There is a silence in which we the Black people dwell – of everything unsaid and unsayable. Of curses cut off before a single syllable is uttered, of screams that would rend the blue of the sky and throw the planet off axis should they be voiced, so deep-seated their source and puissant their intensity that were our oppression any less severe they would rupture our body.  

Sometimes a fragment escapes us. 

The prophets have attempted to cull these fragments and weave them into coherence; thus were the blues and jazz born. 

Sometimes one of us has honed a sword out of the inner fire fed by swallowed rage, and birthed revolutions. 

Still, we have remained displaced, strangers in lands we have cultivated for centuries; yet they remain not our own. 

Limb torn from limb – shoulder dislocated from socket – kneecap crushed – jaw displaced – wrists wrung – neck twisted – poison their blood – curdled screams . . . In the marble temples of the noonday sun hang black sacrifices to white fetishes of Grecian gods.  

* * *

I dreamt of Harlem before I ever set foot in the United States. 

My mother dreamt of a city of spindly steak edifices scoring a night sky turned muddy gray in the haze of too many artificial lights. In utero, I dreamt the same. 

At the age of four, I lost La Habana as paradise when I first experienced a false limitation: you are only this, so you cannot trespass here. Chaos only ever results from the attempted imposition of a detached, preconceived idea of order on organic cosmos.

You may choose one point in space. You may take a compass and center it on that point, and round it draw a circle. Revel in the pale delights of the enclosure you have yourself delineated in the smallness of your imagination, but never claim that beyond its circumference lies nothing else. 

Beneath the marble halls of the gleaming city dreaming nautilus dreams ran rivers of blood — the glaring white of the marble glutting itself on the life-force of our people, vampiric abstractions given life and breath by our pain. 

In time I learnt that if you close your eyes so that you cannot see, then the vampires cannot see you.

Language still held meaning then, for as I surely as I spoke so did the sun in its dawning, the fireflies at dusk in their green luminescence, and the eloquent murmur of the sea, ever present, ever nurturing, no matter how far inland one traveled. 

But at the age of six, I learnt that the language you do not speak determines who you are assumed to be and what rights you are assumed to have. 

And so I came to mistrust language as I had come to mistrust sight, and re-dedicated my energies to trying to save her to whom I cannot give voice and that which I cannot name.

This language is a willful blindness hiding, behind the objectivizing gaze, that which cannot be said. 

The center never held, contrary to what their poets say; centers emanate from all points at once, the circumference as wide or as narrow as our desire, and nothing is excluded from our heaven.