Autobiography for the body that won’t leave

      The poems I craft—either by spoken word or written language—are birthed from a spiritual practice of naming, listening, remembering, and (re)imagining. These poems call into question the impact of colonial history and observe language as a weapon of domination and control, but also as a tool of liberation and assertiveness. I turned to words, poetry to be exact, because I felt there was little agency given to the voices and experiences of women and girls of my culture and upbringing. In poetry, I found a way to combat the feelings I carried with me of alienation and insecurity, often tethered to stereotypes of “otherness” as a Guyanese-american immigrant. However, it wasn’t until my adult life that I was introduced to Caribbean poets like the late, great Kamau Braithwaite, whose words forged a path between reconciliation and recollection, between nation and “national identity”—the historical phenomenon, that is, of the transnational journeying, wherein one experiences, by birth or lineage, a forced departure, and a never-completed sense of arrival. I think it was then that I discovered my own quest to write about home(lands) as a demarcation and excavation of “belonging.” It was then that I saw myself in a tradition of orators and storytellers, whose orature and literature broke the silences they dreamt about breaking.
      I still remember being a young girl sitting at the foot of my bunk bed, in my family’s house in South Jamaica, Queens, conjuring rhythmic lines into the air, how the intonations of my words echoed back to me like the Rocksteady and Reggae musicians my father blasted on the stereo every night or weekend. The first poets I believed in were Caribbean lyricists, who cried about heartbreak, spoke about disproportionate poverty in ghettos around the world, or rallied youths over a pulsating beat. It was, for example, Carol Gonzalez’s refrain “Don’t gimme no second-class love” that stuck with me through the decades, along with the Rastafarian musicians who turned their noses up to the west because they sought after and instilled a kind of harmony detached from the dystopia of western capitalism. These vocal artists taught me how to use words to describe the feelings ailing inside of me, how to exhale and release a poem in public, and how to search for the song stuck in my diaphragm. Through language I found the courage to bemoan any expectation that this breath and body is not all mine.
      Later, I found favor with Dub musicians and poets, who summoned my ears with their playfulness, conviction, and tonality, the gurus who took up space and chanted songs, sometimes without instruments. These poets were evocative; they challenged everything american writing had taught me about line breaks with a slight cursive in their registers. When they tapped their feet or held onto rhymes like an eight-count stuck in the back of their throat, they proved to me that the tongue and body are vessels for carrying memories. Along with the sonic qualities of Dub Poetry, I always took a liking to how these spoken word poems, and poets, highlighted unifying experiences of Afro-Caribbean peoples across the diaspora.
      Still, even in spaces where Black history, culture, and voices are celebrated, it has always been apparent how Black women, Black queer women, and those who take on a myriad of marginalized identities, like myself, have been erased or minimalized from public accessibility and acceptance. Therefore, my poems are also greatly influenced by Black feminists, such as Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, Shauna Morgan, and DaMaris B. Hill, to name a few, who are concerned with exploring silences and interrogating systems that have trivialized the experiences of Black and brown bodies.
      For me, writing is the responsibility to take up space and humanize our conditions. It is the audacity to mobilize from truth and arm ourselves with collective power.

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