The Brooklyn Rail

Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s adjacent islands is comprised of two previously published collections, both artists’ books, amoná (2013) and subtropical dry (2016). Both books are small and focus on the materiality of the collection: amoná is a 3 by 2.3 inch foldout book that features pictures of the island, while subtropical dry measures 4 by 4 inches and is enclosed in a cardboard case that features a topographic map of Vieques. Newly translated by poet and scholar Urayoán Noel, adjacent islands is an extended meditation on archipelagic consciousness, what Noel has elsewhere called an islote, or islet, poetics that rejects the metonymic hegemony of the island of Puerto Rico as standing in for the unincorporated territory that includes Puerto Rico and the surrounding islands, including Mona (the setting for amoná) and Vieques (the setting for subtropical dry). While we might think of a metonym as saying “Washington” for the government or “the Crown” for the monarchy, Delgado’s poetry reveals a Puerto Rico that stands only for the island itself to the exclusion of everything else. Here, it is particularly telling that while the names Mona and Vieques are drawn from Taíno, Spanish colonizers gave Puerto Rico its name. Thus, when Puerto Rico stands in for the other islands, indigeneity is further erased.

As Noel observes in an interview with Delgado included before amoná, “The adjacent islands in this edition are not just Mona and Vieques (now touching one another on the page without being separated by the main island of Puerto Rico and its hegemony) but also an archipelagic experience of the book where the author, translator, and reader meet in the vertiginous open sky of the page, even under the shadow of empire and its official languages.” In other words, Delgado renders the islands of Mona and Vieques as adjacent and, in doing so, considers what it means to have a politics of being adjacent, of being alongside, one another. Such moments are felt within the pages themselves as Noel’s translations in English are at the top of the page and the original Spanish at the bottom. This creates a mirror-effect such that even though the English and Spanish words are different, their reflection is the same. “The vertiginous open sky of the page” is further heightened by the book’s organization: the amoná side and the subtropical dry side share different orientations such that when the former is right side up, the other is upside down and vice versa. This results in a reading experience that is hand over hand, as if the reader is at the wheel, perhaps driving through the terrain of Mona, or on a boat, traveling between islands.

As this haptic reading experience attests, the secret to these poems lies in the concept of adjacency, of being alongside one another as islands (with Puerto Rico as the missing middle that makes such closeness possible), as people, as people within nature. Delgado refers to these collections as her camping books, and rightly so, as they document her time outdoors and her meditations on what it means to be with others. In subtropical dry, she writes,

After these trips / there’s a fear of roofs, of schedules, of breakfasts alone, / even a fear of individual decisions to be made. / We’ve forged family ties, we’re points / that connect like constellations.” The trip to Vieques, then, creates a community that dissolves off the island, a constellation that cannot be seen under roofs and between schedules.

amoná reiterates the importance of a politics of adjacency. Delgado writes, “The guards say / we should be careful, that a raft full of Dominican / immigrants has washed ashore. But they’re the ones who hold their machine guns tight on a deserted island; they’re the ones who establish the rules of the hunt.” In noting the difference between the campers and the guards via machine guns, the speaker of Delgado’s poem rejects a politics of complicity and instead sides with the Dominican immigrants. In doing so, she recognizes that Mona is also adjacent to the Dominican Republic. In response to one of Noel’s interview questions, Delgado reminds us

that the yola [small boat] that reached Mona is a trap; Mona is not Puerto Rico, there is no ’infrastructure’ nor family nor cellphone signal, just some ruins, a desert overlooking the sea, and the certainty that when any Dominican yola reaches Mona it will lead to the inevitable deportation of all those people who risked their lives on that sea journey.

In short, the guards are there to guard against the yolas coming from the Dominican Republic; their purpose is to deport those who arrived at the “wrong” island. Whereas imagining Mona and Vieques together is a way to escape the hegemony of Puerto Rico, in this instance, the failure to recognize the adjacency between Mona and the Dominican Republic results in a failure of solidarity as Puerto Rico has not created the infrastructure to help the refugees who wash ashore on Mona.

We find an echo of Delgado’s politics of adjacency in the final section of subtropical dry, “No Trespassing.” The section offers a history of activism on the island of Vieques, which is known—if it’s known at all—for the weapons testing the US conducted on the island, namely in the form of bombs whose radioactive materials increased the cancer rates of the population exponentially. One of the postcards that attends the collection reinforces the resistance that subtends the books: a risograph print, saturated in orange, features a person with their back to the camera, wearing a backpack. What they see before them is a sign in Spanish that translates to “No Trespassing. Authorized personnel only. Danger. Explosives.” The back of the postcard reads “I also threw rocks and other things,” emphasizing how the speaker of the poems and the person in the picture face the signs of the state and refuse to abide by them. The sign, after all, rests on a bush and can easily be trampled, in much the same way that fences can be climbed and borders crossed.

The postcards translate the materiality of the artists’ books that form the basis for adjacent islands. For example, the one described above was also used on the cover for one of the smaller, pamphlet-type booklets from the original subtropical dry. The second risograph image is of a horse on a road, with dense foliage in the background. The back of the postcard reads, “Cosmic creature that never figured out its place in the universe.” Juxtaposed with the sign from the first postcard, “the cosmic creature” here is one who crosses the very borders and roads that prevent a politics of adjacency.

The title “No Trespassing” and the chant within the poem, “Pineapples and papayas grow / To all your fences we say No / U.S. Navy’s got to go,” illuminate the US as the actual trespasser. The guards on Mona enforce the US’s colonization of the Puerto Rican archipelago, thus showing how a politics of adjacency is the antidote to a politics of complicity. Delgado’s work and Noel’s translation encourage us to participate in a politics of adjacency by reading these camping books and learning the history that unfolds across amoná and subtropical dry—a history that isn’t given, but is told nevertheless.