Black Beyond Borders

Published in 2004, When the Spirits Dance Mambo is a memoir describing the experience of Afro-Caribbean people living in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s. This rhythmic text takes its reader into the cultural and music scene of East Harlem with anecdotes about the influence of Santería, an Afro-diasporic religion originating in Cuba that syncretized Yoruba beliefs and customs with some elements of Catholicism. Vega utilizes modes of musical and religious expression to tell the story of her upbringing as well as a collective Afro-Caribbean Latinx experience in New York.

Words from the Author: In an interview about the Caribbean and African diaspora, Vega states, “I think the biggest challenge for people is to understand still that we are [the] result of 500 years of enslavement. And that the process of education has been one to erase us. And it can erase you intellectually and convince you that you don’t exist. So it doesn’t matter the color you are phenotypically, you don’t see yourself. And the challenge is for us to see ourselves as rooted in one experience.”

About the Author: Vega is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer and scholar who has dedicated her work at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) to connecting Afro-diasporic communities. Her research on Yoruba belief systems in the African diaspora include the spiritual memoir The Altar of My Soul, the study Snapshot-Landmarking Community Cultural Arts Organizations Nationally: The Impact of Public Policy on Community Arts Funding, and an anthology of essays and poems co-edited with Yvette Modestin and Marinieves Alba titled Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora.

To read a 2018 interview with Vega, please click the following link:  https://africasacountry.com/2018/04/the-boundaries-of-how-we-think-of-the-global-african-diaspora  

Published in 1998, The Farming of Bones discusses the tense history between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The novel re-tells this history through the embodied trauma of the protagonist, Amabelle, who represents the Haitian population’s perspective on these events for the reader rather than a history manipulated by the victors. Also, the centering of a Black woman in this narrative follows the tradition of Afro-Caribbean women’s writing while reclaiming an ignored history of the Haitian residency in the Dominican Republic. Danticat reframes the narrative of the Parsley Massacre (Operación Perejil), a mass killing mandated by dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina targeting all ethnic Haitians within the Dominican border. The massacre resulted in the murder of approximately 30,000 people. The Farming of the Bones impresses upon readers the importance of sharing stories from those who have been subjugated.

Words from the Author: In the following quote from the novel, a group of Haitians share their stories about the horrors of the Trujillo regime. The narrator observes: “As they ate, people gathered in a group to talk. Taking turns, they exchanged tales quickly, the haste in their voices sometimes blurring the words, for greater than their desire to be heard was the hunger to tell. One can hear it in the fervor of the declarations, the obscenities shouted when something could not be remembered fast enough, when a stutterer allowed another speaker to race into his own account without the stutterer having completed his” (209).

About the Author: Edwidge Danticat is an award-winning novelist and short story writer who started her career with the semi-autobiographical novel Breath, Eyes and Memory (1994). Born in Haiti, Danticat foregrounds the experiences of Haitians and Haitian Americans in her writing. She remains one of the most influential voices in the Afro-diasporic literary community, as she has edited several Haitian literary collections and cultural texts such as The Butterfly’s Way (2001) and Haiti Noir (2011). She has also written the family memoir Brother I’m Dying as well as the short story collections Krik? Krak (1996), The Dew Breaker (2004), and, most recently, Everything Inside (2019).

Over the Waves and Other Stories / Sobre Las Olas y Otros Cuentos was first published in Cuba in 2008. The collection debuted in the United States when Emmanuel Harris II translated it into English. In order to maintain the authentic feel of Martiatu's writing, the 2009 University of Chicago edition is a bilingual compilation of her stories, which provides more accessibility for readers on either side of the Spanish/English language barrier than what monolingual readers have when engaging other editions. Over the Waves and Other Stories displays the lives of Afro-Cuban identities from different walks of life (from performers and Catholic school nuns to revolutionaries). Additionally, Martiatu confronts Afro-Cubans’ experiences with sexism, colorism, racism, and discrimination. Her stories invite readers into the intimate spaces of Afro-Cubanidad by discussing its unique art, music, and religious practices.

Words from the Author: In a scene from the short story “Time and Again,” an Afro-Cuban artist, whose work draws on fragments of her imagination, confronts her identity in ways that humanize her in a world that works to do the opposite. “Reflected in the mirror would be a harsh face, or another young one, or an old one that she didn’t recognize as her own, yet didn’t reject as foreign. She would lean over the mirror, and all those faces and feelings crowded together in a way that made her head spin more and more. But the eyes, the eyes were always the same. Her eyes” (65).

About the Author: Before her death in 2013, Inés María Martiatu was an Afrocubana scholar, author, activist, and theater critic. Although her stories, drama, essays, and theories are understudied in the English-speaking academy, her work is critically recognized in Spanish-language academic spaces. She was also known for her contributions to Black feminism, particularly in regard to Afro-Cuban femme persons and women. Martiatu contributed to defining Black feminist epistemologies with her co-edited 2011 book Afrocubanas: History, Thought, and Cultural Practices (Creolizing the Canon), in which she and Daisy Rubiera Castillo highlight the history and breadth of Afro-Cuban feminism and make linkages to Black feminisms in the United States.

To view a video on Martiatu, please click this link here:  https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=671048766808485  (in Spanish)

Elizabeth Acevedo captures the complicated relationships between fathers and daughters in Clap When You Land (2020). The novel follows two Dominican sisters, Camino and Yahaira, who are geographically separated by their father’s double life and secrets. In this way, Acevedo captures the detriment and disconnect that machismo (a behavior and/or practice that encourages male-identifying persons to be not only “manly” and self-reliant, but also violent and intolerant of anyone or thing that opposes this mindset) causes within the Latinx and Latino American diaspora. Acevedo conveys the daughters’ emotions due to the personal struggles they face by writing the dual-coming of age novel in poetic form. In addition, Clap When You Land reckons with unexpected death, forgiveness, sorrow, and grief to reveal how the messiness of loss and the exposure of family secrets can hurt families but also unite them.

Words from the Author: The following quote shows the complexities of machismo by maintaining the daughter’s adoring recollection of her father. She recounts, “The little kids would cheer, climb his back, so he would become a human surfboard too, I would say, “Eres es mi papi; he is mine all mine.” Papi learned to swim in water that wanted to kill him. The ocean can’t be so different; shouldn’t be any different. If any man could take a hard dive come up breathing, it should be the one who practiced for just that his entire life” (40).

About the Author: Elizabeth Acevedo is an award-winning poet and novelist of Afro-Dominican descent. A prolific and influential Young Adult fiction writer, Acevedo often infuses her poetry into her novels. She won the Boston Globe Horn Book Prize for Best Children’s Fiction and the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2018 for her debut novel The Poet X, which is also a Carnegie Medal winner. Acevedo’s other publications include Inheritance: A Visual Poem (2022), With the Fire On High (2019) and the chapbook Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths (2016).

This debut poetry collection explores a community of Afro-Mexicans and their relationships with Black American and Mexican American communities. In We Are Owed (2021), Brown responds to mestizaje culture, which prioritizes the mixture of European and Indigenous heritages, by highlighting the importance of Afro-Mexican experiences. The poems exemplify the ways diverse Black folks survive and thrive despite the anti-Black practices that exist in and around their communities. Thus, themes in Brown’s collection broadly connect her poems to the African American women’s writing tradition. 

Words from the Author: In a 2020 interview, Brown offers an expansive definition of the African diaspora. She explains, “This is why I am interested in history… [the] histories of Black people in Mexican, Mexican American, and Latin American spaces. I am learning that lineage is not always sacred (sometimes it is violent). I think a lot about relationality, though. I have a responsibility to Black people everywhere in [the] diaspora. One small thing I can do is share what I know about their historical presence in places where they are assumed to never have existed, like in Mexico (or Latin America in general) during the transatlantic slave trade.”

About the Author: Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet from the Southside of San Antonio, TX. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Sana Sana, published by Game Over Books in 2020. Her work explores queer Black personhood in Mexican American spaces, Black relationality, girlhood, loneliness, and care. Brown holds a B.A. in Mexican American Studies and African Diaspora Studies from UT Austin, an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh, and an M.L.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of North Texas. She is a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion who recognizes that she owes much of her practice to Black performance communities led by Black women poets from the South. Writing, performing, and teaching poetry for over ten years, Brown's lesson plans for the classroom, Spanish translations of her poems, and other resources are available on her website at  arianabrown.com .

To read a 2020 interview with Brown, please visit  The Adroit Journal .

Rita Indiana’s Tentacle (2018) follows the life of young maid, Acilde Figueroa, who discovers herself at the heart of a voodoo prophecy in which the survival of the planet is dependent on her. Indiana pushes the boundaries of gender, sex, and cisheteronormativity, a discourse based on the assumption that identifying with the sex one is assigned at birth and desiring the opposite sex are norms preferred and privileged over any other gender identity or sexual orientation. Tentacle's plot sends Acilde on a journey that requires her to transition into a man with the help of a sacred anemone. By shifting the main character’s gender, Indiana questions gender fluidity and directs the reader to consider transgender protagonists. In addition to fostering conversations about gender and sex, the novel considers the effects of climate change as the protagonist’s ultimate goal is to save the ocean and marine life.

Words from the Author: In this tense opening scene from Tentacle, Indiana describes a near-future Dominican Republic after an environmental disaster that leaves the other side of the island quarantined. “Recognizing the virus in the black man, the security mechanism in the tower releases a lethal gas and simultaneously informs the neighbors, who will now avoid the building's entrance until the automatic collectors patrolling the streets and avenues pick up the body and disintegrate it. Acilde waits until the man stops moving to disconnect and returns to cleaning the window panes, encrusted on a daily basis with sticky soot” (1).

About the Author: Rita Indiana Hernández Sánchez is a Dominican writer, musician, performer, and visual artist. Named after her great-grandmother, she frequently omits her last name and publishes as Rita Indiana. A musical artist that interprets Afro-Caribbean rhythms and electric beats, Sanchez is also known as “La Montra,” a colloquial term for “the monster” or “the beast,” to her fans. She has produced two albums, published five novels, and written numerous poems, short stories, and newspaper columns. Her body of fiction weaves together a number of recurring themes related to identity formation in the postmodern Caribbean, such as the interplay between the local and the global, the representation of queer subjectivities, and critiques of class- and race-based discrimination.

O Último Ancestral is an urban fantasy that contains elements of Afrofuturism, a cultural, aesthetic, and political movement that centers narratives of Black people, heritage, and history. Published in 2021, the novel explores the technological future of African faith and culture as well as the history of Brazil in the Obabmo slum, which is located on the outskirts of the Nagast District. This region holds nearly the entire Black population exiled by the Cygens, an upper class of cyborg persons who have reinstated racial segregation. The protagonist, Eliah, seeks a better life for himself and his sister when he discovers he carries the spirit of the Last Ancestor, a powerful entity capable of saving the Obabmos. Therefore in the novel, Santos reimagines Brazil’s social and cultural history in a dystopian future by drawing parallels between the racial, socioeconomic, and spiritual tensions that currently exist in the nation. Not yet translated from Brazilian Portuguese, O Último Ancestral represents how Afro-Brazilians have similar experiences to other Afro-Latino American and Latinx communities across the diaspora.

Words from the Author: Speaking about his goal to rescue Afro-Brazilian history in his writing by adapting his Twitter threads into published novels, Ale Santos affirms, “I want to help, in some way, to rebuild the popular Brazilian stereotype on people of color, of Africa and all Africans in the diaspora, as well as exterminate the racist and Eurocentric imagination.”

About the Author: Ale Santos is an Afro-Brazilian author, podcaster, game blogger, columnist, and instructor. He has won various awards for his blog writing on games. He was named the Afrofuturist Writer Finalist of Jabuti 2020, one of the 50 most creative by the Wired Festival and the winner of the Yes to Racial Equality 2020 cast. Santos believes that his love of writing and communication came from his love of fiction.

Use the following link to read the full interview “Ale Santos and the Rescue of Afro-Brazilian History”:  https://atlanticoonline.com/en/ale-santos-and-the-rescue-of-afro-brazilian-history/