Jasminne Mendez is a Pura Belpré Honor Award recipient and a Dominican-American poet, playwright, and author of several books for children and adults. She is also a translator and professional audiobook narrator.
https://www.jasminnemendez.com
How would you describe this poetry collection/book to a friend?
What literary methods did you identify?
How does Mendez play with form in this book?
What textual techniques stood out to you?
In her website, Mendez highlights how the book “explores a different kind of “cutting” and what it means to feel othered because of illness, disability, and blackness. Ultimately, City Without Altar is a meditation on being/feeling “blacked out” by the archive, on the world stage and in one’s daily life.
The three-part collection consists of prose, poems, a theatrical script, and various forms of bureaucratic documentation—including a birth certificate, x-rays of Mendez’s hands over her multiple medical procedures, General Trujilio’s speeches fomenting the massacre, and maps of Hispaniola. These documents perform the critical work of witnessing a genocide that to this day does not receive its due attention, even while they gesture to the impossibility of communicating the horror inflicted on a country and on human bodies.
Historical Context
City Without Altar is a poetry collection and play in verse that explores what it means to live, love, heal and experience violence as a Black person in the world. The titular play in verse that sits at the center of the book seeks to amplify the voices and experiences of victims, survivors and living ancestors of the 1937 Haitian Massacre that occurred along the northwest Dominican/Haitian border during the Trujillo Era.
Historical Remembrance (pages 15, 16, 18,20, 34, 35)
The collection begins by foregrounding the processes of, and resistance to, silencing. Mendez creates a poem by literally “blacking out” sections of her birth certificate. This gesture encapsulates Trujillo’s logic for the Massacre. “Hispanic” identity is constructed as the violent denial of Blackness: “Let the record show. I am. Hispanic. Not Black. This is legal. A record. Permanent.”
Describe the role of poetic condensation in Mendez’s historical account. What elements of the history does the poet highlight? why?
47:09
Thinking disability from a personal and historical point of view
Mendez brings her own embodiment to bear as she uses her experience of living with the auto-immune condition Scleroderma as a vehicle for examining the Massacre. Scleroderma causes the skin to harden and tighten, leading to ulcers, blood conditions, and inflammation.
Analysis in pairs:
Explore Mendez’s definition of Scleroderma (Pages 29, 46)
Why do you think Mendez decided to think and write about this condition and the massacre together?
(See pages 69-77)
How do the back and forth between the two types of narratives tell us about the legacies of racial violence in the present?
What is the significance of amputation and the scalpel/machete in personal and national narratives?
Presentation
Statelessness: a decade of “cutting”
How do the inquiries into Dominican “cutting” let us see ongoing forms of eliminating blackness from the nation?
Class Exercise:
Discuss Mendez’s blackout poems (pages 5; 21-22). What are the poems trying to convey? What do the erasures tell us about the history of the Dominican Republic?
Create a blackout poem on today’s topic using one page of the following article:
Share it with a partner and/or the class.