Santos-Febres’s poems articulate what Christina Sharpe theorizes in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being as being Black in the wake. Sharpe understands contemporary Black life to be marked by what Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlives of slavery.” In other words, the slave ship continues to haunt the lives of Black people, repeating as a myriad of ever-changing manifestations across human history in the wake of chattel slavery. According to Sharpe, “living in the wake on a global level means living the disastrous time and effects of continued marked migrations.” In the context of Boat People, the slave ship resurges as the raft, yawl, and vessel used by migrants to cross the Atlantic, which offers both the possibility of death and opportunity. Thus, Boat People documents new Middle Passages in which inhabitants of “Middle Passage nations” have been forced to flee generation after generation. It also can be read in the term “boat people” itself, which reduces the migrants to the vessel that carries them and parallels what Sharpe refers to as the dehumanizing transformation enacted by the slave ship. “Boat people” was first used in the United States to refer to Vietnamese refugees after the Vietnam War ended in 1975, and subsequently ascribed to Haitians escaping the violence of the Duvalier dictatorship starting in the late 1970s, and to Cubans during the Mariel Boatlift in 1980. Its use as the title for the collection highlights the central role played by the United States in creating and enforcing dehumanizing categories to legitimize its use of imperial violence and to eschew responsibility in provoking migration. Santos-Febres further links the United States with causes of migration by naming “dissidents of Trujillo of Batista Duvalier” among those who seek refuge across the sea, escaping dictatorial regimes backed by the United States in the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
The hold is another element of the slave ship that returns to haunt Black people in the present: the prison, detention centers, carding, stop-and-frisk, and holding centers become its contemporary iterations. Sharpe underlines the vulnerability and precarity many migrants face today at the mercy of the “keepers of the hold,” who appear in the form of foreign governments, immigration officials, and people promising to transport them safely. Santos-Febres similarly highlights the continuity of the logic of the hold in today’s society in her depictions of the boats used by migrants for passage. “Undocumented 7” finds himself “in the belly of new beasts,” at the mercy of those who flung him “from one belly to another / and then discarded him on the shore.” Another character meets his death in the ocean “belly-up / like the yawl that tossed [his] excess weight / into the blue maw.” The word “excess” conjures the image of the common practice of jettisoning enslaved Africans and migrants into the ocean to save cargo and other passengers when a vessel is in distress. The language used evokes a contemporary middle passage in which migrants endure abuse even from those who secured them “safe” passage.
Boat People endeavors to document the undocumented, the invisibilized, and the silenced who are lost to the sea. Thus, as Pérez-Rosario notes, the “personified sea is the only witness to migrants’ journeys, and their stories are often told through the powerful voice of the waters that absorb them.” Consequently, the collection conveys the ambivalent relationship between the sea and the Afro-diaspora, which in the past provided a means for the Transatlantic slave trade. In the times of chattel slavery, the sea was also a way to escape enslavement through death by drowning. And today the sea still acts as a space that offers both death and possibility to Black migrants. As Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat writes, “the past is full of examples when our foremothers and forefathers showed such deep trust in the sea that they would jump off slave ships and let the waves embrace them. They too believed that the sea was the beginning and the end of all things, the road to freedom and their entrance to Guinin.” Guinin, spelled Ginen in contemporary Haitian Kreyòl orthography and Guinea in English and Spanish, first referred to the Western Coast of Africa, where the majority of enslaved Africans were kidnapped. However, in Haitian vodou Ginen is the spiritual world in which the ancestors and lwa dwell, which can be found under the water or the backside of a mirror, as well as the principle that guides vodou teaching. Likewise, Santos-Febres draws inspiration from African spiritualities that have resisted and survived in spite of slavery and dominant society’s demonization of them. In her poetry, she creates a similar space outside the logics of slavery, surveillance, and policing, employing what Pérez-Rosario calls cimarrón (maroon) poetics. The migrants in her poems are “ex-slaves seeking to reach the Guinea of their freedom” who finally reach the “great city in the ocean’s deep.”
Sharpe further theorizes “Blackness in the wake” in relation to weather and climate. Anti-Blackness is the weather and total climate Black people face in the ever-unfolding consequences of slavery. Sharpe argues that this holds particular implications for Black breath, coming from those who in the environment of anti-Blackness face numerous assaults on their lungs and ability to breathe freely. These assaults manifest themselves in the suffocating holds of the slave ship or the migrant vessels, horrid working conditions, medical racism, and choke holds. “I can’t breathe” has been a refrain throughout history to describe the physically stifling and violent climate of anti-Blackness: interpreting Fanon, Sharpes writes In the Wake, “we revolt simply because . . . we can no longer breathe.” This resurges again with the death of Eric Garner in 2014 and more recently with that of George Floyd: both repeated “I can’t breathe” as the police proceeded undeterred to end both of their lives. This climate of anti-Blackness and lack of breathable air is present throughout Boat People. It is particularly so in the third poem, where “air is lacking / wanting . . . but what’s the difference on the surface / if on the surface everything else is lacking.” Santos-Febres describes both the ocean and land as suffocating environments for Black migrants who are faced with impossible choices. The assault on Black lungs can also be seen through the repetition of “alveoli” in several of the poems. The alveoli and fingers cleaved from the body appearing in various poems create fragmented migrant bodies across the sea and shore. This fragmentation reflects the abjection that Black migrants are forced to live and die in. The detached alveoli make vivid the image of removing breath from Black bodies as a central project of anti-Blackness. Boat People’s haunting verses contour the ship that continues to stalk Black life today in the wake of slavery.
Pérez-Rosario further comments that Santos-Febres’ cimarrón poetics “resists legibility” and the collection’s opaque language “confronts readers with a sense of loss, highlighting the inaccessibility of African diasporic memory.” Pérez-Rosario adeptly conserves this opacity in her choice to leave some words untranslated, which forces a reader unfamiliar with Spanish or Haitian Kreyòl to engage in further research, or to sit with not knowing. Most untranslated words such as “morena/o,” “mulata/o,” “combite,” and “Tonton Macoute” are historically and geopolitically specific to the Caribbean or Latin America and resist translatability. In other instances, Pérez-Rosario chooses to change the syntax and conserve the Spanish of the original. For example, “ay mi morenito” becomes “oh morenito mío.” Choosing to not translate these words also conveys the multilingualism of the Caribbean region, which is home to several colonial languages along with patois and creole languages, and of Puerto Rico, whose status as an unincorporated territory of the United States creates a particular linguistic environment. Furthermore, the blending of English, Spanish, and Haitian Kreyòl in Pérez-Rosario’s translation simulates the linguistic situations created by migration itself, in which some may understand all languages spoken while others require interpretation to gain access to all meaning. The choice to produce a bilingual edition also draws attention to the process of translation itself, allowing the reader to witness translation as an act of creativity and work rather than taking the role of the translator for granted. Thus, the edition allows for the translator too to move out from a position of invisibility.
