tierra natal
where are you from? from from
where were you born? where did your life begin?
a place before memory a transient place a temporary place
prehistorical rootless
irrecoverable
la guajira
el cerrejón
aguas caribeñas
llanos guajireños
montaña sagrada
tierra indígena
raw materials abound ripe for the taking in a “backward nation”1 in a “lunar landscape”2
an open pit coal mine
a deep water port
a railway to export
a road to connect and divide
local concerns ignored
cheap labor exploited
market interests favored
tax write-offs and contract loopholes
native land raped
while national credit improves burial grounds excavated3
while profit margins rise
this is economic advancement (for whom?)
a land made productive (for what?)
all in the name of modernization
colonization
“The white man eats coal… but neither us nor our animals eat coal, that’s not our life.”4
“Any process of development logically does violence to social structures [and produces] cultural ethnocides.”5
albania
a neat row of houses en plena guajira a looping plan self-contained
a project of building destroying making unmaking creating life sowing death a project of change
fertility springs from the desert en vientres en jardines papaya seedlings outpace toddlers new life blooms in a place with a new name seeds planted sprout and bear fruit una fecundidad tropical an endless exchange of onesies and diapers frutos del cambio arriving only to leave
all the while progress mounts its machines roaring dredging dig here to fill there new routes cut through the landscape long straight desolate highways railroads laid from the first spike labor scars the land bastiones del progreso arriving to stay
in utero // in flight
i am waterborne and airborne in womb in transit
i feel my mother’s heart beat faster envelop me in its flutter as the tiny shuddering aircraft rises the landscape falls away dusty gold meets sapphire edged in jade endless with possibility a land anything but empty
del caribe
i imagine the hospital is small low-ceilinged clinically fluorescent corridors in pale chartreuse slow fans turn overhead legend has it i await my father’s breathless arrival to make my entry into the world
9:10 a.m.
5 march 1986
i am two days old when the nuns pierce my ears tiny flowers in gold filigree each cradling a grain of cloudy emerald
these are holes that will never close
trozos de tierra natal
in a matter of days we are aloft again the flutter of my mother’s heart still close against me a me not yet differentiated from her a fleshy intimacy all our own mi primer hogar
flooded with bright desert sun through gauzy hand-sewn curtains among small artifacts of the many places before mine i lie on a scuffed end table at the beginning of life rodeada de flores
in a matter of months we are aloft again this time in a commercial aircraft outbound one-way still my mother’s heart beats against me fluttering on the brink of something new
i’m napping in my passport photo a tiny new citizen of a land as yet unknown to me
is this where i’m from?
papayitas
she split the lurid orange flesh instantly radiating sweetness scooped the seeds into her palm a clutch of slimy gray orbs
“just put them in some dirt, don’t bury them too deep, and you’ll see— they’ll sprout in no time.”
i raise my eyebrows a bit incredulous but this coming from the woman who grows pygmy manguitos in michigan and tends to tropical plants like valiant compatriots bellos comigrantes they flourish at her touch her green thumb my inheritance
in a matter of days a tiny emerald sprout pokes through the soil then another and another and another another another another windowsill papayitas seed, soil, sun, and water they gaze from their potted confines onto an urban landscape foreign to their tropical souls yet their roots deepen their stalks strengthen their leaves open pruned and transplanted to flourishing
they loved the summer and they’ll brave the winter perched by the radiator false hope of warmth under a waning sun
they’ll never bear fruit but windowsill papayitas will continue to imagine what it might be like to be home.
1 Gonzalez, Gilbert G. “The rape of Colombia.” Race&Class, Vol. 23, Iss. 4, 1982, pp. 321.
2 “Coal Strip Mine Lifts Colombia’s Export Hopes.” LosAngelesTimes, Nov. 8, 1984. The depiction of native lands rich in geological resources as wastelands is a colonialist discourse used to justify the appropriation of land and exploitation of resources. The Guajira region of coastal Colombia is a scrub desert with limited fresh water and arable land, yet the native people of the region have thrived for generations by living in harmony with the ecology.
3 “Colombia to become major coal exporter.” TheGlobeandMail, Mar. 18, 1985. “To secure land for the road and railway, dozens of cemeteries belonging to Guajira Indians had to be moved. ‘The feasts to rebury the dead lasted up to one week but we paid for it all,” Mr. Teicher [Carbocoal’s marketing manager] said.” For more on Guajiro burial practices, see Pulowi. Edited by Grupo Cinco, Cromotip, Caracas, 1984. Guajiro bury their dead twice: once at the time and place of death, and again after eight to ten years, when the bones are ceremonially excavated, cleaned, and reinterred. “El muerto está tranquilo / cuando sus huesos están limpios.” (135)
4Gutierrez, Alberto Rivera. “Exxon and the Guajiro.” CulturalSurvival Quarterly, Vol. 8, Iss. 2, 1984. This quote from a Guajiro Indian woman “underscored the basic incompatibility between the Guajiro notion of well-being and the Western notion of development” (1). This is in line with how Leanne Betasamosake Simpson illustrates the ecologically harmonious principles practiced by the Indigenous peoples of North America in “Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation.” Decolonization:Indigeneity,Education&Society, vol. 3, no. 3, 2014, pp. 1-25.
5 ibid. This quote from Ricardo Plata, Deputy Manager of El Cerrejón, illustrates how corporate and state powers are implicated in “clinically diagnosing the death of a people” in the name of progress. This “technocrat ethnocide” shrugs off the social, economic, and ecological damage inflicted on native people and their land as the “unavoidable costs” of globalized modern capitalism (2).
All photographs and documents courtesy of Mark and Cecilia Bukowski.