Image Credits L-R: 1) 16th century image of a Caribbean native house. Plate 113, Histoire naturelle des Indes: The Drake Manuscript in the Pierpont Morgan Library, 2 & 3) Photo by Javier Amador on Unsplash
Rod Carlos Rodriguez, local, esteemed poet and editor, was the judge for the recent fws Rod Carlos Rodriguez Prize for Poetry contest. As part of a new fws series, understanding: beyond geography, being curated to develop better understanding between peoples of different cultural and geographical backgrounds, we invited Rod to write about his place of ancestral heritage: Puerto Rico. He said, “Yes!”
We hope reading Rod’s prose about working on his MFA and what he learned about the indigenous peoples of Puerto Rico brings you a new and better understanding of it’s history, culture, and people.
Enjoy!
An Unexpected Transformation
Working on my MFA in Creative Writing turned out to be a cultural, spiritual, and existential transformation I had not anticipated. Researching, discovering, and uncovering many historical aspects of my cultural past and present as well as attending writing workshops like the one that was conducted by d. ellis phelps, gave me the inspiration to write pieces like “Rooting for Spices (below).” It also helped me to accomplish innovative in-roads with a significant appreciation and thoughtful awareness for Puerto Rico and its turbulent, foundational stories and experiences. Subsequently, I feel a more elemental connection to the island of my ancestors and to mi gente de Puerto Rico.
One aspect of my MFA research that proved to be especially daunting was in relation to the first section of my poetry collection, A History of Echoes. I came up against an enormous lack of authoritative sources when investigating the indigenous peoples (Taino/Borike’n) of Puerto Rico. Even scant knowledge of Puerto Rico’s indigenous tribes and their history was never addressed nor acknowledged by the US public school system when I was growing up. In many instances, schoolteachers discouraged any such questions I asked and instead focused on white, patriarchal histories of the US, painting such figures as George Washington, Davey Crockett, and Christopher Columbus as great men that were destined to be forever seared into the fabric of American consciousness.
It was only as an adult (and then only in the last 25 years) that I began to actively question the white-centric narrative that is still propagated by the US to this day. As I peeled away layer upon layer of the tragedies inflicted by the US on any other group or people deemed a threat (whether real or imagined), the real stories of the minorities and the original peoples of North, Central, and South America became clear to me.
This is best illustrated by a specific source I came across during my research of the Taino stories, culture, and history. The book is titled Puerto Rican Poetry, edited and translated by Roberto Márquez. In book one of the collection, Márquez makes a clear and extremely cogent observation, specifically about the lyrical style called the areyto, and in general on the lack of historical knowledge about the Taino indigenous people of Puerto Rico:
“The creation of a people with an oral tradition, the areyto, would not survive its encounter with the book tradition of the European nations (Columbus and others), who brought holocaust and devastation. Their voice having been stilled or otherwise muted by the cupidity, triumphal clamor, and paternalistic benevolence of their conquerors, the aboriginal population of the island (Puerto Rico) left us no native account or untranslated narratives that relate firsthand the story of their lives and vicissitudes prior to that fateful meeting. There is only the mute witness of their unearthed artifacts, their enduring linguistic legacy, the testimony of their still existing ruins, and the accusation of their bones. Any historical discussion of Puerto Rican poetry must thus begin with recognition and acknowledgement of a hovering and vast ancestral silence.”
~Roberto Márquez
And it is that silence I acknowledge and recognize in my poetry collection, A History of Echoes, and specifically in my poems like “Rooting for Spices”. Archeological sources like Ancient Borinquen: Archeological and Ethnohistory of Native Puerto Rico can make educated guesses on what the political, religious, and spiritual practices of the Borike’n/Taino may have been like, but ultimately, without a documented testimonial directly from the Taino/Borike’n peoples, we are left with one-sided, usually politically motivated accounts.
From the hovering and vast ancestral silence, I’ve tried to give the Taino/Borike’n a voice, however small, for the present and perhaps future generations of writers, historians, and investigators of justice to further the research and the study of the Borike’n/Taíno gente of Puerto Rico.
Rooting for Spices
Caciques live
in my heartbeat,
swim in my corpuscles,
drown in my brown skin,
and are reborn
in my voice.
Their rushing rivers
part my curls,
pour through my
open iris
at 3am,
filter my vision
through mimosa leaves, golden sunsets,
Utuado mountains,
and the Adjuntas pueblo.
Taino paint my breath
in tongues
murmured down to
my toes, my hands,
the edges of my criollo.
Mi gente de
Mayagüez, Bayamon,
and Cabo Rojo
keep feeding, caressing
these roots
fatigued by
a half millennium
fighting güeros, Spanish Crowns,
and the Caribe.
I hear el piratas
whispering through
taste buds
embracing oregano,
cilantro, Sazón
and the body follows,
joins, leads me deep
into El Yunque’s forest,
by diamond emerald
shores,
of Borike’n, of home.
(c) Rod Carlos Rodriguez
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