- Afroantillano Ghost Story
after Terrance Hayes
Calling all ectoafrocaribbeans, all disembodied afroboricuas,to rematerialize to the colorblind,show them even our ghosts still be prieto.In Pittsburgh, the prospective PhD studentfrom UPR says race isn't a big deal in Puerto Rico.We don't see white kids and black kidswe're all just Puerto Rican. I don't respond.Just listen to the way my bones rattlein the winter wind and isn't thisthe perfect setting for a ghost story?On the way home I listen to "Si Dios fuera negro" to "El negro bembón" to "Babaila" to "Bandoleros" to "Loíza." to the breath of every fantasma slapping me in the face with this frost. [End Page 132] Years later I am on the island for the first time.As I walk past El Morro, Raquel tells me the slave tradedidn't actually end here in 1817. Speaks of slaves smuggled infor decades to follow. I'm not at all surprised. Maybe evenknew this already. Have been marked black marked contraband marked anything butboricua and known the rattling of chains as prelude to a rattlingof bones. Isn't this the perfect setting for a ghost story?The night is dark, though it isn't stormy.I guess the waves crashing behind us will suffice.Hasn't the air always been heavy with every fantasmakilled by this city's walls?That is the only kind of ghost storyI have ever known.I wish there were moreabout negritos who died on sugar plantations on coffee plantations,dark-skinned spirits haunting consumers of their products throughout the Western world.I wish there were stories of negritos who died on ships destined for Puerto Rico and now capsize every cruise shipclose enough to a shore they never reached. Instead I'm left [End Page 133] with a chorus of skeletons.So adiós mi gente. Adiós mi pueblo.Adiós (adiós adiós adiós) Borinquen queridaand hello to this humiditythat has swallowed every fantasmathe myth of progress has failed to exorcise.Let me be inexplicable as a spiritshuffling the bones of the living. [End Page 134]
Malcolm Friend is the author of the chapbook mxd kd mixtape (Glass Poetry, 2017) and the full-length collection Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple (Inlandia Books, 2018), selected by Cynthia Arrieu-King as winner of the 2017 Hillary Gravendyk Prize.