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Perhaps if she’d been endowed with a healthier imagination, she might unsee the bars beneath the elegance and glamor—if only for today.
To someone used to being erased, dismissed, always dangling in the empty space between two categories, being read meant being seen. I am here, she thought, and felt herself resolve
The page was her anchor, absorbing her as it would ink. Rendering her solid after years spent compressing and contorting herself to fit whatever vessel her masters poured her into, no matter how small or narrow the shape. It was as she squeezed herself into those too-tight spaces that she thought, and she read, and she wrote. And she realized she could write herself into existence.
Leave it to Hisperians to conflate exploration with domination. Oh, it was a clever narrative, she had to admit . . . a romanticized pseudohistory in which brave heroes rescued an unenlightened world from the dangers of incivility. In that version, it was a peaceful, even welcome, transition, not the near extinction of a people.
irascibleness
At seven years old, she had been gifted to this girl. To mend her clothes, and set her curls, and pour her tea. And though what she found was a friend instead of a mistress, she could never forget that this girl she loved as a sister had once owned her. Not that she would ever dare say those words out loud. This thing between them was too precious, too fragile, to fracture with the truth.
Sofía offered a neutral shrug. Physical beauty simply held no allure for her. She understood it only as a concept, in terms of facial symmetry, health signaling, and reproductive fitness. But a face, no matter how conventionally attractive, stirred nothing in her.
“They’ll say you don’t belong no matter what you wear, Sofía.” She spoke without malice, simply . . . resignation. “With this on, at least, you’ve beaten them to it. Claimed the words before they can claim you.”
She had peeked behind the curtain of Carnaval, seen the rot under the luster, and still she could not tear her gaze away.
“I start believing that we might grow into something better, instead of simply making way for it. Or I’ll catch myself mulling over the morality of things. Is it right to erase all for the wrongs of a few? That kind of thought.”
“It is not always about whether it is right or wrong though, is it? But whether it is inevitable. You can cut away the rot, or leave it until the rest of the flesh festers.” Kaona brought a bottle to her lips, hovered it there as she said, “Not all healing restores. Some requires destruction.”
‘Ignorance’? No, that is too passive of a word for what this is. You say you’ve met our gods? You’ve merely studied them. They are a myth to you. These waters a thing to be explained by your science.”
“You think you know us because you watch us, make notes of us. Like they did when they came, worming their way into our homes with the promise of peace and friendship.
It was not our gold or our women that they first stole. It was our words. Our stories. They took them, butchered them like they did our bodies. Gave them to their kings and queens as curiosities. Our ways, shared in good faith, in their hands became the first weapon to be used against us. So forgive ...
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It must be you because . . . because you are easier to love. Because your hands create, whereas mine only synthesize. Because I read the world in patterns, not poetry. Because if one of us can inspire a god to mercy . . . it isn’t me.
What is your search worth? What will you become?
“Time can be a mercy, child, as it can be a ruin. Consume it like you would uikú—just enough to warm you. Take it from me,” she said, “the more you reach for that cup, the more dangerous it becomes.”
Northeastern University’s archive Caribbean Carnival Exhibit: An Act of Opposition.
Sebastián Robiou Lamarche’s Mitología y religión de los Taínos, a comprehensive look at the Taíno belief system and cosmology (it’s available in English as well!), and José Juan Arrom’s edition of Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios, one of the first (and sadly, only) original ethnographic works we have about the Taíno. For the Taíno language, much of which was lost during the period of the conquest, my go-to resources were “Vocabulario indo-antillano” by historian Cayetano Coll y Toste and Javier Hernández’s Primario básico del Taíno-Borikenaíki, which provides a foundation for
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“paper genocide,” in which a group of people are forcibly erased through the intentional destruction or alteration of documents and records related to them.
