By Adriana Maria Garriga-López
Hope is not a Precondition for Action
A long night of sorrow
A stone
The cave of our mouths as we cry
For love
For food
For water
For life!
The diminishing returns of Europe.
The remains of History.
The remains of the day upon the table
Before bed
We speak in hushed tones…
We wake up in the morning and
Cry at the sun—
At the parched landscape.
The dust of many stars
Has settled upon
the revolutionary aspirations
of our ancestors.
We ask each other,
the detritus of history,
has it thereby settled
also upon us?
Shall we march inexorably into non-being?
Disappearing into the hegemon
that swallowed us
like a hungry whale and
barely notices us
making fires in its belly.
Waiting, biding our time.
We are working on
getting on
intergenerational
freedom time.
We are working on
being on
to the commonalities
between us.
The Caribbean
is an
archipelago
of struggle.
Anticolonial humanism
is
antihumanism.
But it is also radical humanism.
It is a reformulation
of the problem
of the human
on a much bigger scale
than Europe
ever imagined.
The Haitian revolution long ago
revealed
the limits of Europe’s
liberal discourse.
Our experimental ethos of rematriation
enacts a radical horizon. One that centers
relational aggregates and clusters containing
our non-human relatives who also wait for remediation.
And if the price of remediation
is death, and if the ‘demilitarization’ pollutes,
and if the so-called cleanup happens but
without decolonization and not for human habitation,
then the open-air controlled bomb blast
is nothing other than a recapitulation of colonialism.
Then the wildlife preserve is a bleeding wound unsealed,
a lie unmasked
by the burnt taste of land that remembers
napalm’s maiden voyage.
How do we go to war against what has already won?
What do we want now?
When will we wrest life out of this stone?
The heart of a chicken
Stewed by a grandmother,
its mealy meat a prize for the boldest grandchild.
A throughline
A boat
A rescue at sea
Where your Navy Boat and
Your Hospital Boat and
Your Coast Guard Boat and
Your Floating Pier and
Jet Ski zoom past a manatee,
Eviscerating it like
the millennium.
In her glistening entrails
a daughter is born.
The dust of centuries
accumulated as bones shine like sun-whitened roots
while palms on the craggy hillside sway.
Bombs in the Water
Empire’s ecologies are rusty but limber with use,
practiced and targeted, organized around killing and torture,
made to breed sameness through constriction; they sanctify predictability.
Explosive evolutionary undercurrents leave luminous residues.
Ecologies of empire are denuded, turbulent, simplified, degraded,
limited, fenced, caged, walled, electrified, tense with tanks,
festooned with rotting sargassum and peppered with
decomposing bombs in the water,
Our bodies are polluted, acidified, disabused, (de)toxified,
remediated, rebuilt, redirected, congealed …
Weaponized dolphins swim past sunburnt tourists
gently floating over radioactive bombs in the water.
Our boats are flooded, burnt, cyclically invaded by the tide that
comes in bearing frothy plastics and bacterial mats that insulate
the stifled feeling of oil-thickened sea feathers flapping,
straining to take flight.
Dr. Adriana Maria Garriga-López is Poetry Editor at the NACLA Report on the Americas and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Comparative Studies at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL. Dr. Garriga-López holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University (2010.) Garriga-López is a medical and environmental anthropologist specializing in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Her research analyzes cultural dynamics at the intersections of health, environmental disruption, and decolonization. In addition to her scholarship, Garriga-López reads, writes, and translates poetry and short stories in English and Spanish. Her poetry, short stories, and translations have been published in several academic journals, blogs, and anthologies. Dr. Garriga-López was born and raised in Santurce, Puerto Rico. She currently resides in South Florida. Her website is www.adrianagarrigalopez.com.