Sofía Córdova:
There is a new moon today. I hope we can find ourselves swimming in the darkness without any fear. I have been thinking about the glorious queerdo Blackness of Prince. What a master of the universe. My partner, who is white, half Cuban, a fact I'm always negotiating with and against, and I have taken inspiration in what we call Prince's willingness to suck, willingness to risk all the currency of his genius on a single act. And if it doesn't stick, an embarrassment ensues, whatever.
I don't do well with embarrassment, and I also have a longstanding and deep connection with cetaceans, baleen whales specifically, humpbacks, blues, minke, grays, minke or mink? In this life it has tied me to some dear friends and collaborators. I think of two specifically, one white, one Black. Orca whale, but not killer whale. Toothy but not murderous. But with this Black friend, the link of slavery is present. We share, too, the link of sea and song, of [foreign language 00:01:24] and Chango, of [foreign language 00:01:27], of humpbacks making a bubble net to draw out food.
Joelle, so dear to me, has sent my way whispers to suggest that whales are our ancestors too. I think of [inaudible 00:01:52] and also the Zong massacre, bodies tossed into the sea, the same sea I find a friend in for insurance, but also to perhaps become our live whale, or wash up on shore, in essence, and become sand, earth, warmth, receiving rays of sunlight. My white friend, who is my friend because she can listen, says their spouts when they breathe out produce the most glorious smell of broccoli. The baby learned to say broccoli today. [foreign language 00:02:22].
Five summers ago, Joelle called me their [foreign language 00:02:29], their [foreign language 00:02:29], and it opened my heart, like [inaudible 00:02:32] seeing [inaudible 00:02:33] inside his heart, and quelling the longing and [inaudible 00:02:37] this poor imposter. For his guide, that last bit is from something I wrote a few years ago titled A Festival Song to Cry Over Drumbeat of Kinkiness and Blackness, my approach too.
It opens by citing a poem that I still struggle so much with. For it's violence and beauty, the man who wrote it is light skinned, but is credited with inventing the genre of [foreign language 00:03:01]. [foreign language 00:03:04].
Last night, a Black tarot reader in [foreign language 00:03:28] asked if I wanted a reading. He said, "[foreign language 00:03:31]." Take advantage of the presence.[foreign language 00:03:34].
I was born in Isla Verde, Puerto Rico. Isla Verde is part of Carolina, but Carolina is hood and Black, so people don't say that. It's because Isla Verde is pretty and beachy and white. I grew up in Carolina. [inaudible 00:03:49] grew up in Carolina.
I'm in my lilac and pink childhood bedroom, little bits of hit sticks to the bed, or a corner where I crumpled and cried out of the metal closet doors where I would practice upside down twerking, or jot down the measurements of my body. My mind doesn't know to follow me back there, but the back of it does. Anyway, but I tell myself to forget all that because, honestly, what's this compared to a man who some days ago climbed the power tower to kill himself because he [inaudible 00:04:19]?
1985, the Puerto Rico floods produced the deadliest single landslide on record in North America, killing at least 130 people in the Mameyes neighborhood of Barrio Portuguese Urbano in Ponce. The floods were the result of westward-moving tropical wave that emerged off the coast of Africa on September 29th.
I went to a Catholic school, La Piedad, until fourth grade, when my mother and the Mother Superior got fired. [inaudible 00:04:54] was the principal of the high school. She cut the hair of boys who grew it too long. She got a job in the US Naval base, Roosevelt Roads, on the tip of the island, in Ceiba, a beautiful place. Most gorgeous beaches I ever seen in my old island, closed off, behind gates and guards. Behind, it was America, a McDonald's, and all English everything, and a better education, and an accent I cannot shake, and the accent that I left behind.
This later in life I feel that you're really from Puerto Rico, not New York? You speak such good English. This is where the bombs that fell on Vieques, fired by the US government, launched from. I had friends in La Piedad, mostly rich white girls. And when I started going to school on base for the first time, I met Black Americans.
Veneta Jones, who went by Virginia, and who wrote in my Mickey Mouse significant book, "You spit in my eye," because it's true. When I asked to sign my book, a bit of spittle left my mouth. And later, [inaudible 00:05:54], both who were very dear to me, they all left with their parents or guardians every three years, so I never kept any friends. I barely have friends left on the island because after leaving Roosevelt Roads High School, I didn't go to [inaudible 00:06:08].
Why didn't I know that I was Black, even a little? [foreign language 00:06:14]? [inaudible 00:06:41]. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
... has to do with one's point of view. I had to put it that way, one's sense, one's reality. It would seem to me the proposition for the house, when I put it that way, is the American dream at the expense of the American Negro, or the American Dream is [inaudible 00:07:01] is a question hideously loaded, that one's response to that question, one's reaction to that question, has to depend on an effect of where you find yourself in the world. What your sense of reality is, what your system of reality is.
That is, it depends on assumptions, which we hold so deeply as to be scarcely aware of them. A white South African, or a Mississippi sharecropper, or Mississippi sheriff, or a Frenchman driven out of Algeria, all have, [inaudible 00:07:40], a system of reality which compels them to, for example, the case of the French exile from Algeria, to defend French reasons for having ruled Algeria.
The Mississippi or the Alabama sheriff, who really does believe, when he's facing a Negro boy or girl, that this woman, this man, this child must be insane to attack the system to which he owes his entire identity. Our calls from such a person, the proposition of which we're trying to discuss here tonight does not exist. And on the other hand, I have to speak as one of the people who've been most attacked by what we must now here call the Western or the European system of reality, what white people in the world [inaudible 00:08:36] white supremacist, I hate to say it here, comes from Europe. That's how it got to America.
Beneath, then, whatever one's reaction to this proposition is, has to be the question of whether or not civilizations can be considered as such equal, or whether one civilization has the right to overtake and subjugate, and in fact to destroy another. Now what happens when that happens, leaving aside all the physical facts which one can quote, leaving aside rape or murder, leaving aside the bloody catalog of oppression-
Sofía Córdova:
Last night [foreign language 00:09:19], who was tall and Black, and her three sisters who were Black and less taller, and how when she married my pale white [foreign language 00:09:28], his wealthy father hated it, even though he married a Black [inaudible 00:09:32] from Vieques later on. Her name was Luz Macfale.
A conversation in a park bench while getting high and worrying about what it looks like, two somethings of the same color can blend [inaudible 00:09:46]. It is legal now, but still. That's how this all started because BDH and I were talking about Blackness outside of America, which I was happy about, since I always felt like my Caribbean Black roots, from a non Black Caribbean island, but a Black one, is akin to super light skinnedness in America. [inaudible 00:10:06] step into American life, there better be proof of Blackness, [inaudible 00:10:12].
What's the second way of saying, "So, you know?" A sweet and sticky thing turning and twisting inside that thing that [inaudible 00:10:22], that thing that lets me go at America and Blackness as it's appearing [inaudible 00:10:29] places I want to belong to. [inaudible 00:10:33]. And then America isn't a place. America is a collection of places pieced [inaudible 00:10:41].
Is that [inaudible 00:10:45]? [foreign language 00:10:53]. Isn't faith in god [inaudible 00:11:00], and predicting. I will ask god is it wrong [inaudible 00:11:04] or whatever it is, so that thing [inaudible 00:11:08] or it's a [inaudible 00:11:11]. It is everywhere. This is remembering [inaudible 00:11:14] relaxed.
[foreign language 00:11:22]. The land can spread an idea, but didn't [inaudible 00:11:28] travel the ocean? Why would I love to [inaudible 00:11:32] in that boat so much as a kid? Where is that record in my [inaudible 00:11:35], [foreign language 00:11:35]? Where is [inaudible 00:11:40]? [foreign language 00:11:42]. [inaudible 00:11:43] the residents' power, because they hadn't had power for eight months. [inaudible 00:11:48] chose it for the symbolism.
[foreign language 00:11:51]. It's a joke, [foreign language 00:12:03], hello, you know? And you don't. [foreign language 00:12:06]. [foreign language 00:12:12].
When I was little, I loved when [foreign language 00:12:50] would open the papaya and scoop out the slimy caviar into the trash, saving a small scoop to dry out to grow a papaya tree that would never grow. Now he grows [foreign language 00:13:00] and the iguanas people brought here as pets who became pests. He believes in [inaudible 00:13:08]. I bought a papaya two days ago, and it was green, and now it's ripe. And he says he can't be sure because it's mommy who knows those things, and she's not here right now. Mommy say white American [inaudible 00:13:41].
Only 15% of the population survived [inaudible 00:13:41]. [foreign language 00:13:41]. Maria does the [inaudible 00:13:41]. [inaudible 00:13:41] is so weird, the way it changes shape, the way it is the sun burned the red-hot [inaudible 00:13:42] red American [inaudible 00:13:43]. They're trying to sell it some more. Next to [foreign language 00:13:46], and the [foreign language 00:13:48] and her expensive but tacky beaded triangle [inaudible 00:13:51] under the umbrella she rented from the hotel, even though she had earlier said real Puerto Ricans don't rent umbrellas. She thought [foreign language 00:14:00], no, it melts.
A large group of big, Black American friends splash in the city where I Instagram that they are mermaids, and that this makes them happy. They took pictures. Tourism is an ugly thing. Ugly thing, but it's our nation, though, where all the beauty, or possible beauty, and some ugliness too, in me, are from. I didn't make that choice, but I don't think all the mothers' mothers' mothers, all the [foreign language 00:14:41], had a choice in it.
Either I dreamt of an Antilles alliance where we all joined up and abandoned the stent of a Caribbean that is someone else's, a Latin one or a British one or a French one, and none of those just one thing. And in the corner where we are those things, fingers, toenails, pimples, we are those because someone somewhere who made us was raped. They were well taught. They may have been paid.
And beyond that, because I'm here and not here at this moment, I dream of an assembly coaliltion, whatever, of Black and brown and indigenous bodies across nations, borders, beyond [foreign language 00:15:21]. We are bound by struggle and [inaudible 00:15:21] that alien visitation in the form of German [inaudible 00:15:29] virus, but also afternoon in the palm trees, what a breeze on the ocean looks like.
[foreign language 00:15:58]. I had a hard time whispering Blackness because I learned about my Blackness when I entered the United States, because we don't talk about Blackness back home. And because my Blackness was not the Black like of here, even if they shared the same [inaudible 00:16:22] shit running down their leg, [inaudible 00:16:25]. But because of this ambivalence on my young, young heart, I for so long stood in the way of the thing that I dream of now, of this internationalist Black sinew joined tissue, the tangle of roots. There's Blackness and there's Blackness, and you see it across the horizon. All that could be for us. It could be somehow power of the link.
I am Black, without enough sun, which is most of the year in Northern California. I am light skinned, and I've learned that when the sun hits, I appear [inaudible 00:16:57] what is called red bone, but what you would call [foreign language 00:17:01] in the Caribbean, which is supposed to be what we all are? I'm not ever, ever, ever here for the term Afro-Latinx. [foreign language 00:17:15], maybe. [foreign language 00:17:16], maybe.
[foreign language 00:17:27]. [foreign language 00:17:34], Huey P. Newton holding the copy of Che Guevara's book, Angela Davidson grew up. Where do I [inaudible 00:17:42] with friends that are white fit into all this, though? Can they? Bow Wow meeting Destiny's Child, across national coalition, community, commingling, building is intergenerational.
How beautiful is the dream of pure freedom, with others holding hands, elbows, shoulders, heads resting on heads, posing a little? The freedom of lying in bed after a long day of work he loved. He said it's the work that helps. I and you to sleep the deep sleep of knowing you are safe from rape, death, hurt. And not just you, but I. And not just I, but all of you.
I wish woke POC Americans didn't hold onto the word ancestor so bad. I mean, I dream and think and reach for my ancestors because [inaudible 00:18:31] an indigenous act, whether from beneath or [inaudible 00:18:35]. But I ignore it and shut away. You do the work of the colonizer on ourselves sometimes. And I transcribed this from my notebook on the Cloud, my father, [foreign language 00:18:47], who's mother and [inaudible 00:18:49] grew up back in [inaudible 00:18:50], says he hates the phrase people of color. He says it plays too much to whiteness, that it's up to us to change the language of race, and then the reality. I tell him I agree, but that in a way he's heading pretty close through [inaudible 00:19:04].
I'm watching the Royal Wedding for some reason, and observing how the Black gospel choir Meghan Markle brought didn't wear rich purple robes, or sing big, or clap. How they were de-Blacked. [inaudible 00:19:17] family had land left to her in the mountains of [inaudible 00:19:22], but her greedy uncles took it. [inaudible 00:19:25] of my mother [inaudible 00:19:28].
When will the Black women return to shore and hold him out of [inaudible 00:19:40]? [inaudible 00:19:45] all these beautiful [inaudible 00:19:48]. Black [inaudible 00:19:51] and Black [inaudible 00:19:53] are always [inaudible 00:19:55], but he'll probably not [inaudible 00:19:57]. I'm with hers, assume all politically active Black people are Democrats, because what other form is left to us? Well, update. This was written in 2018, this bit, and it seems to ascertain a comparison to [inaudible 00:20:14], when we forgot what Black women with exceptional paths can be jailers too, and intoxicated with the wrong ideology.
Have you ever seen a dog and a bitch in a kennel, with [inaudible 00:20:27] nose. I love dogs, but they're weird animals. They only exist if human exist, a byproduct of settlement, and our BFF came out of the trash heap. And I'm kidding. White people don't [inaudible 00:20:38] 'cause white people love dogs.
Every day, every few years, we saw a white [inaudible 00:20:45], you know, and [inaudible 00:20:47], let his dog shit two feet behind a Black couple who were having a romantic picnic by the lake. They also don't think they have to pick up your shit in a bad neighborhood. [inaudible 00:20:59].
The Sands Hotel in Isla Verde is where my parents got married. Now it's the Intercontinental, and my cousin [inaudible 00:21:06] got married there. Matt, who is my partner and my husband, and as I said, white, half Cuban, half American, [inaudible 00:21:14]. Do you ever [inaudible 00:21:17] yourselves? I mean, [inaudible 00:21:19] walking, and you must be cool walking [inaudible 00:21:23]. I would build a cross-national anti-national, anti-nationalist, anti-border collaboration. If you stop buying crap, we ascend to heaven, the white Olympus. I asked this specifically to Beyonce and Solange too. I mean, I don't wanna look shitty when the revolution starts, but can we just rely on each other to make nice clothes for each other when this all comes down the street?
I took a while to fully fall into my Blackness because mine is a Blackness with mixed [inaudible 00:21:55] of [foreign language 00:21:55] and [inaudible 00:21:58] that was this meaningful [inaudible 00:22:01] on a rock to make bread. It all happened so fast, and they walled us up together and forced us [inaudible 00:22:11] that wasn't there. And some days it still feels like we dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, digging, digging, digging, digging. When can we look up to see our glowing faces of Black gold, brown gold, in the sun? We are the Black gold of the sun. We are the Black gold of the sun. We are the Black gold of the sun. We are the Black gold of the sun.
Speaker 3:
...bread, housing, clothing, education, justice. We want peace. [inaudible 00:24:30] when a Black brother [inaudible 00:24:31], UN, Black colonial suckers will participate, dealing with, analyzing, projecting, [inaudible 00:24:40] the races to prosper. Build [inaudible 00:24:43] Black people, this nation.
Sofía Córdova:
And yet, somehow, something, call it nature, or that farming fatalism of this human creature, makes me aware of the inevitable as already part of me. Not to be contended against so much as brought to bear as an internal weapon against strict [inaudible 00:25:21] and spiritual death.