DELIRIUM FROM THE UNINCORPORATED US TERRITORY

By Mariana Janer Agrelot

Iwas sitting in my grandparents’ living room listening to the local nightly news when a reporter with a brown bob and wide eyes announced: “The tropical storm has turned into a Category 5 hurricane. It is called ‘Hurricane Maria.’”

The screens went yellow, blue, and red with swirls akin to Van Gogh. The radios were on all over the house and new batteries were bought and stored for when the ones in use failed. There was barking and yelling as water kept pouring and pouring from every orifice in the house. I could hear my dementia-ridden great-grandmother screeching and fighting from the other room, where I had to frantically run to hold her down at times to make sure she did not fall. The signal of the battery-powered radio in her room was scattered as the monotone voice of the newscaster became background noise. My grandma would talk incoherently for hours, screaming in anguish. Other times it would be completely rational things:

“I want to go home, please take me home,” but we couldn’t take her home; we couldn’t even leave the house because the roads were blocked and looters were ravaging the city. In the longevity of the damned night, I began to hear new noises. The battery-powered flashlight by my bed emanated a cranky, mustard yellow noise, screeching as if it were begging to be turned off. I didn’t dare turn off that flashlight. I felt like I was five again and completely afraid of the dark. I was sleepless in the aftermath of the hurricane, in the pitch black, sweaty, sticky nights. Before the hurricane, I hadn’t known what real wind sounded like. It is not the mere swooshes of a light breeze; it is arrows laying siege to my house.

It happened so many years ago that I don’t think anyone cares anymore. It is not on the news, and therefore not on the daily minds of the American people. Even while writing this I feel like I’m complaining, milking a subject that was once heavily discussed only to promote somebody’s political agenda. Puerto Ricans are citizens of America; our passports say it. But suddenly, whenever my trauma was triggered, I was not an American citizen anymore. I was just a childish Puerto Rican, ungrateful for all the slapdash aid that the American government had given the island. Yet, this aid didn’t help that, with every daily action, I felt like screaming at the top of my lungs out of pure fear. Children like me were left in a state of emotional daze, forced to move on quickly and focus on the future.

We weren’t going to achieve progress if I cried. We all wanted to go back to a sense of normalcy so fast that we stunted our emotional growth. I am angry at my school for making me go back so quickly, to feel sweat dripping down into my laboratory notebooks in a drowsy,

asphyxiating uniform. I am angry at my friends and colleagues and family members and the government and mental health services and colonialism and imperialism and the American citizenry. I am angry at you. I am angry at myself. Maybe the people close to me are angry at me too.

Where are we now? What normalcy have we achieved? We have been consumed with chaos for nearly four years and we are still unable to come to terms with the hurricaine’s aftermath. The summer of 2019 was the climax of our anger towards the local and US governments. We ousted the government in a two week long protest when one million people took to the streets. Then, two successive earthquakes startled an already traumatized nation. Now, there are blackouts every day due to a corrupt deal between the US government, our colonial administration, and some money-hungry bondholder grabbers who privatized our already detrimental local power authority. So, in the end, isn’t our quality of life still exactly the same as when the hurricane hit? Was it worth it to move on so fast when no one was ready to accept reality? They’re still there, those same people on top of the castle, and the United States government is selling political positions and cutting up our island like a cake. How can we continue to support the same damn people who created so much suffering?

I think I was in a state where I completely denied my trauma, and now that I am aware, I need to put the pieces back together and come to terms with everything I went through. How is it that every September 20 I mourn the loss of 4,654 people in complete silence? How could I forget the greatest natural disaster I’ve ever witnessed? I have yet to find answers or a way to come to terms with it all. I broke it down once and realized I was one of the lucky few from that fateful day; my house did not collapse on me, and my family survived in one piece. But I still can’t help seeing those yellow, red, and blue swirls on TV and being filled with raging anger and pain. Whenever I smell diesel, I can’t help but fall back into a similar state of delirium. Whenever I hear the wind hit my windows, my back shoots straight up. I do not want to remember this event at all, but it hovers over me every day, at times leaving me speechless. A man once asked me if the “hurricane got my tongue.” It did, and I’m tired.