I am sitting on a balcony looking east, watching the sun rise at Hacienda Margarita in Puerto Rico. The imperceptible movement of the sun rising reminds me that I can see, but that I cannot see. This blindness is a clear account of why this place, this geography instils passion for our Island, making Lareños fierce citizens, making Lares the cradle of resistance against colonization,carrying the perceptual aura of a Land, a space where you can still feel El Grito… a long-brewing revolutionary call to arms taking place on 23 of September of 1868 against the over three-century long genocide by the Spanish invasion, remaining the strategic place of resistance again against the US’s own later invasion in 1898, remaining a namesake and metaphor to a scream of desperation and a call to arms against colonial injustice.
On this particularly crisp morning, the depth of that layered horizon intensifies the myriad soft sounds the birds make and the light breeze of aromas the flowers and trees release, all part of that blindness, all impossible to quantify, but surely palpable to discern. And as the sun slowly rises and softly warms my skin, it all not only amplifies the scream for the profound affection I feel towards our home islands, but it also augments the sense of privilege I feel for being here, for being alive, and being able.
This ‘privilege’ does extend from the deep and sincere gratitude I feel for being one of the few who can sit here, on the balcony of this beautiful farmhouse occupied by generations of monied families, Patrons of this beautiful and huge coffee plantation of over 1500 cuerdas (1cuerda=.97acres). It is being able to have this spectacular experience, to see this sunrise, and then walk the ruins of this hacienda, of this Earth, of this Tierra which deepens the multiple meanings that this word carries… Tierra, as complex stratigraphic matter nourishing everything that lives, everything we know (and that we still do not). Tierra as a rural space for farming and industrially colonize harvesting. Tierra as the home nation we treasure and passionately defend. And Tierra as home planet that allows us to live.
It is this feeling of ‘privilege’ that quickly turns into a psychotic Double Bind impossible to ignore.
That, through a slow and deliberate process of un-learning, this privilege turns into an overloaded disgust, an impossible load of traumatic horror and bloody violence; of the invasion of the Caribbean, and of the absurd, racist, systematic, homicidal, and genocidal destruction and erasure of pre-Columbian societies, of their people, materials, techniques, and mythical & environmental resources, including the consequent enslavement of their survivors, all followed by the abduction of entire African societies. And when it ceased to be ‘viable’, it continued by way of the same instrumentalization to tacitly enslave the mostly Taíno-European Jíbaro laborer (which used to be categorized as ‘mestizo’), all in order to make the Earth ‘real’, to raze and destroy the landscape, one that is so full of the beauty that allows us to breathe and live, and that is simultaneously bathed in the dismembered guts of blood; the deliberately rendered invisible guts and blood of those human societies who labored under psychotic torture, certainly without any reward.
And it is these deliberately repressed, say, made-invisible guts and bloods of said human societies that are suppressed into void memories of the flora and the fauna, of the more-than-human lives that were also razed and/or kidnapped from their bioregions, colonized, and systematically amputated in the name of paternal erect industrial white European North American imperial reflex.
-by Luis Berrios-Negron