IN OUR BONES: Sounding a New Language of Sovereignty
In Our Bones: Sounding a New Language of Sovereignty*
By: Claritza Maldonado
After quickly saying her name, Peggy Robles-Alvarado announces she had just finished writing the poem she is about to perform earlier that day after researching Pedro Albizu Campos. She holds the slightly folded papers of her first draft and begins to read the excerpt of Albizu’s speech* that inspired her poem: “To the Women Albizu Campos Said Feel It In Their Bones.” His words, now recited in her voice, proclaim: “Puerto Rico will be free, sovereign, and independent when the Puerto Rican woman feels* free, sovereign, and independent.” The feeling described is one that, then, the Puerto Rican woman must feel in her bones. When Alvarado recites “she has to feel it in her bones,” she gathers the tips of her fingers to gesture towards her stomach. She shakes her hand and the gold bangles on her wrist move as she enunciates and boasts the word “bones” as if her mouth has taken the shape of her own bones.
This poetry performance takes place at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York City in 2018 as a part of a #PoetsForPuertoRico benefit reading series. The series was an extended effort to raise funds for hurricane relief in the continued aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Peggy Robles-Alvarado is Dominican-Puerto Rican educator and poet from Washington Heights in NYC and currently resides in the Bronx*. Robles-Alvarado is also the author of Conversations With My Skin; Homenaje a la guerreras; The Abuela Stories Project; and Mujeres, the Magic, the Movement, and the Muse.
To feel something in your bones is to feel something in the skeletal architecture* of your being. How does one come to feel something in their bones? Bones, which are more resistant to decomposition than the flesh, are physically long-lasting remains of death. To feel free, independent, and sovereign in your bones in many ways coincides with how Audre Lorde discusses feeling. For “our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas.*” These radical and daring ideas are conceived from and after the poem. When Lorde cites this as “not idle fantasy,” but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of ‘it feels right to me*,’” I hear echoes of “we feel it in our bones.” Women must feel it in their bones because this is how feelings transform into language, which can support survival, create change, and alter the foundations of our lives. Albizu’s excerpt claims that the freedom of a place is not only tied to the freedom of a body, but dependent on it. Is this, then, personifying a place or landscaping a body? Land and body are inextricably tied.
In an interview for Centro Voice’s e-Magazine by Ivelisse Rodríguez, Robles-Alvarado responds to a question about language with this first sentence: “When I write, el sentir is my guiding force.*” El sentir means feeling. The poem is a remix from Albizu’s words to the written poem, from the written poem to spoken word performance, from the spoken word performance to song, and back to the page. All of these are poetry, but what new feelings and knowledge emerge from these various renditions? The poem—on and off of the page—imagines and transforms a language and vision of who a sovereign Puerto Rico includes.
“If the Puerto Rican woman must feel sovereign free and independent in her bones, how do we center black and indigenous women’s bodies without making them a resource for the freedom, sovereignty, and independence of a place?”
When I hear “feel it in our bones,” I hear life and death一skeletal architecture and skeletons. The chorus of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s “Rican Beach” sings: “Well you can take my life / But don’t take my home / Baby it’s a solid price / It comes with my bones.” The song about gentrification in barrios of New York City rings true for cityscapes as much as it does for an archipelago that is a colony—diasporas that map onto one another. These lines in particular unfold a sacrifice of one’s life for one’s home. “Feeling it in our bones” includes the bones of those alive and dead. If the Puerto Rican woman must feel sovereign free and independent in her bones, how do we center black and indigenous women’s bodies without making them a resource for the freedom, sovereignty, and independence of a place?*
The beginning of the poem immediately lets it be known that the Puerto Rican woman she is thinking of as central to sovereignty is the Black Puerto Rican woman. Alvardo-Robles continues to list all the types of women including praying women, women deemed “deviant,” working women, first responders to the hurricane women, activist women, women who are healers, women who keep all things moving. Whether Albizu knew it or not, Alvarado-Robles is carving out a future vision of freedom and of a sovereignty that centers “side hustle, side eye, sidewalk, en la esquina, la bandolera del barrio fino women.” The woman en la esquina must feel it in her bones. Through every phrase, proverb, descriptor, and life of a woman she tells, she repeats the word “women” with the same swift breath and mouthed punch.
“And all the poets were dying
Of a silence disease
So it happened quickly and with much ease”
The poem cannot stay only written on a piece of paper. It is when the poem explodes off of the page that what is felt can resound for another. Poetry is meant to be spoken. Audre Lorde states this significance: “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood*.” Poetry is liberation. Lorde writes of a commitment to language and its power as a “reclaiming of the language which has been made to work against us.” The language that has been made to work against us*, like that inscribed in History, can be transformed or a whole new language completely created anew. Poetry has this capability, which is why Robles-Alvarado stresses the poeta by the end of her poem. Her embodiment is rooted in her own personal feeling. This discredited form of knowledge is the language needed. This language—this poetry—must always, then, truly be in our bones.
* An excerpt of a longer 20 page paper
*Pedro Albizu Campos was a Puerto Rican activist and attorney known for his many radical speeches and leadership in the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party.
*Albizu Campos’ speech was given on October 12, 1933 in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Titled “Columbus Day Speech” in Stevens Arroyo, Antonio M., editor. Prophets Denied Honor: An Anthology on the Hispano Church of the United States. Orbis Books, 1980.
*Emphasis my own
*More about Peggy Robles-Alvarado can be found on her website: robleswrites.com
*Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is not a Luxury,” 38. This riffs from where Lorde writes: “Poetry is not only a dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”
*Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” 37.
*Ibid.
*To Be a Woman: An Interview with Peggy Robles-Alvarado by Ivelisse Rodríguez. Centro Voices e-Magazine. 2017.
*This question is in many ways the question Cathy Cohen brings us to in “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens.” This is the question Cohen brings us to: “How do we center the ‘punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens’ as the core of collective liberation without instrumentalizing black/queer bodies?”
* Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” 40.
*Ibid, 43.
Claritza Maldonado is a Chicago-born Puerto Rican who aims to intertwine her practices as a creative writer, poet, educator, interdisciplinary thinker, and curator. She is currently a PhD Candidate in American Studies at Brown University and a Spalter Teaching Fellow in School + Teacher Programs (K-12 education) at the RISD Museum. She holds a BA in Linguistics with a minor in Latina/o Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a MA in Public Humanities from Brown University. Her poetry has been published at the Wanderer Poetry literary website and the Brooklyn Rail. Her poetry has also been part of collaborative creative projects, such as Roy McGrath’s musical album, Remembranzas; Raíces to Roots, a dance, spoken word, and music production; and Puerto Rico in Mi Corazón. You can learn more about her research interests and investments here.