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By Khalin Vasquez
On a good day, my mother says I am black
and my father snap quicker than a whip
He swear he got enough self hatred to dull the genetics
He swear he married a white passing woman
He swear he already dug up every slave who ever died on my island
and reburned the bodies.
All that is left now is his skin
but this too, can be cleansed.
Even blood can be erased so long
as it is bleached enough times.
On a bad day, my mother is the whip
which snaps with my father’s wrist
Columbus is a colonizer and a saviour.
Without him, where would we be?
I say Black and alive
They say Black and mean as good as dead.
Or, on special days my mother holds a funeral.
She cries for her black husband. Her black son.
She knows they have not died but this is inevitable.
She carries the proof in her skin.
How our people were black enough to turn to ash
How our magic couldn’t stop a sea of ghosts
looking for another body to take
She feeds me yuca as if to say she is sorry
That nothing else survived the pillaging.
That even this, too, is white.
When African slaves were brought to Puerto Rico
Tainos fell in love with them. Had children with them
So both our kin had a chance of surviving genocide
Tainos went extinct
My parents do not want me loving my blackness
They are afraid of history repeating itself.
They would rather I live in whiteness
Than be black and not live at all
I want to tell them
That maybe whiteness is death
That my island has always been possessed
and still finds a way to dance. to sing. to live.
That we have been doused in bleach
and woken up to repaint our history
again. and again.
That blackness is the only reason
we have this history. these bodies. these heartbeats.
I want to say we are black and mean
we are still alive
Khalin Vasquez is a queer/trans Boriqua poet from Brooklyn. Khalin was a 2017 Youth Poet Ambassador for New York City, and has performed at the Library of Congress, the Apollo Theatre, Lincoln Center, and others. They were published in Lincoln Center’s 2015 Poetlinc Anthology and are the recipient of the Andrew and Eleanor McGlinchee Prize for playwriting. Their work is currently available or is forthcoming on Slamfind, EOAGH, PANK, and Nylon Magazine.