Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e: Personal Essays and Poetry by Jasminne Méndez (review)

Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e, the second book of award-winning author and educator Jasminne Méndez, is an exemplary work of creative nonfiction. The volume is a seamless bilingual compilation of personal essays and poetry in four parts. The book weaves together a tapestry of Latina experiences: navigating her status as a Black, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx woman within and outside of her communities; the grief that comes with managing chronic illness and infertility; the micro- (and macro-) aggressions of a racist and misogynist medical system; the work of negotiating cultural norms as the child of immigrants; and the colonial traumas underlying the intersections of these experiences.

Méndez's evocative writing foregrounds the embodied nature of these experiences both syntactically and formally. For example, she subversively employs the cold, "objective" rhetoric of diagnosis in order to make it blossom, as when she defines the chronic autoimmune disease scleroderma as "thick skin stretched so taut you become a wax museum replica of who you used to be" (14). She crafts a parodic "how-to" guide for being infertile and a dictionary of missing words for the missing: "___________: There is no word in English or Spanish for a parent who has lost a child. There is no word in English or Spanish for a woman who once was pregnant and suddenly is not. One in four pregnancies ends in a miscarriage. We named our child Baby M so we had a name for our grief, a word for our loss" (82). These poetic strategies both reveal and undermine the dehumanization enacted by the US/Western medical system on women and people of color. The pieces relay how (particularly male) medical practitioners assume she has minimal knowledge of her own body and its needs, even while they view her body as an object to be fixed: "I was no longer a human being with a soul. I was a human body with a problem, a cracked shell that needed mending, a scientific experiment" (113). Méndez tells of the assumptions she encounters among her family and well-meaning but "healthy" friends around what illness and health supposedly look like. Her writing deftly illustrates the complexity, fear, and fatigue involved in communicating her experiences to those she loves. Above all, Méndez masterfully connects her living experience with scleroderma and lupus to her embodied, cultural memories of racism and colonialism. In the stunning chapter "Hands: El Corte," she places the genocide enacted upon Haitians by the dictator Rafael Trujillo in conversation with the amputation of her fingers, bridging the machetes that "culled" the Haitian population with the red knife that disappeared part of her hands. Méndez both loses and finds herself in the languages of her body—English, Spanish, music, medicine—and in the process, she maps a new territory of how her body speaks itself into being.

The beauty of Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e is in the way it stages a specifically Afro-Latinx feminist resistance to the erasures of Western knowledge, misogyny, and colonialism. I am reminded of the work of Gloria Anzaldúa in the way Méndez uses writing as a praxis of making the wholeness of herself present—in sickness, in healing, in pain, in motherhood and infertility, in loss, in love, and everything in between. Some may find her book to be overtly didactic (as she herself notes; she is a teacher). Yet the work is poetic pedagogy at its best: it makes space for unseen processes of self and communal realization and enriches the lives of those who encounter its praxis. The book is wonderfully multidimensional and accessible: it could find a comfortable place in a high school classroom, a graduate seminar, or a medical school reading group. Those interested in Afro-Latinx feminisms and the medical humanities in particular will find a rich work of art to add to their canons.