El Proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña

On the night of my 30th birthday I dreamt of a woman stepping out 

of the ocean, wearing every starfish at once like armor. Her eyes 

crystallized the liquor of the seed planted in her vision; 

an island pronounced by the ocean without bubbles, left alone 

to defy the heat and storms, Borikén the people called it. 

She cuts her destiny in two and keeps the heavier one.

When my mother was 30 years old, she fled Puerto Rico and for years 

refused to tell me the story of why. Perhaps she thought she was saving me. 

“I come from a fleeing people, first land, then language” 

I have always desired to speak Spanish without shame, guilt or resentment, desired to speak English like a poet. Because it feels like from either side 

you cannot win, you cannot convince them of your innocence in that process 

of flight as a child with my mother and as an adult I have made by myself. 

Children of the diaspora, learn quietly survival language people in our old homes hate without thought and love without self pride. 

There is no room to say yes, or no, because you’ve been told by family 

you are, no longer really in all honesty a true Puerto Rican. Tu eres de alla, 

una, gringa, nuyorican. So you scream back in the language you’re still learning, spitting in the eye of the world: 

¡Yo soy la conciencia de Puerto Rico 

Yo, la conciencia de Puerto Rico 

Yo, la conciencia de Puerto Rico 

Children of the diaspora, is the love for Borikén always the heaviest half? 

Never having the answers to the nightmare questions of our genesis, 

the only choice but to be survivors despite the fears still being there, 

an enduring a storm called Maria. Did they name her Maria, 

for ‘sea of bitterness’, or ‘sea of sorrow,’ or is it ‘the rebellion’, 

or the ‘wished -for child’, or the pronounced devastation that

we may endure once again the grief in order to start anew? 

Like my mother at 30, who made the decision for fight or flight in order 

to start anew. We learn to live with the language of these contradictions. 

These are the profound costs of just being us. Diasporic Puerto Ricans, 

always believing the possibilities before they are wiped out. Like how I love you, hoping not for return or recovery, but for a perpetual renewal of that enduring 

spirit that gives us the courage to fight or fly.