Plantains and Our Becoming by Melania Luisa Marte

Author:Melania Luisa Marte [Marte, Melania Luisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

6,000-year-old wisdom.

I’ve forgotten.

There is room for both of us.

But how?

Meet me under our Black.

Are we safe here?

Land Of Mountains, Tourism & Lambónismo

The Dominican Republic & Haiti receive

more than 6 million tourists per year;

Christopher Columbus is said to have been the first.

The first to reach someone else’s paradise and call it yours.

The one to pillage and persecute and then become a national hero.

His statue stands mighty and tall in Santo Domingo.

To be the first slave port of the Americas and to be romantically entangled

With your colonizer is to master the art of lambónismo.

Gold pendants atop a garden of armor

and this country is said to be alive and well.

A paradise for those who tour along the beach

but won’t dare enter its jungles without at least

six police cars trailing or paying off the government.

Or trading gold for asylum.

They say that when this land goes under water

they will send boats or planes.

Small enough for one percenters whose children study in Europe.

Won’t dare get a degree from a country under siege. Or ruin.

Death plaguing the countryside. Swollen babies fat

with the salt of invasive poachers. I mean tourists.

I mean curious eyes. I mean stargazing for gold mines.

I mean contaminating the river water, polluting the air.

I mean, it’s no wonder our world is always ending.

We, children of plátanos, always gotta learn to play in everyone

else’s backyard and somehow feel at home. They always find

a way to pilfer and spoil what was natural for good reason.

What if the land and the fruit were forbidden from us so that

we may die? And if you choose to not die, how will they label you then?

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