nation full of mestizaje, where it doesn’t take but a minute to mix the red wine blood of a straying Mallorquina or a pale criolla kept out of the sun just to be safe, with the burnt sugar amber fire of a seventh generation barrio Mandinka, or put green eyes from Galicia on the brown baby of la negra Malén, you can’t just rely on the color of skin. People have to act white; there has to be a whole list of white ways to act, which means you have to have an opposite list of Black ways to act and not act that way.
High up on the list of how a woman can act white is to never walk alone, talk loud, or go out without a chaperone, to dance with decorum and keep her skirt down and her shirtwaist buttoned. The dark people who get rewarded for acting white are mostly men, and no matter what they look like, most poor women in the cities and coastal towns act Black. They talk back, they don’t obey, they walk all over the place, and what they dance is not European. A woman who “acts Black” is an uppity woman and an uppity woman is a loose woman, immoral, scandalous, without shame, because every slaveholder’s grandson knows that dark women are just like that. You could be the best behaved dark skinned girl in the barrio, but no white man will believe it. You could be a moon white jíbara girl just down from the hills, but if you go to the bomba dance you just got five shades darker. Let me hear you say Bomba!
White men loyally supporting the power of the Spanish Crown, white men daringly and eloquently calling for autonomy, mulato artisans arguing for their own citizenship in these changing times, sober working men of all colors, and ardent white feminists demanding to go to school all agree: unruly scandalous disrespectful streetwalking bomba dancing out of control dark skinned women who don’t know their place have got to be dealt with for civilization to march into the coming century. Time to start rounding up the women. Bomba!
Its been twenty years since abolition, and now dark women fill the streets of Ponce, working for themselves. Market women, laundresses, seamstresses, the coins they earn go into their own pockets. They rent houses together. They talk loudly in the streets.
And if wrongful power still stinks up the air they breathe, these days they can breathe a whole lot more of it. At night the hardworking women of Ponce pool their money and hire coaches. They go in laughing groups to taverns where they drink and flirt. They sing and strut and call out teasing verses, clap their hands and then they all shout Bomba!
1894. A woman you can’t control is a prostitute. No proof needed. If you are a suspect you have to register. Things for which you can become a suspect: Talking back to a shopkeeper. Being outdoors at night. Having a man in your house. Unseemly dancing. Most of the women accused of prostitution are dark. You know why.
OK, lets’ get something straight right now. It was a time of ruined crops and failing markets, of women drifting into the towns from countrysides of hunger, when poor folks lived in piles of sticks and mud and palm thatch that rotted in the rains, and every mouthful counted, every loaf of bread, every half pound of beans. The ones who had work, who had a pretty dress and ate enough, and whose children had something to wear, all knew how much worse it could get, so don’t get all shocked.
Of course women traded sex for food. We always have. Sex for food, sex for shelter, sex for clothing against the cold, and even in Ponce, when it’s raining and it’s nighttime and your walls are made of sticks, it gets cold. The ladies did it for life and the women of the barrios temped, and mostly it was just one of the dozen things they did to hold things together and feed their kids: wash the señora’s sheets, make dulce de coco to sell in the plaza, sew dresses, hem pants, and lie down for men.
Sometimes there was a man with a bit of money, a blanquito or a well paid craftsman who wanted a mistress, and that was better than marrying because there was not even the dream of divorce, and he might set her up in a house, pay the bills for a while, give her something for the children they made and she raised. So I’m not saying that some of the women who got hauled in and humiliated, pass-booked and segregated didn’t trade bootie for cash. If you think it’s indecent, so’s making toxic sneakers for pennies in a sweatshop, stitching cheap t shirts in a high death rate maquiladora, or having to serve styrofoam wrapped carcinogenic fast food to children for minimum wage. Talk about obscene. Everybody shout Bomba!
Meanwhile back in Ponce it’s 1895. Arrests are up and more and more of the arrested end up in jail. Anything a woman does that draws attention to herself is grounds for suspicion: walking by herself, dancing with a registered woman, leaving her parents’ house after dark. Dancing in an African way. Any man can denounce a woman as having a venereal disease and that’s that. Rejected lovers, angry boyfriends, resentful neighbors, people with grudges—anyone can accuse her and there is no trial. Her name goes on a list and now she has to carry a passbook. Maybe she’s forced to move to a different part of town, away from the big houses.
The people with power are obsessed with the idea that she is infectious, that something about her will sneak into their houses and destroy the foundations of their lives. It isn’t really VD but they say it’s VD. So every two weeks registered women have to come to the station and have a public pelvic exam. Yes, you heard me right. The public hygiene doctors make them lie down on a table, in front of the policemen and any spectators who happen to have wandered by, spread their legs and have unsterilized metal instruments shoved into their bodies while all these men stand around and watch. If it turns out some guy did give them syphilis or gonorrhea they lock them up in a special hospital with spiked fences, bars on the windows, rotten food and violent guards, and since hospitals are not jails, they don’t have to set any date for release. Don’t think the poor women of Ponce surrendered. They forged passbooks, denounced men who didn’t pay what they promised, shouted insults at the guards from the windows of the hospital, made ropes out of sheets and climbed out, and every chance they got, they danced. Bomba!
Now the authorities start cracking down on bomba dancing, which they call bailes de prostitutas, shutting them down every chance they get, because let me tell you, if the men’s hands rising and falling on the taut heads of the drums, surrendering to no one, raising up a beat full of the spirits of slave revolts, reminding them of Cuba’s Black general Maceo who right that moment is riding across sugar fields leading a multitude of dark men with machetes in hand, if the flying hands of the men scare them—it’s the women’s hips that terrify them into a cold sweat panic, those white skirts hiked up to show ankles, legs, even a glimpse of thighs that belong to no one, unlicensed willful women, imitating hens in heat, shaking their backsides at the drummers, because if women like this belong to nobody, if no one can make them fold their hands in their laps, if they can be possessed of their own selves like that, then anything can happen, and maybe some people think it’s the drummers who matter most, but it’s the uncontrolled fire of brown women’s bodies that shakes the ground beneath the feet of church and state.
Bombazo! by Aurora Levins Morales is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
chicken house goat girls
We were the only girls who wore pants, she said, sitting across the orange plastic table at a fast food joint in Brooklyn, forty years after we said goodbye on a rainy morning in late spring in the cordillera of our hearts. Now we live in cities but we both dream in unfurling fern leaves under the shade of towering pomarosas. We still have red clay mud in our bellies, in our pores, in every cell. What we are made of: mud, pomarosa, cold spring water.
Among all the skirted girls of the barrio, among all the women in their flowered cotton dresses worn thin from pounding on river rocks, among all the women and girls sitting on porches shelling beans at dusk, I answer, we were the only ones who climbed trees, guamá, guayaba, flamboyán, pino, the only girls with skinned knees and burrs in our hair, with dirt under our nails, the only girls who let the dogs sniff our crotches and laughed. No seas cabra, the neighbor women would snap, and their daughters would settle back onto the porches and smooth their skirts down, waiting to be called on. You and I, we bucked and skipped and played with boys, and ran shouting through the dusk among the fireflies.
La vieja told me her Taino grandmother was caught stealing food on the hacienda, decked only in her long black hair, was hunted with dogs, locked in a room, forced into a dress and a marriage. The rest of her life they called her La Tormenta because she would as soon smack a man across the face with a dried salt cod as look at him. But she taught her granddaughter how to make the birthing mats, where to dig for the best roots, how to keep her own name in a secret place under her tongue, at the back of her knees, a dark pool of knowing.
We would steal fruit from fenced-in trees, run from dogs, take off our clothes, throw rocks at our enemies. We had our own rebellions.
Do you remember the chicken house? she asks and I think the smell of fertilizer, sacks of it piled in the back, old broken furniture, hoes and rakes, an outgrown tricycle. Of course I do. Her skinny little hips, lying back on a bag of clothes, the cement floor, sunbeams full of dust motes, the hummingbirds in the bushes, the lizards skittering up the walls, thickets of ginger standing guard, and two girls with Taino eyes, our hair full of twigs, dirt under our nails, laughing as we sniffed, our scabbed knees parted, digging for roots.
© 2010 Aurora Levins Morales. All rights reserved.
Among all the skirted girls of the barrio, among all the women in their flowered cotton dresses worn thin from pounding on river rocks, among all the women and girls sitting on porches shelling beans at dusk, I answer, we were the only ones who climbed trees, guamá, guayaba, flamboyán, pino, the only girls with skinned knees and burrs in our hair, with dirt under our nails, the only girls who let the dogs sniff our crotches and laughed. No seas cabra, the neighbor women would snap, and their daughters would settle back onto the porches and smooth their skirts down, waiting to be called on. You and I, we bucked and skipped and played with boys, and ran shouting through the dusk among the fireflies.
La vieja told me her Taino grandmother was caught stealing food on the hacienda, decked only in her long black hair, was hunted with dogs, locked in a room, forced into a dress and a marriage. The rest of her life they called her La Tormenta because she would as soon smack a man across the face with a dried salt cod as look at him. But she taught her granddaughter how to make the birthing mats, where to dig for the best roots, how to keep her own name in a secret place under her tongue, at the back of her knees, a dark pool of knowing.
We would steal fruit from fenced-in trees, run from dogs, take off our clothes, throw rocks at our enemies. We had our own rebellions.
Do you remember the chicken house? she asks and I think the smell of fertilizer, sacks of it piled in the back, old broken furniture, hoes and rakes, an outgrown tricycle. Of course I do. Her skinny little hips, lying back on a bag of clothes, the cement floor, sunbeams full of dust motes, the hummingbirds in the bushes, the lizards skittering up the walls, thickets of ginger standing guard, and two girls with Taino eyes, our hair full of twigs, dirt under our nails, laughing as we sniffed, our scabbed knees parted, digging for roots.
© 2010 Aurora Levins Morales. All rights reserved.
Imagine This
Imagine you live in a country that has broken free from five centuries of being ruled by others, where the mansions and country clubs have been turned into schools, hospitals, research centers, a country run, at last, for the people who live there. A place where, in the rich soil of solidarity, of all being in it together, creativity flourishes and solutions are found, because in your country you have the will, and you have each other. Imagine loving this country with all your heart, no matter how much you complain about having to stand in lines.
Imagine this beloved country is under endless attack by ex-masters from the colonial days. Imagine they try to cut you off from food, medicine,fuel, tools--that anything they can do to make you suffer for the insolence of declaring your independence, they do. Imagine your country is barricaded, blocked, besieged to keep you from exporting your most dangerous product to the poor people of the continent: hope. Imagine your poets sing that what burns with its own light cannot be extinguished, that it shines into the darkness of other shores.
Imagine every embezzling politician, every death squad commander, every coup-plotting colonel, every kingpin, every latifundista and monopolista on the continent knows this, every agent of foreign interests with contracts for mineral rights, every CIA trained diplomat with shares in the privatization of absolutely everything knows this, and desperately wants to extinguish that light.
Imagine that any day of the week your country is assaulted by gangs of dispossessed thugs from your nation's prehistory, yesterday's crime lords and opportunists, furious at no longer being able to rake it in, who set up camp in the ex-masters' patio where they are always amply supplied with cash, weapons and advice. Imagine they bomb your hotels, drop epidemics from the sky, blow up your airplanes. Imagine they murder young teachers who go out into the countryside to give the alphabet to those who grew up too poor to read. Imagine them dreaming of the day they can take back the family estates, and make your children shine their shoes for the price of a piece of bread. Imagine that independence, in this time and place, means daily danger.
Imagine your brother, your lover, your cousin, your neighbor, your best friend, who love you, and love the possibilities of this country, risk their lives and their happiness, leave their land and go infiltrate this criminal gang, to find out what's being planned and prevent harm, to stop them. Because the government of the ex-masters won't do it, although these thugs break every law in the book and boast of it strolling down Main Street. Imagine these five men scrupulously pass on what they learn to the ex-master government as well as their own, even though they know the thugs will continue to be armed, funded and exonerated by their hosts.
Imagine that these brave, well-loved men are seized, put in prison, deprived of daylight, confined to solitary for months on end in violation of regulations and decency, and accused of treachery, of spying on the nation, of endangering the security of an empire. Imagine them tried by the closest associates of the very people they tried to stop from killing you. Imagine day after day the court denies them any semblance of a just trial, inflicting punishments, refusing hearings, dismissing evidence, doing what they set out to do from the start without regard to what's true. Imagine them denied the right to be visited by their wives, by their children growing up without them.
Imagine your brother, your lover, your cousin, your neighbor, your best friend, whose only crime was trying to protect you from ruthless people, who did nothing but gather information about real terrorists who randomly murder civilians because they want to be kings again. Imagine them sitting in the dark for a year at a time. Imagine them singing to themselves in the dark remembering the sunlight on your face and all the people who can read now and go to doctors and study as much as they want.
Imagine there is no visa that will take you to the room where you can place your hand on one side of the glass matching finger to finger the hands of these men on the other, so you paint their faces on every wall and demand of the world that they be freed, work day and night to get them back. Years pass and the parents grow old and die, the children grow up and go to college, the landscape changes without them, but you don't stop. You name them every day, on every corner, and you call out to people everywhere in the world to name them and argue for them and work to get them back.
Now imagine what it means when in the very heart of that country that has stolen these men you love, the people who live there stand in front of those prisons in your place. Imagine people in this foreign land, where your heroes sleep behind bars, stand up and speak their names, collect money for their lawyers, write letters, make statements, write articles, shout at their own government, go on television and radio, hand out leaflets, do internet campaigns, tell this story, insist they must be released.
There is no visa that will take you to them, but there is a love that flows from these people standing at the gates, that seeps under the locked doors and down harshly lit corridors and reaches them, breathing of freedom. You have not yet won them the freedom of an open door and a street of smiling neighbors and their own land under their feet, but you know that there is another freedom no jailer can keep from them. You know that the courage of their hearts, the clarity of their minds, their uncrushed spirits in the face of a seemingly endless injustice are nourished by these voices outside the walls, magnified and passed from hand to hand. The rallies, the benefits, the posters, the songs, each act matters.
Everything you imagined is real. The five beloved men are named Gerardo, René, Ramon, Antonio and Fernando. You are the person living in the heart of that nation. You are the one that can stand before the gates. There is a reason the rulers of your state want these five men broken. They want the light extinguished. They want hope hidden from view. They do not want people dreaming about taking their countries into their own hands. When you stand at the gates of the prison where these men are locked away, you stand at the door of your own cell. Come, put your hand up to the bullet proof glass. Match your fingers to their fingers. Match dreams. Watch what grows between your hands. It burns with its own light.
This work is copyrighted, and licensed under the Creative Commons. It may be quoted, published in newsletters and on websites, performed live and recorded anywhere on earth in support of the Cuban Five as long as the author’s name, url and this notice are included. For all other rights, contact the author.
Imagine this beloved country is under endless attack by ex-masters from the colonial days. Imagine they try to cut you off from food, medicine,fuel, tools--that anything they can do to make you suffer for the insolence of declaring your independence, they do. Imagine your country is barricaded, blocked, besieged to keep you from exporting your most dangerous product to the poor people of the continent: hope. Imagine your poets sing that what burns with its own light cannot be extinguished, that it shines into the darkness of other shores.
Imagine every embezzling politician, every death squad commander, every coup-plotting colonel, every kingpin, every latifundista and monopolista on the continent knows this, every agent of foreign interests with contracts for mineral rights, every CIA trained diplomat with shares in the privatization of absolutely everything knows this, and desperately wants to extinguish that light.
Imagine that any day of the week your country is assaulted by gangs of dispossessed thugs from your nation's prehistory, yesterday's crime lords and opportunists, furious at no longer being able to rake it in, who set up camp in the ex-masters' patio where they are always amply supplied with cash, weapons and advice. Imagine they bomb your hotels, drop epidemics from the sky, blow up your airplanes. Imagine they murder young teachers who go out into the countryside to give the alphabet to those who grew up too poor to read. Imagine them dreaming of the day they can take back the family estates, and make your children shine their shoes for the price of a piece of bread. Imagine that independence, in this time and place, means daily danger.
Imagine your brother, your lover, your cousin, your neighbor, your best friend, who love you, and love the possibilities of this country, risk their lives and their happiness, leave their land and go infiltrate this criminal gang, to find out what's being planned and prevent harm, to stop them. Because the government of the ex-masters won't do it, although these thugs break every law in the book and boast of it strolling down Main Street. Imagine these five men scrupulously pass on what they learn to the ex-master government as well as their own, even though they know the thugs will continue to be armed, funded and exonerated by their hosts.
Imagine that these brave, well-loved men are seized, put in prison, deprived of daylight, confined to solitary for months on end in violation of regulations and decency, and accused of treachery, of spying on the nation, of endangering the security of an empire. Imagine them tried by the closest associates of the very people they tried to stop from killing you. Imagine day after day the court denies them any semblance of a just trial, inflicting punishments, refusing hearings, dismissing evidence, doing what they set out to do from the start without regard to what's true. Imagine them denied the right to be visited by their wives, by their children growing up without them.
Imagine your brother, your lover, your cousin, your neighbor, your best friend, whose only crime was trying to protect you from ruthless people, who did nothing but gather information about real terrorists who randomly murder civilians because they want to be kings again. Imagine them sitting in the dark for a year at a time. Imagine them singing to themselves in the dark remembering the sunlight on your face and all the people who can read now and go to doctors and study as much as they want.
Imagine there is no visa that will take you to the room where you can place your hand on one side of the glass matching finger to finger the hands of these men on the other, so you paint their faces on every wall and demand of the world that they be freed, work day and night to get them back. Years pass and the parents grow old and die, the children grow up and go to college, the landscape changes without them, but you don't stop. You name them every day, on every corner, and you call out to people everywhere in the world to name them and argue for them and work to get them back.
Now imagine what it means when in the very heart of that country that has stolen these men you love, the people who live there stand in front of those prisons in your place. Imagine people in this foreign land, where your heroes sleep behind bars, stand up and speak their names, collect money for their lawyers, write letters, make statements, write articles, shout at their own government, go on television and radio, hand out leaflets, do internet campaigns, tell this story, insist they must be released.
There is no visa that will take you to them, but there is a love that flows from these people standing at the gates, that seeps under the locked doors and down harshly lit corridors and reaches them, breathing of freedom. You have not yet won them the freedom of an open door and a street of smiling neighbors and their own land under their feet, but you know that there is another freedom no jailer can keep from them. You know that the courage of their hearts, the clarity of their minds, their uncrushed spirits in the face of a seemingly endless injustice are nourished by these voices outside the walls, magnified and passed from hand to hand. The rallies, the benefits, the posters, the songs, each act matters.
Everything you imagined is real. The five beloved men are named Gerardo, René, Ramon, Antonio and Fernando. You are the person living in the heart of that nation. You are the one that can stand before the gates. There is a reason the rulers of your state want these five men broken. They want the light extinguished. They want hope hidden from view. They do not want people dreaming about taking their countries into their own hands. When you stand at the gates of the prison where these men are locked away, you stand at the door of your own cell. Come, put your hand up to the bullet proof glass. Match your fingers to their fingers. Match dreams. Watch what grows between your hands. It burns with its own light.
This work is copyrighted, and licensed under the Creative Commons. It may be quoted, published in newsletters and on websites, performed live and recorded anywhere on earth in support of the Cuban Five as long as the author’s name, url and this notice are included. For all other rights, contact the author.
Imagine This by Aurora Levins Morales is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.auroralevinsmorales.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.auroralevinsmorales.com.
My dance "Stroke," for Sins Invalid, 2011. Photo © 2011 Richard Downing
Stroke (Text of my dance performance for Sins Invalid 2011)
stroke
stroke
stroke
when it happened the right side of my body disappeared from the map
left only tangled lines. Everything dragged down towards earth
except for my pinkie that curled up and out like a twig.
when it happened my foot was pierced with fire, but cold and swollen
as waterlogged wood. my skin couldn’t bear the weight of my sheets.
touch made me scream and weep.
when it happened my hand was scalded, wracked with spasms,
a dense slab of pain. Five fingers set adrift from my brain
couldn’t cup, grip, press, pinch.
therapy began with holding my right foot in my left hand and squeezing
so it would know where it was. so the crazy screaming nerves would
calm down and remember to be foot.
Therapy was holding my runaway fingers together
reuniting the pinkie with the ring finger, teaching them to be hand.
Therapy was stepping on needles, on burning asphalt, on
glaciers. Ten steps. Fifteen. Try again.
start rubbing the skin with silk, they said,
with wool
with terry cloth
put sandpaper on the toilet seat.
apply texture to the hypersensitive and the dulled.
the arm, the hand, the leg, the foot, the face
no one asked, no one ever asked
about inner skin
about silk and touch and stiff
uno dos tres cuatro cinco
all summer at the gym in Havana
all day every day step, step, step
up down open close
my hand clenching, spreading, uncurling
my foot stepping, bending, arching
walking
strongly
on the earth
but no one asked, no one ever asked
do you feel this?
the injured brain forgets the places it’s lost connection with
blank spaces in the atlas, unexplored oceans
find your missing continents, they said
grasp with your hand, put weight on your foot, touch your face
use it or lose it
but no one asked
do you feel this?
or this?
no one said,
pleasure is a lost continent
touch yourself with silk
how is your clitoris today?
use it or lose it.
stroke, stroke, stroke
No one helps me.
I explore the dry places and the wetlands.
Struggle to clench and release muscles that forgot how.
Rub dry sticks trying to raise a spark.
open, close, open, close
tracing the tips of nerves that have been sleeping
hoping they will wake up and remember to be delicious
The hand that dives in is still thick as a novacained cheek.
It cramps on the vibrator.
How do I tell which is numb,
the slick, ridged wall or the finger.
clench and release, clench and release
breath takes me down
breath is a bridge across numbness
closing gaps in the circuits
streaming past burnt neurons
chi dancing naked in the dead places
becomes my instructor
exercise imagination she murmurs,
remember
wet tongue, long finger, velvet cock
breathe them into bound muscle
conjure sensation out of thin air
the imprint of memory
begins restoring the coastline of pleasure
mirages shimmer in the air, forgotten peaks
floating above flesh
breathe them in
breathe them out
become what I have lost
until nothing is missing
stroke
stroke
stroke
stroke
stroke
stroke
stroke
when it happened the right side of my body disappeared from the map
left only tangled lines. Everything dragged down towards earth
except for my pinkie that curled up and out like a twig.
when it happened my foot was pierced with fire, but cold and swollen
as waterlogged wood. my skin couldn’t bear the weight of my sheets.
touch made me scream and weep.
when it happened my hand was scalded, wracked with spasms,
a dense slab of pain. Five fingers set adrift from my brain
couldn’t cup, grip, press, pinch.
therapy began with holding my right foot in my left hand and squeezing
so it would know where it was. so the crazy screaming nerves would
calm down and remember to be foot.
Therapy was holding my runaway fingers together
reuniting the pinkie with the ring finger, teaching them to be hand.
Therapy was stepping on needles, on burning asphalt, on
glaciers. Ten steps. Fifteen. Try again.
start rubbing the skin with silk, they said,
with wool
with terry cloth
put sandpaper on the toilet seat.
apply texture to the hypersensitive and the dulled.
the arm, the hand, the leg, the foot, the face
no one asked, no one ever asked
about inner skin
about silk and touch and stiff
uno dos tres cuatro cinco
all summer at the gym in Havana
all day every day step, step, step
up down open close
my hand clenching, spreading, uncurling
my foot stepping, bending, arching
walking
strongly
on the earth
but no one asked, no one ever asked
do you feel this?
the injured brain forgets the places it’s lost connection with
blank spaces in the atlas, unexplored oceans
find your missing continents, they said
grasp with your hand, put weight on your foot, touch your face
use it or lose it
but no one asked
do you feel this?
or this?
no one said,
pleasure is a lost continent
touch yourself with silk
how is your clitoris today?
use it or lose it.
stroke, stroke, stroke
No one helps me.
I explore the dry places and the wetlands.
Struggle to clench and release muscles that forgot how.
Rub dry sticks trying to raise a spark.
open, close, open, close
tracing the tips of nerves that have been sleeping
hoping they will wake up and remember to be delicious
The hand that dives in is still thick as a novacained cheek.
It cramps on the vibrator.
How do I tell which is numb,
the slick, ridged wall or the finger.
clench and release, clench and release
breath takes me down
breath is a bridge across numbness
closing gaps in the circuits
streaming past burnt neurons
chi dancing naked in the dead places
becomes my instructor
exercise imagination she murmurs,
remember
wet tongue, long finger, velvet cock
breathe them into bound muscle
conjure sensation out of thin air
the imprint of memory
begins restoring the coastline of pleasure
mirages shimmer in the air, forgotten peaks
floating above flesh
breathe them in
breathe them out
become what I have lost
until nothing is missing
stroke
stroke
stroke
stroke
stroke
Patients
Why do they call us "the patient"
We are not patient. We endure.
The anxious tedium of public hospital
waiting rooms, because waiting
is the punishment of the poor;
interminable buses to inconvenient places
where we count up our cash, calculating
whether we can take a cab home
instead of riding our exhaustion;
the angry contempt of specialists, taught to believe
any pain they cannot explain is insubordinate,
deliberate, offensive.
We are not patient. We are denied.
Not medically necessary, they say, not proven.
Feel free to appeal. We are experts at appealing,
so we begin again, gathering documents, faxing releases,
collecting letters and signatures,
giving our numbers, all our numbers,
to dozens of indifferent, underpaid clerks,
stacking up evidence for the hearing, where we will declare
as civilly as we can to the affronted panels
that it is necessary that we breathe,
sleep, digest, be eased of pain, have medicines
and therapies and machines,
and that we not be required to beg.
While I am waiting, I am using my pen,
steadily altering words.
Where the card says "medically indigent"
I cross it out and write indignant.
Where my records say "chemically sensitive"
I write chemically assaulted, chemically wounded,
chemically outraged. On the form listing risk factors
for cancer, I write in my candidates: agribusiness,
air fresheners, dry cleaning, river water, farm life,
bathing, drinking, eating, vinyl, cosmetics, plastic, greed.
I am making an intricate graffiti poem
out of mountains of unnecessary paperwork.
Where the doctor has written "disheveled" I write untamed.
Where it says "refused treatment", I write refused to be lied to.
Where it says safe, side effects minimal
I say prove it. What do you mean minimal?
What do you mean side? I write
unmarketed effects unmentionable.
Where it asks, authorization? I write inherent,
authorized from birth.
Are you the patient? she asks, ready to transfer my call.
I say only with my own sweet, brave body.
I say, Not today, no. I have no patience left.
I am the person who is healing, I say,
in spite of everything.
I will have to put you on hold she says. Yes,
hold me I say. That would be good.
©2005 Aurora Levins Morales
We are not patient. We endure.
The anxious tedium of public hospital
waiting rooms, because waiting
is the punishment of the poor;
interminable buses to inconvenient places
where we count up our cash, calculating
whether we can take a cab home
instead of riding our exhaustion;
the angry contempt of specialists, taught to believe
any pain they cannot explain is insubordinate,
deliberate, offensive.
We are not patient. We are denied.
Not medically necessary, they say, not proven.
Feel free to appeal. We are experts at appealing,
so we begin again, gathering documents, faxing releases,
collecting letters and signatures,
giving our numbers, all our numbers,
to dozens of indifferent, underpaid clerks,
stacking up evidence for the hearing, where we will declare
as civilly as we can to the affronted panels
that it is necessary that we breathe,
sleep, digest, be eased of pain, have medicines
and therapies and machines,
and that we not be required to beg.
While I am waiting, I am using my pen,
steadily altering words.
Where the card says "medically indigent"
I cross it out and write indignant.
Where my records say "chemically sensitive"
I write chemically assaulted, chemically wounded,
chemically outraged. On the form listing risk factors
for cancer, I write in my candidates: agribusiness,
air fresheners, dry cleaning, river water, farm life,
bathing, drinking, eating, vinyl, cosmetics, plastic, greed.
I am making an intricate graffiti poem
out of mountains of unnecessary paperwork.
Where the doctor has written "disheveled" I write untamed.
Where it says "refused treatment", I write refused to be lied to.
Where it says safe, side effects minimal
I say prove it. What do you mean minimal?
What do you mean side? I write
unmarketed effects unmentionable.
Where it asks, authorization? I write inherent,
authorized from birth.
Are you the patient? she asks, ready to transfer my call.
I say only with my own sweet, brave body.
I say, Not today, no. I have no patience left.
I am the person who is healing, I say,
in spite of everything.
I will have to put you on hold she says. Yes,
hold me I say. That would be good.
©2005 Aurora Levins Morales
Drifting to Bottom
I settle into the bed of passive sex like a leaf descending to the bottom of a pond, all of me liquid, languid, slow, luminous, still. Once I was tigerish, licking, biting, pouncing, growling, tumbling, arched, riding the springy ribcages and hips of lovers I could climb on. Now I have sex as plants do, petals agape for pollen; as snails do, one sticky wet part sliding softly, infinitesimally across another. I have sex like a body of water, breath making nipples rise like the crests of waves, creeks emptying into my shimmering state of awareness through crevices, gullies, hillside torrents. Rocking against the coast, tide by tide.
Now I am infinite earth, potent beyond all things and nearly motionless. Sex is a bead of sweat, dew forming on the curve of a leaf, a thigh. Sex is the quiver of grass on an almost windless day. I am a bed of clay on which your fingers drum like rain, furrowed by your tongue, penetrated by roots that grow strong because of me.
I am the sea anemone, exquisitely sensitive and anchored to rock. My most delicate pink-tipped tentacles suck, clutch, cling to what touches them. I change color, rose to maroon to violet, blush, glow, burn, circle and dance in the water, wrap myself all around what comes within my one inch reach, and never lift myself up from my stony bed. I am held down by tired muscles, topped by my own fatigue, nerve endings tingling with sensations, too exhausted to move, lickable, liquid, languid, sinking into the slick, soft mud, coming down from above, drifting to bottom.
Now I am infinite earth, potent beyond all things and nearly motionless. Sex is a bead of sweat, dew forming on the curve of a leaf, a thigh. Sex is the quiver of grass on an almost windless day. I am a bed of clay on which your fingers drum like rain, furrowed by your tongue, penetrated by roots that grow strong because of me.
I am the sea anemone, exquisitely sensitive and anchored to rock. My most delicate pink-tipped tentacles suck, clutch, cling to what touches them. I change color, rose to maroon to violet, blush, glow, burn, circle and dance in the water, wrap myself all around what comes within my one inch reach, and never lift myself up from my stony bed. I am held down by tired muscles, topped by my own fatigue, nerve endings tingling with sensations, too exhausted to move, lickable, liquid, languid, sinking into the slick, soft mud, coming down from above, drifting to bottom.
