From Agony to Hope, From Healing to Power: Writing Poetry to Exist

Escritura Pública is a non-profit committed to uplifting women’s voices through writing and wellness practices. This edited number in collaboration with La Libreta stems from the enthusiastic spirit of the women who make up our organization’s community as well as La Libreta’s founder trust and invitation to partner with us. ¡Gracias a todas!

As a Caribbean scholar, I have spent nearly two decades reading literary texts from across the region and listening to peoples’ real-life experiences on the ground through community storytelling. Half of that time, I was doing so while living in the diaspora for a decade. For the past two years, after an unplanned return to the island in 2020, I have held space for over 100 women committed to telling their stories by creatively engaging with storytelling, poetry, and wellness practices through Escritura Pública.

This is the first set of texts from our organization that was not tied to specific topics, unlike the texts that typically come out of our community workshops, which are accessible to women from all backgrounds through scholarships. And yet, the writers participating have all arrived at similar themes: the often unbearable act of resistance of living on our island as women, and the sense that our island often feels like it’s slipping through our fingers. I have encountered this before, for example in the ruins of Cuban literary works from the “Special Period” with which my own poem engages. What I have not been able to experience in other literary works is the depth of the embodiment with which these voices speak to the colonial violence that Puerto Ricans forcefully endure every day. How they contain both the agony of not knowing if we will exist tomorrow, individually or collectively, and the hope that we will in fact exist as long as our poetry exists.

This is not fortuitous; on the contrary it comes from a very intentional work on our organization’s part to make the literary arts and creative writing accessible as tools for cultural change. This means that while some of the writers included in this number are professional published writers, others engage with writing and poetry as a way to express their demands for a better island as well as process their emotions. This also means that all of us, me included, come from diverse backgrounds often underrepresented in more canonical literature and literary circles. We are also models, doulas, service industry workers, educators, freelance workers. We come from rural zones, from caseríos (projects), from the diaspora. The list is longer, but my point is that privilege of any kind hasn’t been a determinant of whether or not women’s voices are included here. That is what we seek in Escritura Pública: to make visible the diverse experiences that women face on the island every day and to use literature as a space for reflection and rehearsal to change our realities by connecting with ourselves and each other in community.

So, it is no surprise to me that, as often happens with every collective publication we produce, there is an unintended overlap in the themes of the texts; an overlap that reflects how our realities are interconnected, the ways in which we might consider to be interdependent. We enthusiastically present our first bilingual selection of poems, in partnership with another non-profit, with the hopes that readers can also intertwine their realities with ours, in healing and power.


A brief note on translations
Luckily, in the past few years, the distance between those of us on the island and our much larger Puerto Rican diaspora has grown much smaller. However, I still remember how I would hear folks on the island tell me that those who live outside cannot truly understand what it means to stay and endure life here. That is a valid perspective, and I understand it now more than ever before. At the same time, I am interested in the ways we can continue to bring our diaspora closer to us, because, as has become more widely acknowledged in recent years, the colonial dispossession that separates them geographically isn’t so different from the one oppressing us on the island. When I decided that this would be our first bilingual publication, I was thinking of the first-, second-, and third-generation Puerto Rican and Latina women in the US who might’ve not had the privilege of learning Spanish. Yes, because when you live outside your ancestral land, learning Spanish is often shaped by privilege. It can depend on factors such as whether you live in a conservative or liberal neighborhood, whether you’re bullied at school for speaking your language, or whether your working-class parents have enough time to teach you the language when they come home after work. My hope with these translations is to share them with these women (and people of all genders) who may find reflections of their own experiences in them. These translations seek to bring folks from our and other diasporas closer to us, to our realities, as told by women in their own words. They are an invitation to see where our realities might overlap, so that we can create spaces that allow us to grow closer together in solidarity, especially in times when we need it more than ever.


Thanks to Anahit Manoukian for translation support and to our podcast producer Vladimir Pérez for the recording support.