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  • Remittances
  • Elizabeth Pérez (bio)
Keywords

masculinity, Cuban revolution, misogynoir, racism/anti-Blackness, Latinx immigration, kinship

Santiago de Cuba, 1996

Nephew my grandfather loved(tanned man at my sunburned elbow):you introduced me as myself to your wife,circular visage burningwith the urgency of a silver bowltarnishing on your table.

Forty-some years agoyour father's blonde father (my great-grand),distantly Italian,forbid his son's marriage to a Negra in writingthat few in town could read.Your parents eloped, snappingsugarcane shafts underfoot,the final crushafter snubbing a compulsory harvest.As soon as your mother bore her sole child,wriggling in the heat of a legendary fall,my great-uncle(your father)leapt at a flight [End Page 155] to the United Stateswith a bottle-redhead twelve years his senior.

His brother embarked on regular visits,bearing wheeled toys and custard apple candyfrom the capital.Turning to purpose what he learnedfrom brotherless sisterson the plantations of the interior,he never stooped at your mother's door(whistling apart his obsidian mustache)without apologizing.You called him Papáeven after he also went,bequeathing the contents of his cabinetsand dribbling steady money via telegram until his death.

When you and I finally meetwe spend the short time budgeted for thisdebating the relevance of revenantsin mannered Spanish,sipping café con lecheout of my grandfather's indestructible Soviet glasses,I not fond of you in the leastand neither of us named after him. [End Page 156]

Elizabeth Pérez

Elizabeth Pérez is associate professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her first book, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions (NYU Press, 2016) was awarded the 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion, and received honorable mention for the 2019 Barbara T. Christian Literary Award. Her poetry has appeared in several journals and two edited volumes.

Footnotes

The title of this poem, "Remittances," refers to money transferred from a person in one country to family members and friends in another. These payments are transnational gestures of care and sacrifice, tying immigrants to the lands of their birth, to "faceless" flows of capital, and to relatives with whom they share intimate racialized and gendered histories. "Remittances" begins by tracing back a legacy of misogynoir, as the term was coined and conceptualized by queer Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey. It then contemplates the intergenerational expressions of love available to cisgender men in post-revolutionary Cuba. It is the latest in a series of poems about Santiago, starting with "Six Eulogies for a Cuban Exile," published in the Bilingual Review/La revista bilingüe in 1996.

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