Tu También

Have you ever heard something you know you shouldn’t have?

I was in my hometown of Moca one summer,

In the back of the family car with my Tías in front

And they told me about how when Trujillo was president, 

People would be profiled and made to say the word “Perejil”

Because Haitians couldn’t pronounce it the way Dominicans do.

They told me about how our government would make black Haitians and Dominicans dig their own graves,

And that’s not what I mean by something I shouldn’t have heard,

What I know I shouldn’t have heard was their laughter as they told me.

I recall telling my uncle about a trip I was taking to San Juan de La Maguana, by the Haitian border

I wish I hadn’t heard him say

“Esos negros se van a poner locos cuando vean a esa morenita”

I wish I had looked into his face,

The same shade of mahogany wood shared by so many of our compatriots,

So many of our heroes,

So many of the people we love.

How do you inject a phrase with love?

How can you speak so that your undertones explain how much you want someone to grow? 

How much potential you see in them?

How could I have told him in a way he could accept that,

“Tío, tu eres un negro también,

Y te amo así. Te amo, negro.”

I remembered that my grandfather, born in Las Matas de Farfán, also by the Haitian border,

The same dark-skinned father of my giggling Tías,

Was almost murdered by Trujillo’s men

For being in the “wrong” place and in the “wrong” skin

How he was lucky enough to be known by convenient people,

How only a tiny factor could have sent our entire bloodline into oblivion 

Like the bloodlines of so many others

My heart sank at the historical pattern that if it didn’t happen to you

It might as well not be history

I couldn’t find the humor in stealing a people’s laughter.

It took me leaving the comfort of my own home

To see how my blackness sentenced me to oppression

A blackness I did not know I possessed until it could be used to justify my dehumanization

I cannot call myself wise

If I close my eyes

When my privilege shifts back

I wish I’d had the words to tell my loved ones that all it would take is a change of scenery

For Our skin, and for Our accents

To become a death sentence too.

There is no reason why an island with so much rhythm should be so tone death

After all, the ones who told us we were somehow better

Had us two-steppin’ in the same chains.

Marta María Burgos Berigüette was born in Moca, Espaillat in the Dominican Republic, and grew up in The Bronx. This poem was inspired by a performance of “Eddie’s Perejil” at Syracuse University (by Edward Paulino and directed by Samantha Galarza), where a young Dominican in New York City learns of the 1937 Haitian Massacre and has to reflect on Dominican history.