Tun tun de pasa y jinchería*
The more time I spend here, the more I become aware of how much of a blessing and a curse this is. First of all, I definitely confirmed that my best mode of learning is through maieutics- things that are already inside me and that are only brought out by specific questions or general issues that lay bare my theoretical assemblage.
That brings me to the second thing: for all I bitch about this place, I must truthfully say that the situations have made my brain go places it hadn't had the need to go to before, and for all that pisses me off, it does necessitate that I find my own stance and I explain to myself why these things are not only bothersome but viscerally so.
Today I had one of those little nuggets of wisdom when things kind of fall together. Today I finally managed to piece together (while speaking to professor Licona) that part of the reason the politics in the department bother me so much is because I feel that a definition of race that is incongruous with my lived experienced is being written forcefully upon my body-because the "American" conception of race and racial difference gets preeminence over the race that was written for nineteen years upon my flesh, that of the jincha. It's as if my racial determination meant nothing and I am just what others would like me to be, as they try to force commonalities upon us where there are few and those that exist are precarious at best. I am lashing out against it because to not do so would be to let others separate me from my embodied memories. I cannot allow that. I don't have a body, I am a body, and this body is full of scars, of marks, of unevenly colored spots: violence is written on my body, and it is through these wounds that I have gained a lexicon for loving. It is impossible to divorce me from the ambiguity that makes up the colonial legacy that makes up who I am, from my scars, from my wounds and yes, from that hint of whiteness, that jinchera that I carry with the memory of my grandmother.
You will pry that from my cold, dead hands.
* Tun tun de pasa y grifería (Drumbeats of Kinkiness and Blackness) is the name of a poetry book by one of Puerto Rico's most famous poets, Luis Palés Matos. He is credited with being one of the fathers of the "Negrismo" or Afro-Antillan movement; he was "white" (light-skinned) which made the experience all the more bittersweet: light-skinned intellectuals blasted him for the "worthlessness" of the topics he covered and dark skinned Puerto Ricans blasted him for becoming renowned "at their expense". If he had lived in the US, he would have just been another brown man.
That brings me to the second thing: for all I bitch about this place, I must truthfully say that the situations have made my brain go places it hadn't had the need to go to before, and for all that pisses me off, it does necessitate that I find my own stance and I explain to myself why these things are not only bothersome but viscerally so.
Today I had one of those little nuggets of wisdom when things kind of fall together. Today I finally managed to piece together (while speaking to professor Licona) that part of the reason the politics in the department bother me so much is because I feel that a definition of race that is incongruous with my lived experienced is being written forcefully upon my body-because the "American" conception of race and racial difference gets preeminence over the race that was written for nineteen years upon my flesh, that of the jincha. It's as if my racial determination meant nothing and I am just what others would like me to be, as they try to force commonalities upon us where there are few and those that exist are precarious at best. I am lashing out against it because to not do so would be to let others separate me from my embodied memories. I cannot allow that. I don't have a body, I am a body, and this body is full of scars, of marks, of unevenly colored spots: violence is written on my body, and it is through these wounds that I have gained a lexicon for loving. It is impossible to divorce me from the ambiguity that makes up the colonial legacy that makes up who I am, from my scars, from my wounds and yes, from that hint of whiteness, that jinchera that I carry with the memory of my grandmother.
You will pry that from my cold, dead hands.
* Tun tun de pasa y grifería (Drumbeats of Kinkiness and Blackness) is the name of a poetry book by one of Puerto Rico's most famous poets, Luis Palés Matos. He is credited with being one of the fathers of the "Negrismo" or Afro-Antillan movement; he was "white" (light-skinned) which made the experience all the more bittersweet: light-skinned intellectuals blasted him for the "worthlessness" of the topics he covered and dark skinned Puerto Ricans blasted him for becoming renowned "at their expense". If he had lived in the US, he would have just been another brown man.