Entry Question
Ariana Brown starts her section on Gaspar Yanga by quoting Afro-Canadian poet, essayist, and documentarian Dionne Brand:
“Black Experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting. One enters a room, and history follows; one enters a room, and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives. Where one stands in a society seems always related to this experience.”
What do you understand by this quote? and How it helps to illuminate Ariana Brown’s intentions with this section?
Introduction
Published in 2021, We Are Owed is Ariana Brown’s debut poetry collection. Brown is a Black-Mexican-American poet-performer and educator. Many of the poems in this collection are about the author’s childhood in Texas and a trip to Mexico as an adult. This collection interrogates accepted origin stories of Mexican identity and asks readers to reject U.S., Chicano, and Mexican nationalism and to confront anti-Black erasure, empire-building, and discourses.
Brown discusses her Black experiences with the histories of formerly enslaved Africans in Texas and Mexico. These figures serve as guiding forces, in particular, Yanga, a maroon that founded the first Black liberated town of the Americas.
Mexicanidad, just like most of the national identities in Latin America, has been defined as a mestizaje (mixed race/ mixed culture) in which African heritage and blackness are diluted. Through these discourses, la hispanidad is centered, and indigeneity is seen as a fixed folk culture of the past.
Facing this, Brown decides to center instead on the figure of Gaspar Yanga, a maroon or self-emancipated African. The poet sees Yanga as the true origin of her Afro-Mexican-US American identity. She doesn’t identify with brownness but with blackness.
Written Reflection
Analyze the juxtaposed texts in the poem “Field Notes.” Why do you think the poet intercalates her experiences as a Black Mexican-American in Mexico and the biographical notes on Yanga? How do the experiences of maroons (self-emancipated Africans who flew the colonial status quo) resonate with the poet? Why does the poet end the text by saying she would look for Yanga everywhere? (Pages 68-70)
Minutes 11:00-16:25
Class Presentation (s)
Analysis
Read the statement and look for evidence in the poems that would support these claims:
.The poems in this section of We Are Owed establish a conversation with Yanga, inserting him into personal memories.
.For Brown, studying abroad in Mexico, her ancestral homeland, seems precisely haunting as she needs to interact with being fetishized as a Black woman and anti-blackness in the form of being separated or erased from the historical constructions of Mexicanidad.
.The experiences of maroons, the self-emancipated Africans who flew the colonial status quo and regenerated their culture in a new space, resonated with the poet as an Afro-descendant haunted by history.
.The poet wants to recover Yanga’s body and gestures to trace an origin.
.Although she understands Yanga as a kindred spirit, the poet is also critical of the historical figure and questions him about his alliances with the Spanish colonial government and how he compromised the lives and liberty of other maroons. However, she finishes on a hopeful note.