Poetry Sunday: My Hispanitude by Darrel Alejandro Holnes

"My Spanish is the color of rust in a sugar boiler." That line grabbed me as I was searching for a poem to feature this week. Spanish is very much a part of the culture where I live. One hears it spoken in the stores while shopping, in restaurants by the other patrons who are eating, in any place where people gather. I'm not Hispanic but it is something I find comforting and familiar. It is all a part of "Hispanitude" and it says "home" to me. I like it! 

My Hispanitude

by Darrel Alejandro Holnes

I speak in the fold of the map— 
creased between empire and salt. 
Mother braided three names into my hair, 
none of them white. 
I carry a chair made of silence— 
its legs, the Grito de Dolores, 
its seat, a tongue bitten in school. 

My voice is a garden 
planted in the ruins 
of a burned-down convent, 
mint growing wild in the mouth of a well. 

They said my Spanish was broken. 
But what they heard was 
Arabic echoing through stone, 
a gitano’s guitar wailing in the square, 
Yemayá surfacing between syllables, 
the baobab tree’s roots itching for a stretch, 
the duppy eating akee and saltfish in my voice. 

My Spanish is the color of rust in a sugar boiler. 
It smells like tamarind and the sweat of mango pickers,
ginger for saril and sap from the sugarcane. 

Each word I say contains another— 
one for the father who kissed their child goodbye in Yoruba,
and one for the conquistador who renamed him Juan. 

I showed them my skin, 
called it a palimpsest. 
I opened my mouth 
and invented bolero with 
a hundred eguns in my breath— 
some who danced, some who prayed, 
some who never made it off the boat. 

I write with the red pen they used to grade me wrong,
and eat the drunken fruit that fell from the family tree
they said I didn’t belong to. 
Only as a scar belongs to the blade. 
Do not bow 
to the marble statues of the crown 
or kiss the cracks.

My Hispanitude is not your cathedral.
It is the shadow behind the altar, greater than the thing itself.
The laugh that survives translation. 
I return to the page like a field after fire—
charred, yes, but stubborn.
Full of many seeds in my locs 
that they intended to never survive,
where every rejection 
birthed a refrain. 
Call it exile. Call it inheritance. 
Call it what remains 
when nothing fits
but the mouth that says it anyway
and becomes its own unplace.

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