Look! A Whore.

"Look! A Negro." Frantz Fanon, BSWM

PART 1: A Story

You bundled up in your wool coat, doubled checked the contents of your bag (microphone, iPad, iPhone, wallet, notebook, pencil case, chargers), and grabbed your travel mug. You’d read on a travel blog that you’d need to bring your own to-go mug in Spain because it was common to sit in a café rather than take your cafécito to go. You headed down the stairs and out onto the streets of La Latina, an auspicious name you thought, for the neighborhood where you were staying while doing field work for your soon-to-be-completed dissertation. You walked by two fruit shops and ducked into the café bar. You ordered a cortado and ignored the smirk on the face of the barista, a middle-aged man with dark hair and eyes. He tapped his finger angrily on the counter when you attempted to pay by putting the euros in his hand. You realized that he didn’t want to take money from your hands but that morning you’d decided he was just grouchy. You left some coins, a tip, on the counter and he pushed it back at you and dismissively snapped that he was insulted at the gesture and that he made enough money without having to take yours. You shrugged your shoulders and walked out, trying to find your way to the bookshops you were told would have the materials you needed. At the first bookstore you were ignored even though you asked for help twice. You found the Africa section near the front of the shop and you collected every copy of a book written by an Equatoguinean author. You’d come to Spain to collect as many books on history, politics, race, and literature, as well as to conduct interviews with diasporic and exiled writers from the only Spanish-speaking Sub-Saharan African nation-state. You piled the books onto the counter and to the surprise of the clerk you paid over 300 euros for your new collection.

You decided to skip the second bookstore because you had only 20 minutes before your first meeting with a retired Spanish political scientist whose area of expertise was Equatorial Guinea. You’d agreed to meet at the corner of the department store El Corte Inglés but you hadn’t secured a SIM card and without wifi your cell phone did not work. You told him you’d be wearing a burgundy coat, and that you had brown skin and curly hair. You thought that would be enough for him to spot you. You headed to the corner of El Corte Inglés and stood under the awning near the bus stop avoiding the drizzling rain. Ten minutes turned into twenty and twenty into forty. You paced a bit and kept your eye out for this señor. You’d gotten a little turned about and didn’t know where you were or how to get back to your apartment. After almost an hour you decided to ask the woman standing next to you to make a phone call on her cell phone and even offered to pay her a few euros for the trouble. You’d felt comfortable asking her because she reminded you of your mother, a short, fair-skinned, late-middle aged woman with a seemingly kind face. Little did you know that your request would be met with disdain. Perhaps it was the sound of your Puerto Rican accent, your fast-paced talking, or your Blackness. She pressed her purse tightly and replied: no. No, you could not use her phone and what were you doing in Spain anyway? You explained that you were a doctoral student doing research and that you were waiting to meet someone you were supposed to interview. She didn’t believe a word you said but she was your only hope at the moment, so you pressed on. Señora, you can hold my phone while I make a phone call on yours you offered – knowing that your smartphone was more valuable than her flip phone and perhaps that gesture would put her at ease. She acquiesced only after you made the suggestion twice and clutched your phone in her hand giving you an icy look as you triangulated your location with your contact. When you finally found each other, the old man scolded you for being on the wrong corner. You accompanied him to a café where he talked to you about the exceptionality of African dictatorship and how its violence went beyond any colonial influence. African violence, he pressed, was its own phenomenon altogether. You countered his argument to no avail and suddenly became distracted. You were being watched. You realized that the waitstaff and a few patrons were looking oddly at you and your interviewee.

One evening a few days later you’d gotten lost on the metro and with no cash in hand you had to walk back to La Latina. As you came up from the station you realized you were on a desolate street. Three men walked out of a building and you approached them asking, “¿permiso, me pueden ayudar?” Two of them brushed past you and the third one yelled, “¡NO ME HABLES!”. The fury flew out of your throat and whatever you said to them made one of the men double back and apologize to you but even then, he wouldn’t tell you what direction La Latina was. After about an hour of walking you found your way back to the apartment.

The following day you took the train to Barcelona where you were going to meet with and interview two Equatoguinean writers Juan Tomas Avila Laurel and Remei Sipi Mayo. This would be the first interviews with Equatoguinean writers in Spain and you were excited to meet with them and discuss your upcoming trip to Equatorial Guinea. When you arrived at the station Juan Tomas picked you up and took you to a bookstore and later to the home of Remei. At Remei’s apartment you were welcomed with open arms. She prepared you a meal, talked with you for hours, showed you photos of her grandchildren, and advised you to go to her hometown in Equatorial Guinea ensuring that someone would meet you there. She then asked how you were enjoying Spain. You answered her honestly and told her how you felt isolated, mistreated, and had faced much rude and racist behavior. Even the express train ride from Madrid to Barcelona wasn’t without incident: the Spanish man assigned to the seat next you refused to take it and was reassigned a new seat several rows ahead. Remei listened with a knowing grimace on her face and replied: “Niña, es que creen que eres una prostituta.” She explained that in Spain Black women, especially from the Caribbean were assumed to be prostitutes. Sex workers. Whores. You sat at the table of this beloved African woman writer, surrounded by her books, with your mouth agape. Remei had opened your eyes.

[found image/artist unknown]

PART 2: LA MIRADA

In her 2002 book, Inmigración y género, Remei Sipi Mayo examines the racialized experiences of African women in Spain. She outlines the distinct experiences that propel women from various locations across Africa to Spain. Furthermore, she enumerates the kinds of racialization and quotidian violence experienced by Black women in the diaspora. She names this violence “La Mirada,” or the reductive “gaze” through which Black immigrant women are often seen

Es aquella que surge del exterior o sea de la sociedad receptora, de aquellas

miradas que ante mujeres procedentes de escenarios humanos diferentes tienden

o pretenden encasillarnos, reduciendonos a estereotipos y aplicándonos prejuicios

como, por ejemplo, los referidos a considerar que por ser de un determinado

origen, somos prostitutas, trabajadoras del servicio doméstico y un largo, en

ocasiones, etc. Intentando borrar saberes y riquezas que algunas trajimos y los que

aprendimos aquí como maestras, escritoras, dinamizadoras de grupos, mediadoras

interculturales, etc. (22)

The violence of La Mirada reduces African and Afro-Caribbean women to the roles of sex workers or domestic workers, while simultaneously erasing the rich knowledges and skills they bring from their homelands and eliding the skills and education they acquire in exile or diaspora.

In his 1952 text Black Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon examines the ontological and phenomenological (“ontogeny” and “sociogeny”) impacts of anti-Blackness and racialization on Black subjects. Relegated to the “zone of nonbeing” the Black (man) is condemned to continually face the bad faith of anti-Black racism and the “veritable hell” of continued dehumanization (xii). In his chapter “The Lived Experience of The Black Man,” Fanon recounts a quotidian moment of violence, the “passing sting” of a young white boy in France crying to his mother, “Look! A Negro” and “I’m scared” (90). This chance encounter, among others, forced Fanon to see himself “in triple,” to understand the lived experience of the Black man as embodied, and to see the sociocultural schema of white supremacy yield to an embodied racialized schema(92).

Fanon has long-been critiqued for his parsimonious discussion of gender and sex in general, and his terse discourse on Black women in particular. Yet, in the days after the revelation that during my doctoral fieldwork I was perceived as a whore, I kept thinking about that oft-cited chapter of Black Skin, White Masks. In my imagination the little French boy of Fanon’s story grew into the Spaniards (both men and women) who looked at me like a sexual object with no value. Within this colonial white supremacist heteropatriarchal system Black women are reduced to their racialized sex and potential to perform illicit sex acts. The fact of Blackness, for Black women, is to become the container for sexual labor, to labor for the white imagination. Gendered racialization is a production of a series of limiting categories, spaces, placements in the world. Thus, thinking about the “space between the legs,” as articulated by M. NourbeSe Philip, is a critical site to think about how Black women speak within, between, and beyond histories of oppression and contemporary forms of quotidian violence. [1]

A Black Latina perspective adds to these African and Caribbean meditations on the permanence of gendered anti-Black racial structures and attitudes. To be clear, sex work is work, perceived promiscuity is a social construct with all-too-real impacts, and the word “whore” is both fatuous and laden with meaning. In this case, the attitudes and actions I experienced in the field revealed to me how Black women assumed to be prostitutes are conceived as: suspicious, interesadas, needy, desperate, cunning. It is also imperative that we link this tacit understanding of Black women’s bodies/being as part of transnational networks of the sex trade that thrive in the Caribbean through economies of sex tourism and matrices of exploitation. [2] The space afforded to Black Latinas by La Mirada in a world mired by ongoing colonization and coloniality, is wretched.

Found Image/Artist Unknown

PART 3: BLACK IN THE FIELD

I have been thinking about the surveillance of Black people both in public and institutional spaces, and the confluence of both.[3] In January 2014 I was conducting a final round of interviews and material collections for my dissertation which focused on Blackness and the literary, aesthetic, and political relationship between the Spanish-speaking Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic) and Spanish-speaking Sub-Saharan Africa (Equatorial Guinea). After a week of awful experiences in Madrid, some of which I outlined in Part 1 of this post, I traveled to Barcelona to the home of writer and editor Remei Sipi Mayo. That afternoon Remei listened to my stories, commiserated with my pain, and affirmed my experiences. Unlike the many other (white Spanish and mestizo Latinx) scholars with whom I’d come to share these experiences, Remei didn’t brush the story away or reduce the blatant gendered racism I’d faced as simply “rudeness” or “Spaniards being in a rush”. Instead, Remei was one of the few faithful witnesses to my experiences and she stood alongside me helping me to reckon and recover from the deep impact of those violent interactions.[4]

Each year I tell this story to my graduate students during our “Responsible Conduct of Research" discussions. I share my experience as a Black Latina in the field for two reasons: first, to expand their understanding of field work and transdisciplinary research in the humanities, and second, to foreground the ontological experiences of Black women researchers as a way to underscore how gender, race, and gendered anti-Blackness impact the experience of scholars in the academy in general and in the field in particular.

Graduate and government institutions offer scholars in humanities and the humanistic social sciences training on archival and field work including various forms of data collection and primers on ethical human subject study. These trainings, however, are crafted in universalist terms and often assume that the scholar in the field, in the archive, and in the world, is a white man. As such we are trained to approach field and archival research as if these spaces/places would welcome us, nurture us, and accept us as they would if we were white male scholars. To be clear I was not totally naïve in my scholarly endeavors. As an Afro-Boricua -a colonial subject- going to Spain for research I was aware that I might face racism. Yet, I was also endowed with a false sense of security offered to me by my training in Comparative Ethnic Studies and by the financial resources given to me by the top public institution in the US. That is to say, I was expecting racism in general yes, but not the kinds of gendered racism and xenophobia that made quotidian encounters unsafe.

The latest uprisings in the wake of extralegal and police violence against Black people in the US has ushered in a bevy of public letters by Universities and Colleges across the US promising “accountability” and increased “diversity” efforts. If research institutions are indeed committed to recruiting, retaining, and otherwise supporting students who are radically racialized and gendered, students who are underrepresented, and students who are first-generation, then they must reject the normative underpinnings of their research agendas, trainings, and methodologies. This will not be addressed by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” training but rather by rethinking the colonial categories of research, the human, and the intimate impacts of anti-Blackness inside and outside the ivory tower. As the Combahee River Collective argued in their 1977 statement, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” Thus, as we continue the important work of abolishing the current systems of unfreedom endemic to capitalism and coloniality, we must continue to make critical changes to our conceptions of knowledge production. One such way to do this is to take the experiences of Black women and racialized and gendered subjects as the point of departure for a profound reimagining of the practices of all scholarship.

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Notes:

[1] M. NourbeSe Philip A Genealogy of Resistance: and other essays. Mercury Press (1997). See also, Katherine McKittrick, "'Who do you talk to, when a body's in trouble?: M. Nourbese Philip's (Un) Silencing of Black Bodies in the Diaspora" (2000).

[2] For more on Caribbean sex tourism, sex trafficking, and sexiles see: M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (2005); Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel, “Female Sexiles? Toward an Archeology of Displacement of Sexual Minorities in the Caribbean” (2011); Angelique V. Nixon, Resisting Paradise: Tourism Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture, (2015); Lorgia García Peña, Borders of Dominicanidad: Race Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (2016) in particular the chapter titled “On Bandits and Wenches”;

[3] For more on surveillance and the state see Simone Browne Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015). For more on the experience of “archiving while Black” see John Hope Franklin, “The Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar” (1963) and Ashley Farmer, “Archiving While Black” (2018).

[4] For more on faithful witnessing see, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vasquez, “Faithful Witnessing as Practice: Decolonial Readings of Shadows of Your Black Memory and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” (2015), Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (2020); Maria Lugones, Peregrinajes/Pilgrimages: Theorizing Coalitions Against Multiple Oppressions, (2003)

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[this post was first published on 1 July 2020 on the Black Latinas Know Collective site]

dyeing: an autoethnography

i dyed alone. 

i died and made a pact with the dead,

white cloth pinned to orange buckets 

steeped in blues of blues and 

seas of dark dyes washed

clean and uneven 

inked by drops and made

to look like constellations of grief.

spheres explode and you see

the skies witnessed by a couple

impregnated with worry and joy,

grasping at new life

while winding down

a mountain highway 

watching a moon fleshed  in a starless sky

bear its belly to the whole world.

seven months later you drop 

your hands into a warm pail of blue blue 

dye and grasp for the moon demanding answers,

elbow deep in salt. the flesh of cloths,

like blessed and not forsaken souls,

usher you away from reaching

the full bloom.

you crouch lower in the grass and splash

blues across your face, pulling from the deepest recesses.

you reach in and pull yourself out.

this: made possible by death 

by want, by loss, made possible

by scrapping and injecting 

and full madness

made possible by unfathomable wrath. 

this: made possible renewal

a new self, a thirst for color and

seas and sacrifice and creation

and hands making.

made possible a new notion of self 

new relations,

newness out of

a deep heartache 

29 January 2020

ElectricMarronage Taller #1

Prompted by Savannah Shange’s Archive/AutoEthnography Exercise

Grief to the Bone: bodies that remember [Part 2]

This is part 2 of the essay. Click here to read part 1.

LO QUE ESTA PA’ TI

Fifteen days before we found out that our baby’s heart had stopped beating we were driving from Michigan to Baltimore for a post-holiday family gathering. As night fell over Pennsylvania I remember being entranced by the moon in its waning gibbous phase. It looked to me like a gorgeous pregnant belly sticking out of the sky. I fantasized about our baby traveling worlds, making its way from the sky to my belly to places beyond my imagination. Just two days before that drive, on Christmas eve day, we’d seen our baby’s little heart flicker for the second time across the screen – 135 beats per minute. We were elated. This was our baby. The baby we’d wanted so badly and loved so much already. My mami had said some months earlier to quit with the bad mathematics: lo que esta pa ti nadie te lo quita. And that was a balm and a spell that lifted the burden of my miscalculations and the fears that arrested my every move.

Because we’d experienced that early loss five years before I was caught between excitement and terror. The minor discomforts of my pregnancy symptoms were a relief and my fertility specialist, quietly acknowledging my fears, decided to “graduate” me to a regular obstetrician a few weeks later than scheduled. At that appointment her every move was calming and her words so soothing that I decided against telling her my one thousand concerns. We’d gotten pregnant relatively quickly, just three rounds of some not-too-invasive procedures. She’d gasped at our first visit when she heard how my former gynecologist had treated me. Now at this appointment she discussed my previous labs was thrilled with the progress of my weekly ultrasounds. Our baby had been growing right on target. This is why I went into total shock when the doctor could not find a heartbeat. I’m so sorry. So sorry. So sorry.

My husband held his face in his hands and cried. Seeing his instant reaction unmoored me. I had no voice, I could not feel. I failed to think of ways to make it better for him. My loving and distraught partner who’d been the cheer to my worry, who’d written our baby little poems, and told us little stories about all the things we’d do together, he too was undone. A few minutes later in her office as I listened to her explain the next steps my nose started to bleed profusely, and this continued for days.

It was the first week of classes at the university and I had to teach just a few hours after that appointment. I hardly remember getting to campus, to my office, or to the classroom. I do remember that I quietly cried throughout my entire lecture on Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. My freshmen students asked if I need a hug. I said no, thank you, even though I’m sure I needed a hug from every single one of them. As I grow older and my students stay the same age, I think of them in new ways: each of them is a beautiful miracle, someone’s baby, someone’s whole world.

DILATATION & CURETTAGE

After a few days of waiting to miscarry naturally I called my doctor in a panic. The process could take six weeks and I count not handle the thought of having my baby just shrink away inside me. I remembered so vividly miscarrying at home all those years before and was terrified to go through that pain again. In order to get a D&C I had to go in for another ultrasound to confirm that my baby had indeed lost its heartbeat. I looked away from the screen and squeezed my partner’s hand unable to face the loss. I secretly prayed for the sounds that we loved so much to emerge.

Later that week I was admitted into surgery. My doctor was so kind, answering all of our questions, and brought me tissues as I wept in my surgery get-up. The big hat and little socks and the odd gown and really just the whole thing would be comical, if it weren’t so terrible.  

A cheerful anesthesiologist came into introduce himself. He read my name on the chart and with a quizzical look on his face asked: What is your first language?  I gave my spouse a knowing-side-eye as the anesthesiologist explained that when coming back to consciousness after being put under general anesthesia, patients usually respond fastest to their first language. Spanish, I replied. My first language is Spanish. I perked up to ask him where he learned to speak such good Spanish (in a Caribbean accent at that!) and he laughingly told me that some Puerto Rican friends had taught him growing up. He quickly added that he knew that Puerto Rican Spanish was not professional, so he didn’t use it much. Suddenly he wasn’t so funny anymore. A sea of rage rose in me even as I knew this was not the time to tell him about his racism, classism, and linguistic imperialism. Honestly, even if I wasn’t already halfway sedated he didn’t deserve my ethnic studies doctoral realness or the Boricua cultural nationalism knockout that was surely coming his way.

As they rolled me into surgery I cried in fear and misery. I was in the deepest grief I had known since the death of my father and I could not see beyond that fog. The last thing I remember are big blue lights.

 In the ether I heard a woman’s voice call my name. My first words when I awoke: ¿Se murió mi bebé?

Diagnosis

Uterine contents:

Chorionic villi are identified.

Received fresh

labeled "products of conception,

genetic testing, karyotyping"

multiple fragments of pink-tan to brown-purple,

soft, spongy, fibromembranous tissue

fragments aggregating to

9.5 x 7.0 x 2.3 cm

weighs 59 grams.

The dear and beloved 59 grams extracted from my body turned our world upside down. I could not stop crying. I was lost in a grief so deep that I could see no way out. I worried about ever feeling joy again in my life. Would I ever laugh? My husband held our world together despite his grief. The few people in our community who knew about our loss held us in their care. I hid from all of my pregnant friends and avoided eye-contact with all pregnant people in public  I could handle the sight of babies, but the sight of a pregnant belly would send me into the deepest well of anger and resentment.

The trauma of being in surgery engulfed me. I felt violated. The idea of being under sedation while they opened my legs, dilated my cervix, and scraped away my almost-child was more than I could handle. Plus, the idea that I would never have a regular (read: happy, fear free) pregnancy, that I would be wracked with anxiety if I we were ever to conceive again, kept me awake all night for weeks.

It was my mami’s cries that most tore me apart. She mourned for my loss and for her own. She’s pinned a hope on this baby and had made her own secret plans to move to Michigan to care for our little family. I found myself comforting her as she cried, no me lo esperaba. Yo tampoco mami.  

Even as I was undone in every way, I had privilege of being a Black Puerto Rican with health coverage and a job where my colleagues and mentors supported and in fact demanded that I take a medical leave (thank you). Without the force of the women in my circle I would have returned to work in my zombie-like state and I may have have thrown myself into a deeper pit. Instead, I stole away at home where I found solace in nothing but the comfort of my grieving spouse and the sealed mother-of-pearl box with our baby’s ultrasound prints and tiny belongings. The surgeon who performed my D&C became my new gynecologist and seeing how depressed and shattered I had been at the hospital and at my post-op check-up, she began to schedule me for bi-weekly visits to check in with me. I never once had to undress in her office for a physical. These were mental health visits until she could get me into a therapist’s office. She sat and talked with me for an hour every two weeks for over three months. My gynecologist showed me every ounce of respect, generosity, and tenderness that I had never experienced at a doctor’s office in my entire life. Even now I don’t know where to place my gratefulness for her care.

EVERY CELL

One evening in February, the mother and grandmother of a friend unexpectedly circled around me, held me, and let me cry for what seemed like hours. It was cathartic and necessary. Every cell in her body is grieving the mother said. And I wept uncontrollably in that room for every loss, for every moment of indignity, for every fear. I left there having been given a simple task: do not cry for the future.

Feb 18, 2019

She said every cell in my body was grief

or covered in it

Last night I dreamt of grief as a garment

I wore cotton pajamas tight to my body

covered from my wrists to my ankles in a soft

chartreuse shroud

I moved through the dreams in different scenarios

but each time I became aware of myself I looked down

and was dressed in radiant green-yellow grief

and what is this if not a rotting?

An oozing pain like I’ve seldom known.

or a hope, or a light,

or the realization that I am consumed by this loss

I’d write poetry for you my love

I write in your memory now

thinking of the minor discomforts of your presence

and the joy we felt in seeing you flicker

the loneliness in seeing you fade

I’d wished for you and begged for you and wanted you

for longer than I’ve ever admitted

If you come to us again I’d like to keep you

and write you poems

I waited three months for my body to release all of the pregnancy hormones. The lab results finally came back negative. It took three months for my blood and my body to say goodbye. It took more time for me to find my balance again.

CEREMONY

In Puerto Rico this summer I did ceremony. My shadow fed, a cleansing, a despojo, and a calabaza as big as the moon was tossed into the sea for me.

I was bathed and doted on and called nena and I cried for the care. I made new family. I made relations larger than the universe.

I came back new. Painting and writing and sewing and gardening and moving my heart in every which direction.

DUE DATE

It had been on my mind, but I had not fixated on our due date. I was secretly hoping it would pass and I would be too busy living anew to notice.

But we have bodies that remember.

At around 2am in the early hours of my due date I woke up to an incredible pain in my lower back and cramps that seized me up. Alone in bed and tangled in a sea of blue sheets I struggled to breathe. The pain came in sudden jolts all night. I don’t remember when I finally fell asleep again, but I awoke hours later in a pool of sweat. I cannot explain this. I won’t bother trying to understand. I know that this body remembers even that which it tries to forget.

Mi nena, I won’t forget you. Te lo prometo.

Grief to the Bone: bodies that remember [Part 1]

  BEGINNING

We lost our first baby in 2013. I woke up one August morning with sharp pains coming in quick succession. Bleeding profusely and confused, I fell off the bed and crawled quietly down the hall to the bathroom. I didn’t know what was happening and not wanting to wake up my husband, I kept my moans to a low treble. After what seemed like an eternity in the bathroom, I limped slowly to the couch and cried as the pains swelled across my body over and over again. I remember thinking: if this is what childbirth is like I don’t want it.

Later that morning we tried to figure out what was happening: food poisoning? a bad period? a cyst? a physiological reaction to the blow out fight I’d had with my brother the afternoon before? After a few hours I was able to withstand the cramping and decided to keep my plans to visit a friend who was home with her 6-month-old baby. When I arrived to her house I told her about the pain that morning and she asked if I was pregnant. I told her that there was no way but, in my heart, I knew. I drove back home later that evening clenching my teeth as the waves of pain hit me. When I got home I dusted off an old pregnancy test box and held my breath as I waited for the verdict: Pregnant.

I walked out of the bathroom, told my husband the news, and cried. We were both in our final year of graduate school, living in New Jersey – clear across the country from our institutions in California and making regular trips to check-in with our advisors. We were teaching full-time at a nearby university and I was also holding a part time job at a clothing shop. Just a few months earlier I had resolved to finally finish my dissertation and start working on applications for the academic job market. This pregnancy was an unexpected interruption to our plans and, like the schtick of a romantic comedy, we needed more proof. Very quickly we were on our way to the pharmacy to pick up another box of pregnancy tests. On the way to CVS and back I listened and mouthed the words to Hurray for the Riff Raff’s “Go Out on the Road” on repeat. For some reason that song echoed my empty, excited, and sorrowful feelings. We’d just returned from a 3-week cross country road trip, we’d been married for six months, we’d been together for six years, but it felt like we were just getting started. This felt like a fantastic kind of failure. This would end our hopes to move forward and would mean a whole new future. I was thrilled and terrified.

One positive test after another led to a doctor’s visit where a blood test showed that I was indeed pregnant – about five or six weeks, maybe more. The doctor gave me a script for pre-natal vitamins and booked me for a follow-up in a week. There was no ultrasound, no discussion of my ongoing pain and symptoms, just a script and a shrug.

That week my friend, the owner of the clothing shop where I worked on the weekends, was taking the staff on a weekend trip to Puerto Rico. As nervous as I was to be pregnant I was also superstitiously hoping to see my grandmother –mother to 18 children/grandmother to over 100– to get her blessing for my baby who was sure to be one of her last bisnietos (as I was one of her last grandchildren to have a baby and she was well into the double digits on tataranietos). When I went to see my grandmother in Caguas I held her hands tightly and stared deeply into her cataract-laced eyes, saying nothing about my baby as she gave me her bendición: que santa clara te acompañe.

The morning we were due to leave the island, I snuck away at sunrise to take a solo bath in the salt waters of the Atlantic. I thought of my ancestors bathing and rejoicing in those waters, my ancestors carried violently across the sea and worshiping in those waters, and my ancestors who brought their hunger, greed, and despair to those waters. I meditated on my child and summoned up their emotional, ancestral, and ephemeral inheritance to those waters.

Upon return, my second blood test showed that I was miscarrying or had miscarried. My HCG numbers were plummeting and without much explanation, the doctor said the reason was inconclusive – perhaps a blighted ovum or more likely a chromosomal issue with the embryo. These things happen. Whatever the case, I was told that the pregnancy was not viable and was sent on my way. I felt numb. Had I miscarried that August morning back in the apartment or had that been implantation bleeding? Had I miscarried in Puerto Rico or would I miscarry in a few days? Still bleeding a week later, I was left with so many questions that I wouldn’t have answers to for years to come. I know now that I had begun miscarrying that August morning, that the doctors didn’t listen to my symptoms, that they treated me as pregnant when in fact I was losing my baby right in front of them.

The rates of mortality for Black women and infants are twice that of white women in the U.S. and one of the highest of any “developed” nation. We know too well the stories of Black women who were dismissed or ignored, to death. My own mother’s stories of miscarriage and infant death are likewise a documentation of the disregard for Puerto Rican women and their babies in the 1970s. Her first miscarriage led her to bleed out on the train from the Bronx hospital where she was refused help, to Hoboken, NJ where she was rushed into surgery. Her second loss came after being misdiagnosed and medicated for not having enough amniotic fluid. Unbeknownst to her she gave birth prematurely to twin daughters. Only one survived. When I talk about miscarriage and infant loss to my extended kin and community I am met with a flurry and fury of stories: infinite loss, infuriating care, and often the simple reality of the unknown.

When we lost our first baby, I remember that I was consoled only by the thought that perhaps we weren’t ready to be parents just yet. We were wrong.

MATH

I was diagnosed with dyscalculia in 2007 a few months before my college graduation. I felt freed knowing that my visceral reactions to my university math classes were not just a mix of stubbornness and stupidity, but rather a diagnosed disability. I transpose numbers and mix-up equations, I jumble addresses, phone numbers, and codes. My relationship to math has always been as strange and as strong as my transfixing love of words. For many people these worlds are not separate. For me, the use of words and numbers are universes apart. 

Over the last three years, the struggle to grow our family has caused me anxieties like I have never known before. The kinds of mental math I make are illogical, absurd, painful, and relentless. There is the equation of deficit – where I calculate where I fall in my family’s fertility matrix:

Abuela Santo: 22 pregnancies, 18 children

Abuela Catalina: 6 pregnancies (?), 6 children, 2 murdered after her own mysterious death

Mami: 5 pregnancies (1 set of twins with 1 surviving), 4 children

Papi: 1 child, 5 stepchildren

Sibling: 1 child

Sibling: 1 child

Sibling: 1 child

Me: 0

In this fucked up equation the number of children decrease with me reasonably getting none.

There is the equation of scarcity, a zero-sum game, where I calculate how many children in my kinship and family networks and frantically attempt to decipher the “chances” that I will have children:

5 couples with twins

2 couples with triplets

7 people on baby #1

12 people on baby #2-3

3 close friends pregnant now

700 acquaintances pregnant now

0 babies for me

In this equation every baby born and every baby announcement make the chances of me having a baby go down and down and down. 0.

Equations like this ...

Grief the size of a lemon seed

Root into a tree,

A sapling taking hold in the root of you in your womb

A blooming halo

Blocking all light and possibility

Offering instead a sobering truth

You are not like the others

You are like many that are not like the others

Your future children, ojala, may bring you joy

but you know what it is to lose

and the fear of loss consumes you

eats your dreams, invades your days

It reaches inside you and scoops and

scrapes away at the hope you’ve been hiding

THE ROAD

We started trying to grow our family in 2016. We had just bought our first home and were so thrilled to be first-generation home owners and in our first jobs after graduate school. It was, a quiet pursuit, our child, and we felt that sharing our desire to become parents would dash our hopes. Keep your head down nena and quietly try for a baby. I started taking pre-natal vitamins and a few months later we spent the summer in Spain and Morocco hoping to come back home pregnant. Months passed and my visits to the ObGyn were inconclusive. My doctor, a white woman, told me to lose 10lbs then 15lbs. My PCOS and weight were the problem she suggested. Every test returned clear. I started taking medicine to help with the insulin resistance that PCOS can cause, medicine that made me extremely sick. Every visit to the doctor ended with an increase of that medication, every visit was a painful reminder that I had to keep waiting for our baby to come. I dropped 15lbs and then 20lbs by cutting calories, exercising, practicing yoga, and going to acupuncture. But returning to the doctor with those results were not enough – she would not recommend me for fertility treatments. I know now that I could have gone to a fertility specialist without a referral but at that point I was blindly following whatever the doctor advised even as she withheld our possibilities.

In 2017 I went to my primary care physician and told her about my fertility struggles. She recommended some blood work and when the results came back she gravely informed me that she thought I had perimenopause. My estrogen levels were low she said, and this was cause for concern. I was then sent for a mammogram. I made an appointment with my ObGyn and waited one week for the appointment. During that week I was alternatively catatonic and then inconsolable. I remember crying quietly through an entire work out at the gym. I remember my husband helping me to my feet in the Target parking lot. Stepping out of the car I had collapsed to the ground in a fit of tears, unable to walk or talk for the pain of the potential diagnosis. At my appointment the nurse on call calmly and lovingly informed me that estrogen is a fluctuating hormone and is not used to determine fertility. You are fine. You are perfectly healthy. You can have babies. I was relieved and enraged at my primary care physician for a potentially devastating diagnosis for which she knew nothing about. I needed a specialist but was still so scared of what that step would mean.

LAW 116

I come from the most sterilized nation in the world. Over the course of twenty-five years law 116 saw to it that over 34% of Puerto Rican women were coerced into sterilization as a form of permanent birth control or rather, population control across the island. The sole method of contraception available at first (besides the male vasectomy), Puerto Rican women were often sterilized without their knowledge or without knowing that the procedure was irreversible. Since winning it as a prize of war in 1898, the colony of Puerto Rico has represented both a problem and wealth of biopolitical resources for the united states. The film La Operación interviews women and they confirm that there was no orientación, no guidance. Puerto Rican women were also used as a laboratory subjects to test the nascent birth control pill which, a strikingly ten times more potent than was eventually made available to women in the United States.

The aim to sterilize this population of non-white peoples did not stay on the island but rather, migrated in the same pattern as the population. Efforts to sterilize Black, Puerto Rican, and working-poor women in the Bronx’s Lincoln Hospital were met with mass protests.

I touch my empty womb. I rage against histories of corporeal dispossession.

Read Part 2 here…