A bilingual collection of essays in the form of open letters-- to public figures and private ones, ancestors of the flesh and the spirit, organizations and activists. Aurora Levins Morales speaks out about book banning and eugenics, anti-Semitism in Latin America and sexism in solidarity movements, addiction and colonialism, the trafficking of children and the power of metaphor, and she speaks as a citizen of the Matria Grande, a feminist version of the unified and sovereign Americas Simón Bolívar dreamt of, and today's new revolutionaries and beginning to build.
By failing to ban Getting Home Alive, Medicine Stories, and Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriqueñas, you are treating me like a liar instead of a digger for the roots of truth, a scribe for the imperial chronicles of Fox News instead of the many-colored codices of liberation, a sad assimilationist longing to be just like you, instead of the fierce, malanga-eating, mixed-blood madre poeta bruja revolucionaria that I am. You are insulting the memory and tarnishing the reputation of my mother spitting in the eye of colonial anthropology and the FBI. You have committed libel by omission.
from "Ban Me!" 
If all the social movements and leftist governments of Latin America are under assault by media terrorism, we live in the central command post of that assault. The U.S. corporate media industry has an almost total monopoly on the information available to our people, so that very few of us know about Latin America’s history, struggles or present reality. On the day of the coup in Honduras, while the Honduran people were shown cartoons, we watched endless footage about the death of Michael Jackson. The United States is one of the few countries that prides itself on ignorance of other languages, and the pressures of racism and assimilation guarantee that the children of Latin American immigrants quickly lose their fluency in the language of their parents. Although Telesur can be watched on any computer with an internet connection, an English language version of its broadcast would open a floodgate of new information and inspiration. Access to the news from the south could be our own Operation Milagro, one that restores not our eyesight, but our imaginations, our sense of the possible.
from "Open Letter to Telesur." |
Fierce organizer, tireless in the cause, it was poetry, after all, that meant most to you. The delicate shade of rose among the tall grass. The startle of blue. The violets of a first love betrayed. The flamboyánes of San Juan, blazing against the sea. You didn't write agitprop. You wrote about love and heartache and blossom, the early sentiment ripening into a clear, strong voice, acquiring edges, an iron tang. You fought for laws as concrete and mundane as soup on the table or not, and you wrote of the roses, of acacia, of trinitaria against a wall. You said that poetry was as much the daily bread as the white hyacinths of life, insisting that it was necessary, not a luxury, more powerful, in its electric spark, leaping across the gaps between us, than any other form of speech. You used it to heal your broken heart, and to make bridges and pathways between peoples, and it was as essential to you as breath. from "Muna Lee." There's a word in Spanish that was part of all the leftist speeches of my youth: coyuntura. It means the situation, the circumstances, the current historical moment. If the big picture is a constellation of stars by which we plot our course, the coyuntura is the muddy ground we stand in while we stargaze. The bloody, difficult present. In the coyuntura, we have not yet won. Each act carries risks we must weight. Not all our alliances will hold. Repression can escalate, alongside bribery. Some of what we want to build can't yet be done. We point ourselves toward those dreams, but the conditions don't yet exist to make them happen. Standing there in the mud, our job is to keep talking about stars while we shovel slush, add gravel, pass around hot thermoses. Sometimes that means supporting solutions that are painfully inadequate, that cost us, but still move us toward the the universally humane future we long for.
from "Bigger IS Better." |
Imagine there is no visa that will take you to the room where you can place your hand on one side of the glass matching finger to finger the hands of these men on the other, so you paint their faces on every wall and demand of the world that they be freed, work day and night to get them back. Years pass and the parents grow old and die, the children grow up and go to college, the landscape changes without them, but you don't stop. You name them every day, on every corner, and you call out to people everywhere in the world to name them and argue for them and work to get them back.
from "Imagine This."
from "Imagine This."