Child of Diaspora
April 12, 2018, by Mika
I’m the child of two wildly different Diasporas. I’m a black man in America and Jew that doesn’t live in Israel. The two paths of my family trees might reflect different journeys to claiming cultural identities in this country but they converge at major points that I believe all Diasporic people’s relate to. There’s the insulated culture of communities unwilling to fully assimilate, the unique traditions created by the poverty of being unwelcomed (like gefilte fish or chitlins), and there’s the shared sense that we have to prove ourselves twice. All diasporic people’s must show that earn the right to be both of the place they call home and of the people with whom they share a homeland.
Reading Sandra Maria Esteves’s poetry I found myself both an observer of her unique diasporic culture as a Borinqueña and sympathetic member of his own diaspora standing in solidarity with her relation to the experience of being poor and brown in America. Now personally this is where those two identities of Black and Jewish clash: the Jewish people still face their obstacles to true freedom in my mind, but they certainly have the benefit of whiteness and a cultural history that’s well recorded and proudly in tact. The Peurto Ricans have that to a degree, at the very least, like the Jews, they have their own language. As a black person unaware of any foreign tongue my ancestors spoke or tribal culture to call my own I’m a bit envious of the Neyoricans ability to combine two languages into their own dialect. To a degree that’s what the Jews of Europe did with Yiddish which is a wellspring of uniquely Jewish culture far deeper than Fiddler on the Roof.
But there is something about Esteves’s poetry that’s also so undeniably hip-hop, unabashedly street level and blunt. I love the ability for diasporic people to create these personas that feel both larger than life while also being brutally representative of the issues real people face. Her poetry feels like a fiery Latina superhero, whose powerful yet has her real weaknesses. In fact comics are a great place to look for the embodiment of these diasporic identities. Luke Cage and The Black Panther are dramatically opposite responses to blackness in America and feel both extremely powerful in impossible ways and extremely real in what they represent to blackness in America. There aren’t any superheroes that draw their powers from being culturally Jewish however…
There’s actually a Puerto Rican superhero created and independently published by Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez named La Borinqueña that he describes as an original charectar and patriotic symbol represented in a classic superhero story. On his website he explains:
“Her powers are drawn from history and and mysticism found on the island of Puerto Rico. The fictional character, Marisol Rios De La Luz, is a Columbia University Earth and Environmental Sciences Undergraduate student living with her parents in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She takes a semester of study abroad in collaboration with the University of Puerto Rico. There she explores the caves of Puerto Rico and finds five similar sized crystals. Atabex, the Taino mother goddess, appears before Marisol once the crystals are united and summons her sons Yúcahu, spirt of the seas and mountains and Juracan, spirit of the hurricanes. They give Marisol superhuman strength, the power of flight, and control of the storms.”>
I think this hero is amazing and bad ass for what she represents to her people but she’s not as bad ass as Sandra Maria Esteves. Her poems inspired some critical thinking about my own diasporic identities and below are some of my musings:
##From Fanon Googling Frantz Fanon he seems like a dynamic and influential thinker that has unsuprisibly been absent form my own education. I wonder who made her hip to him and how his thinking influenced her. When she writes “remnants of that time interacting in our soul” I feel that in both my Black and Jewish souls. Both identities constastnyl relate to a state of the past a state when they were slaves and faced opporesion She adds that “As slaves we lost identity/ assimilating our master ‘s values/ overwhelming us to become integrated shadows undefined and dependent” In many ways the Jewish people are a lot more guilty of losing themselves in the identity of whiteness, becoming an integrated model minority that’s hardly even thought of as a minority. Blacks and Neyoricans are too loud and proud to assimilate as well although there are plenty of Carlton Banks out there
##I Look For Peace Great Graveyard The lines “bedroom walls bare stagnant water/ drenched colorless laugh” instantly reminded me of the opening from the Geto Boys classic Mind Playing Tricks On Me where Scarface raps “I sit in my four-cornered room/ staring at candles” and all I can say is that the desperation and bleakness of poverty is real. There’s a reason the Neyoricans felt such solidarity with black power movements and its because we were both broke as hell. I wonder why nationaly that solidarity isn’t more felt and expressed.
##Some People Are About Jamming This goes to show that the desperation of poverty can’t keep a lively spirit down however. In fact in that bleakness, a lively spirit might just be the only honest way to stay a float. I think the emphasis of the term Jam, as opposed to Slam is important because this poetic movement would precursor the quickly commercialized Slam Poetry craze that hit the nation. Jamming is pure and untainted by the eye of the camera. it aint glamorized or monetized so it aint tellin no lies.
##Staring into the eye of truth This poem reminds me of a more folksy tradition a la Bob Dylan or Woody Guthrie with it’s waxing of metaphoric pimple heads. Maybe these are toxic identities and the evolution she writes of is an internal cleansing of the illusion that you need to be any one of those pimple heads.
##A la Major Borinqueña This is what made me think of the superhero and I imagine that the powerfully at peace woman in this poem is much like the heroine. My favarotie line is “My name is Maria Christina/ I speak two languages broken into each other/but my heart speaks the language of people born in oppression” because it expresses the love and loss that comes with being a child of a diaspora.
My favorite line from Esteves that I read was from “Capital” where she rightfully asserts that the man is the one “who forever rips us off, and charges rent/ for being born.”