The Brooklyn Rail

At the beginning of each semester, one of the first things I do with my students is ask them to come up with a list of the objects that are no longer in their lives. Then we think about the sounds, too, that have disappeared. Then we consider the vanished spaces that housed those objects and their sounds. Then we summon the people in those places, the friends and lovers who would otherwise be strangers but for such spaces of connectivity. Then we conjure the things we once did together: our shared practices, the erstwhile rituals that are no longer with us by virtue of emerging media, the conditioning of temporality through technology that turns everything new old and everything old unusable. My own list, like so much of my own life, is rooted in the experience of looking; since our media reorients how we see, our ways of appearing, too, have changed, a construction of difference reinscribed within visual technologies that measure likeness to codify categories of race, ethnicity, gender, and even sexuality, returning us to ourselves as an unrecognizable apparition.

… I sliver
web 2.0 into tercets
use my roommate’s face
wash for the novelty

I write, in a poetry collection forthcoming from Roof Books this fall called Windows 85, rooted in the glitchy friction of networked intimacy and the mediation of self across the screens of surface and language; the outmoded media we revive and return to in order to recover our pasts, and maybe also our sense of the transferable present.

Whenever I think about the sounds associated with objects, spaces, persons, and the things we did together, my memory brings me back to photo albums; how so much of my childhood and adolescence was spent gathered with my parents and brother, looking at photos of my past and my pre-history, the familial and material relations that move underneath the assumption of historical record, coursing against our feet like a secret river. How I would only know about the people who are my cousins, uncles, and aunts because of the album; how I could only have seen the homes of my parents and the places I had come from in the paper photographs that the album contained, inserted between folds of translucent plastic.

I’m often thinking about such ritual displacement as a first-gen US citizen who has had to learn to live through faking it, and more generally, mushfake, the ways in which we make do in want of the real thing, not accounting for the fact that the real thing might not have ever left us after all. In a culture of proxy copies, our bodies, too, have become substituted for another. Our faces give us away. But so too do we give away our faces. My face, like yours, is an address, unique to each person yet easily accessible, transferrable. If I wrote a book that masqueraded as a photo album or the reverse, what would it look like; how would it reformat memory and experience, how might it retrieve all the things we once thought lost? Absent a visual representation, how could the photo album force me toward another sight or site of recognition? To conjure a version of the past through clipping and reassembly and the velocity of montage to pass on the intergenerational friction of migration: the variegated marks of transition and dissolve that remain even after any ostensible arrival.

I needed to write it two ways, by which I mean: I needed to see it twice—to make it appear, but also, to make it disappear. I’ve often thought that diasporic writers have had to reconstitute our omissions through excess; that what marks our work is not our construction of a particular genre so much as our innate pursuit of destabilizing generic constructions and the borders they escort. I called the creative nonfiction North by North/west (West Virginia University Press, 2025), a reference to the Hitchcock film the speaker sets out to remake, or reenact, forgetting for a moment if he’s actor or producer or viewer, or all of these, none of them. I called the novel VHS (CLASH Books, 2025), named for the videocassettes to which the unnamed narrator begins to transfer his parents’ different stories of migration, exile, and dislocation. The books were inversions of the other; fiction or nonfiction, I think of them each as counterfeits and counterparts.

My role as a researcher in the fields of migration and media studies facilitated the production of a third, connector of tissues both modal and aesthetic, a personal criticism interested in marrying theory with civic discourse, creative expression and political practice, in pursuit of an interpretive mode of reading—to read event and encounter as one would read the text—to reassess literature and art with lived experiences: a monograph under contract with Lever Press called Drift Net about how migrants have forecasted and reshaped new media practices and norms, producing a political subjectivity that resists subjectification.

I needed to write it again, to write it over, which is to say to write the story from scratch, where the “beginning” is neither tethered to an assumed origin nor a single source but rather a crossroads of connectivity and dispersal. Between them—between us—the common accompaniment of the image, a carefully arranged series of ghosts.

We the People

The photograph predates the memory, which doesn’t exist. Since I was three years old, or maybe four. It must have been 1989, or 1990, because the palm fronds are nearly neon green, the midday sun a shade of orange, pink, and bright yellow. My reflected ghost from the future intervening, or interrogating, the printed surface that I’ve photographed again—confusing one copy for another—bringing the past closer or else relating the distance, such that my doughy toddler arms and the rectangular device held against my chest might all be seen as another segment of the fibrous palm tree, which holds half my face, the three-year-old face, three-and-a-half years going on four, in shadow.

I am holding a bottle of beer, so small its sepia barrel barely reaches beyond my open hand. The person behind the camera, probably my dad, took the photo after he’d placed the bottle in my hands, and because he’d placed the bottle in my hands. Baby and his bottle. That’s what the caption says, written in cursive blue ink on the back of the resin-coated paper image, if you’ve taken it out of its plastic sheet, flipped it around in your own hand. The bottle didn’t have any beer in it, at least not the kind many people might expect. It was a Malta Hatuey, the non-alcoholic Cuban cola brewed with molasses, barley, and hops, whose faint carbonation was my early entry point into soda pop, the thrill of carrying bubbles on the tongue, unless the thrill came from the risk of their abrupt dispersal. Look closer. The man on the bottle, his hair in a bun, his ears wreathed in ringlets, is framed in portrait, in profile, his eyes cast toward the viewer’s left, if you’re holding the front of the bottle as you look at it. Look again. His head lunges forward; the neck kneels in deference or out of some uncertain strain; the nape rims the bottle’s alphabetical insignia, above which the image ends, making way for the oblong U that I confused, for many years after, as a V, a brand which shares its name with a town in Cuba, itself an homage to the Taíno chief who was burned there, at the stake, by the Spaniards. A Taíno chief who, after departing the Hispaniola province of Guahaba (present-day Haiti) by canoe to warn the Indigenous people of Cuba about the conquistadores’ imminent arrival: initiated a pan-Caribbean resistance; mobilized enslaved Africans and Indigenous tribes; was captured and interrogated; refused conversion to Christianity; and requested to go to Hell, since Hell, as it was confirmed to him by the Franciscan friar that provided his last rites, was a place absent the Spanish, on account of their devout faith, their supreme piety.¹ Flip the photograph back, so that my half-open eyes are again facing yours. Your own eyes, looking back. The fluttering eyelids like curtains, swaying above a stage.

How did a Taíno chief end up on this bottle of beer? Which is to say: why?

Hatuey, in profile, is turning his gaze north, turning his gaze west. From Haiti, he leans, throat jutted, scanning the sea that separates him from Cuba’s eastern coast, knowing what he will do in spite of everything that has already occurred, and why, which is progress, the eradication of the present. He is looking, not to the future, but to the past.

My bottle of Malta Hatuey isn’t an álbum de vistas—the popular genre of viewing albums that dominated the European imaginary of the earth’s Western Hemisphere from the sixteenth century all the way through the turn of the twentieth, when photographs replaced copper engravings and wood-cut etchings—but it can be read as an extant artifact of the state’s implementation of scopic recognition to rationalize the subjugation of persons contained within a frame and ventriloquized by captions, a verbal-visual exhibit in miniature, in which the shift from imagined to exterminated bodies became, for the Latin American governments that employed them in pursuit of the production of nation, merely a matter of form.

Legalized slavery may have finally ended in Cuba on October 7, 1886, but the complex assemblage of surveillance, travel narrative, documentary, and portraiture to fortify an unbroken chain of mass eviction—by death or deportation—economic exploitation, and white supremacy continues without interruption. Remember the Castro regime’s implementation of the film camera as a utensil for socialist realism, the photographic image as a unit of naturalized reality in the realm of art as in life; remember the link between the wholesale usurpation of what can be counted, that is registered, as real, and the policies of totalitarianism. The history of resistance in the realms of politics and pedagogy and art reminds us that what may be concretized on the level of material action must first be imagined. But it works just the same for the predominant powers, a rehearsal of visual imperialism that exceeds the theater of Latin America.

Remember that to be seen is also to be looked at, exposed and thus brought to light, kindled, convertible: the etymological death mask of any “image” mounted in the word’s Latin origins. I often wonder about the consequences of visibility: a culture of enforced outing, or the metrics of identification and recognition, of being out, against which non-legibility—non-visibility—is equivalent to mankind’s passing into disposability; the upshot of representation when the image, circulated and celebrated, begins to replace the real. And the residue, too, of a revolution premised on the independence and equality of its most vulnerable citizens in a nation with the second-longest history of slavery, a revolutionary regime which, nevertheless, reproduced the racial violence of the republics it replaced.

Patria o muerte, venceremos, so said Fidel Castro after Fulgencio Batista was ousted. Homeland or death, we will prevail. Who is the “we” of Cuba’s national motto? Decades later, during the initial outbreak of COVID-19 and the all-day demonstrations in the city of my father’s birth protesting the policies and practices of newly appointed First Secretary Miguel Díaz-Canel, “Patria y Vida” became another rallying call for the Cuban people, who had to invert post-revolutionary rhetoric in order to reconsider its failed promises. Homeland and life.

An alternate title to this combination could be called “Che Guevara’s collection of Rolexes.”

“But before the white man,” Guillermo Cabrera Infante writes of his native Cuba, “were the Indians. The first to arrive—they came, like all of them, from the continent—were the Ciboneys. Then came the Taínos, who treated the Ciboneys like servants. … In turn the Taínos and the Ciboneys were at the mercy of the Caribs … the Caribs were fierce and proud and had a motto: ‘Ana carina roto’—‘Only we are people.’”

But before Hatuey turned up here, in my outstretched hands on my bottle of Malta, on this lithographed portrait framed in profile, in this photograph that predates memory, he was a martyr. The first hero of Cuba, they say, except he was burned to make Cuba what it is and what it would become.

Only we are people. Only we are people. Only we are people. Only we are people. Only we are people. We the people. We the people. We the people of the United States. Without a pause, without a comma. Order … Union … Justice … domestic Tranquility … the common defense … the general Welfare … and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. Since only we are people. We the people. United. The Carib’s motto, terrifying in its calm calculations, merges with the Preamble to the US Constitution; a new verse shrieks between my ears, and I can’t rewind; I cannot turn my gaze or forget how it is I arrived here, with you. When my neighbors ask what it is I’m working on all day and into the night, I tell them: a rough translation of North by Northwest, by which I mean a movie, a series of film strips, or the scrapbook through which they continue to be inserted, and recombined. This is why the arrangement of the album is just as important as the white space that surrounds each visual-verbal inscription. I am interested in what the images cannot say.

1. The priest tells us: In memory of Christ and the Twelve Apostles, the Spanish forces would hang Taínos in groups of thirteen before burning them alive.