Black Latina Girlhood Poetics of the Body: Church, Sexuality and Dispossession

Like Xiomara, the teenage protagonist of Elizabeth Acevedo's poetry novel The Poet X, I was always afraid of getting disciplina — of getting caught up and revealed as an imposter within the church. I walked the tightrope breaking every sacrament that took me away from my body. As a teenager, I wasn't supposed to masturbate almost every night, called by the flesh and the possibilities it offered. As a college student, I wasn't supposed to smoke weed and I wasn't supposed to hold on to remnants of my Pentecostal youthhood while exploring what it meant to spend time being and feeling my body and recognizing that it had a life of its own.

I didn't think I was wearing masks — there were just parts of myself I strategically omitted. I shifted through different subjectivities depending on where I was and with whom. At church, I was a youth leader at the mostly-Puerto-Rican church where my accent became heavily Puerto Rican because I was born and raised in Humboldt Park, but also because being Dominican or Black wasn't "in" yet. At school, I was the proud nerdy ChiDominicana who was president of her Latina sorority chapter and would tell it like it is. The hermanos at the church probably couldn't tell I was going dancing almost every weekend or heading to the college bar night every Wednesday with her Bay Area Chicana bestie, followed by hitting up a bong at the frat house down the street. In my most private space, I was all of these. If God was seer and knower of everything then he was probably the only one that knew who I really was — at least that's what I believed.

Yet the shame always made my cheeks warm at church when they would remind us not to give in to the desires of the flesh. We were reminded to stay virgins, and yet not touch ourselves. We were to wait until marriage, and only then it would be okay to have sex and pay attention to our bodies for the consumption of another. How did any of this make sense? My body cried for attention from me, for love from me. How was I not going to give in when this same sacred body was deemed undesirable by others, unworthy of attention, and supposedly disgusting to look at? But my fear of losing a space of community, fellowship, and healing through song kept me from leaving the church.

Back in high school, my best friend was the pastor's daughter — a light-skinned petite puertorriqueña de la isla who all the boys wanted to be with. I recently read the old notes we used to pass to each other during prayer time in church where we'd talk about how she had rejected yet another boy who was dying for her. We'd gossip about who had done it with who, and how so-and-so had lost their virginity at 14 and was loving it. I found these notes carefully hidden in my Spanish Bible while I was packing parts of my youth to take with me. The notes were tucked into secret pockets only I knew of and clearly wanted no one to find. Between the lines, I recognized the younger me who sought to live vicariously through the lives of these girls. I was always wondering, "Why them and not me? Why do I always get friend-zoned?" But in the background and at the forefront of all this was the anti-blackness that policed my Black Latina body in and out of the church. I was coerced into self-dispossession. I had fallen for the discourse of seduction that Saidiya Hartmann so eloquently describes in her book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in the Nineteenth-Century America:

The confusion between consent and coercion, feeling and submission, intimacy and domination, and violence and reciprocity constitutes what I term the discourse of seduction in slave law . . . Seduction makes recourse to the idea of reciprocal and collusive relations and engenders a precipitating construction of black female sexuality in which rape is unimaginable. As the enslaved is legally unable to give consent or offer resistance, she is presumed to be always willing.1

The presumption that Black Latina girls are always willing has haunted us for centuries. It is this seduction of the church forced on to our black bodies and subjectivities that led me to believe that as a child and teenager I was always on the wrong side of both biblical and social "law". Because of my blackness there was no such thing as innocence granted to me — hence, I had to pray harder, fast longer, and look for the holy spirit to possess me. We Black children are always guilty. Black Caribbean or Dominican girls, in particular, are thought of as willful: agenta', voluntariosa, chivirica. These words in Dominican Spanish resonate with Sara Ahmed's notion of "willful subjects": we, Black Latina girls, are already deemed guilty and deviant — we are too "fresh" for our age.2 We accept the charge without our consent in a geopolitical landscape that has positioned us with an unacceptable agency and yet always available for others' perusing and consumption — both in the Dominican Republic and in Dominican diaspora communities.

Black Girlhood studies recognizes the violence, joy, trauma, and policing of Black girls' bodies in the United States. Scholars such as Ruth Nicole Brown, Oneka LaBennett, Aimee Meredith Cox, Aria S. Halliday, and others have given us a breath of fresh air, releasing what we carry in our bodies as girls, young women, grown women, and elders.3 I join that conversation from a literary theoretical perspective that engages the archives that our Black Latina bodies produce. The trauma and violence our bodies have experienced during our childhood and youth create an epistemology and a methodology for approaching Black Latina feminist research. Our bodily consciousness as young girls shapes our subjectivities and identities. As we get older we remember less of our experiences during that time and our younger selves become ancestral memories that guide us. Thus, the subjectivity of our young selves becomes ephemeral while we embody the spirit of that girl who once was. She shapes me, influences me, and still lives in me although I cannot remember her entirely. Our girls await, and sometimes demand, an offering from us. In our bodies we hold poetry for them, we hold joy, we hold pain, we hold trauma.

Poetry is the offering I give the young girl who lives inside me. It is a healing praxis where I write from my own positionality and experience. The poetry of Solange Knowles' A Seat at the Table, Nayirahh Waheed's Salt and Warsan Shire's Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth provided me with healing when I lived in Philadelphia as Donald Trump was elected president. In 2018, as I picked up my own pen after a hiatus from poetry writing, I needed Elizabeth Acevedo's The Poet X to give me the impetus to write. I needed healing for that little girl that lives inside of me: who crawls into a corner and sits silently. She holds the trauma of being infinitely fat-shamed: being told she would not attract men as long as she was gordita, yet being cat-called, harassed, and molested for being a child with "too much body." This girl holds the pain of always waiting for her turn after mami's novelas and waiting for papi's return from "school"—their nickname for prison. This little girl also feels joy in meaningful friendships, fulfilling her middle-school dream of surfing in Hawaii, and dancing merengue hasta las quince.

The book I turned to when I took up my own pen again, Elizabeth Acevedo's The Poet X, explores what it means to be a Black Latina teenager in an urban setting: daughter of Dominican immigrants, twin sister to a queer brother, and spoken-word poet finding her voice. The book begins with a poem "Stoop-Sitting," which immediately introduces us to the hustle of Harlem in the summer: the rush of open fire hydrants accompanied by the music filtering out the bodegas and where tigueres wait for the next woman to walk pass them for their next round of unsolicited flattery:

Peep Papote from down the block as he opens the fire hydrant
so the little kids have a sprinkler to run through.

Listen to the honking gypsy cabs with bachata blaring from their open windows
complete with basketballs echoing from the Little Park.

Laugh at the viejos—my father not included—
finishing their dominoes tournament with hard slaps and yells of "Capicu!"

Shake my head as even the drug dealers posted up near the building
smile more in the summer, their hard scowls softening
into glue-eyed stares in the direction of the girls in summer dresses and short shorts:

"Ayo, Xiomara, you need to start wearing dresses like that!"
"Shit, you'd be wifed up before going back to school."
"Especially knowing you church girls are all freaks."4

While this scene unfurls around her, Xiomara hails us to sit on the stoop beside her as she paints the urban landscape and soundscapes. She describes a transnational Dominicanyork neighborhood where informal economies and practices form part of the survival of the community.5 Xiomara signals the fire hydrant, gypsy cabs, dominoes tournament, and the drug dealers as performances of masculinity in Harlem — an afro-diasporic neighborhood. Her description also reminds us that there is always a diversity of residents in, what some of us call, the "hood" — the devoted church-goers who want to disassociate themselves from the "sinners", and the "sinners" who see the church-goers as fanatics. Xiomara sits at this intersection of the stoop: a Black Latina church girl who has her doubts, but also engages in the everydayness of what it is to live in the 'hood. She wants us to look, listen, and laugh right before witnessing being told she should dress more provocatively. Amidst the hustle and bustle of the city, she is read as a sexually-repressed promiscuous church girl who is desperate to let it be known through her clothes. Of course, I have been told "church girls are all freaks" too. I do not think they were too far off — but the issue here is more of the gaze imposed on AfroLatina girls' black bodies as hypersexualized. This is not to say that white or light-skinned Latina girls have not experienced being hypersexualized — but we know that when we are referring to Black girls' bodies we are also referring to a history of anti-black gendered violence that carries a particular kind of weight. Xiomara experiences the hypervisibility of her body and others speaking for it — dispossession happens in the hood too, not just at church. As a fourteen-year-old, Xiomara is being told that dressing provocatively would get her ". . . wifed up before going back to school" — implying that her not having a boyfriend at that moment is odd, or a problem. I remember being a fourteen-year-old Black Latina churchgirl in the hood being seen like an alien: always wearing long skirts (pants were only for men), straightening my hair so that hermanos in the church didn't think that my curly-kinky hair shrinkage meant that I was cutting it, and wearing little to no makeup. I was a church hood girl who was also an over-achiever in school — yet, not scared to run my mouth and scrap if I needed to. Unlike my school friends at fourteen, I did not have boyfriends — they thought it was strange. Reading through my 8^th grade graduation guestbook, where students wish each other well as they go off to high school, comments like "Good luck in high school! Hope to see you with a boyfriend next time I see you!" or things like "Good luck getting a boyfriend next year!" are written in the multi-color pastel pages. Apparently, there were things holding me back from being "wife'd up" too. From where Xiomara sits on the stoop, I am reminded of my own stoop-sitting in front of my building on Augusta Boulevard: little Puchy with her friends catching up on the latest gossip before the church van would arrive to pick me up.

The Poet X offers a first-hand account from Xiomara, a Dominican girl from Harlem, who according to her conservative Catholic mother, has "a little too much body for such a young girl" (5). Xiomara is constantly warned to not to talk to boys, or engage with them in any way, or she will be punished. She always wants to respond, defend herself, and clarify that she is not the one looking for men's attention. But before she can continue to explain, she is silenced and understood as suspect. Xiomara is supposed to constantly show her mother the good Catholic that she can be by going to mass on Sundays and attending her confirmation classes, but Mami doesn't know of her growing doubts of the faith and religious practices. For Xiomara, "Jesus feels like a friend, . . . I just don't think I need anymore."6 Indeed, she feels

When I'm told girls
Shouldn't. Shouldn't. Shouldn't.
When I'm told
To wait. To stop. To obey.
When the only girl I'm supposed to be
was an impregnated virgin who was probably scared shitless.
When I'm told fear and fire
are all this life will hold for me.
When I look around the church
and none of the depictions of angels
or Jesus or Mary, not one of the disciples
look like me: morenita and big and angry.
When I'm told to have faith
in the father  the son
in men    and men are the first ones
to make me feel so small.

That's when I feel like a fake.
Because I nod, and clap, and 'Amen' and 'Aleluya,'
all the while feeling like this house 
his house
is no longer one I want to rent.7

. . . that church
treats a girl like me differently.
Sometimes it feels
all I'm worth is under my skirt
to a God
that don't really seem
to be          out here         checking          for me.8

The extension of the last line of the poem can be heard out off the page — two syllables spoken followed by a long pause. Sonically and visually it can remind us of tapping our fingers against a surface as we annoyingly wait for someone or something to arrive or react. Instead, the response is silence. The poem ending this way seems to warrant an answer or reaction to Xiomara's thoughts — but there are none, meaning that she is either validated or unheard. Furthermore, although God and church are not necessarily the same, for Xiomara these words are related as for many, church is an extension of God. I felt these words at a later age than Xiomara during my first year away at college when folks wondered how I was keeping up with my "purity" and prayer — that was the only time I felt God was out here checking for me. Not when I was experiencing anti-blackness via an anonymous college gossip website calling me an "ugly black fat monkey" or later in graduate school when my younger brother's body was found in a lake after he went missing for three months. That's when I sat in my whole body angered similar to Xiomara in "Church Mass":

In these lines, Xiomara highlights how oppression gets imposed on her Black Latina body through the imposition: "shouldn't", "stop," and "obey". The repeating phrase of "When . . . " highlights how the law comes before her own agency. In other words, Xiomara finds that her mother's use of Catholicism to silence her and police her body and sexuality is too restricting for the person she is in the process of becoming. In Spanish Caribbean households, we are met in these instances with the retort: "¡No me contestes!" ("Don't talk back to me!") as an enforced silencing that requires your own witnessing and renders you a threat to the authority figure. Instead, you must wait, stop, and obey. Furthermore, as she points out the things she must or must not do, she also points out the ways these "Biblical laws" do not represent her—since they are white and patriarchal. Xiomara's response to the silencing, or the feeling of being unheard, is channeled into the non-Bible verses she writes and recites. For Xiomara, poetry becomes an avenue through which she can,

[ . . . ] write
all the things I wish I could have said.
[ . . . ] that feel like they could

carve me wide
open.9

Similarly, for me, poetry became a parallel—initially letters to God and eventually a way of finding myself. Yet, I still receive phone calls from my grandmother reminding me of my debts to God similar to Xiomara's mom who tries to guilt her into communion by reminding her that it is because of God that she is alive and breathing. Meanwhile Xiomara wonders,

[ . . . ] what's the point of God giving me life
if I can't live it as my own?

Why does listening to his commandments
mean I need to shut down my own voice?10

When we are told the Spanish Caribbean proverb, "Tú no te mandas" ("You are not in charge of yourself") and are reminded that our bodies are not ours, that we must have no will — we are forced to hold our breath in prayer and hope our bodies do not get us in trouble. Acevedo reflects this experience, when Xiomara writes in "The Last Fifteen-Year Old":

[ . . . ] I had to pray the trouble out
of the body God gave me. My body was a problem.
[ . . . ] I wanted to forget I had this body at all.11

Similarly, Frantz Fanon's words — "O my body, make of me a man who questions" — echo here: Xiomara's black body questions the framework of that which is spiritual and good. Being a Black girl in a world where your consent is non-existent, your body is a sin, and you have no agency, yet you are seen as lustful, willful, assertive, and aggressive. You are forced to make yourself small, to try to blend in, and be as quiet as possible — that maybe those are the things that will save you—that submission and silence are your friends. Xiomara — whose name means: "One who is ready for war" — fights back against this by escaping: writing about her experiences in her leather-bound journal, ditching confirmation classes for her school's poetry club meetings, and listening to hip hop music in the park after school with her first love Aman (6). She begins to transfigure biblical verses for poetry verses — words that become flesh, not through the embodiment of preaching but through the embodiment of spoken-word poetry. Xiomara holds poetry in her body, she writes:

I let the words shape themselves hard on my tongue.
I let my hands pretend to be punctuation marks
that slash, and point, and press in on each other.
I let my body finally take up all the space it wants.12

Like preaching, poetry is an embodied praxis that centers her experience as a Black Latina girl growing up in Harlem. More than that, finding a voice for the poetry that is in her body, and is her body. Xiomara practices her spoken-word poems in front of the mirror and allows herself to embody them — in "Holding a Poem in the Body," for example, she uses her body to signal punctuation marks. I will always remember the freeing moment I felt when I let the words out at my first slam poetry club meeting in high school. It felt like I was preaching—the only difference was that I felt and lived the words that were coming out of my mouth. In my first Louder Than a Bomb slam poetry competition in 2004, I performed my poem "Violence," where I questioned and painted a picture of what it was like to live in a Chicago gang-ridden neighborhood, while at the same time watching the dead bodies of the early Iraq War — this parallel made the name, "Chiraq" make sense. Yet, at church, no one was talking about this. In my own personal archive — my pre-teenage journal — I wrote about girls my age becoming pregnant after being gang-raped as part of their initiation into these gangs in a very desensitized language. Spoken-word poetry is an embodiment of what you know—it is, as Urayoán Noel describes Nuyorican poetry, a documentary-style poetry.13 He writes:

A dialectics of representation is built into the very project of a documentary poetics. Inasmuch as the documentary poet seeks to directly convey the lived experience of the community, said poet must blend into the landscape being documented, so that a fully successful documentary poetics would require the disappearance of the poem—of the graphic features on the page or the performing poet's voice and body, which would merely distract readers from the scene being documented.14

The voice and narration between Acevedo and Xiomara are blurred. Additionally, the lines between poetry and novel are also blurred through Xiomara's lived experiences as she paints the landscape of her surroundings and her experience. The Poet X's documentary poetics is fictional as far as genre is concerned. Xiomara's writings—the book we hold; her journal, we hold—are snapshots of what I know also to be true from my own experience of growing up in a similar environment. Acevedo's work extends the legacy of Nuyorican poets and the Black Arts Movement by bringing an AfroLatina character to the forefront of The Poet X. One cannot engage in Xiomara's poetry and story without contending with her black body. Acevedo forces us to reckon with Black Latina phenomenology amid the intersection of religion, sexuality, and girlhood.15 One cannot engage in Xiomara's poetry and story without contending with her black body.

Mami catches Xiomara making out with Aman on the train instead of being at home doing her chores. She punishes her by beating her and having her kneel on rice in front of her saints asking for forgiveness.16 Xiomara at this moment, more than ever, relies on her journal by writing away the pain of having to endure such violence and trauma. Following this, in the third and final part of the novel, titled "The voice of one crying in the wilderness," demonstrates how she begins to find a voice for those words in the poetry club, which meets on the same days as her confirmation class. Meanwhile, her best friend Caridad covers up for her absence at confirmation, Xiomara finds spiritual solace in poetry club where the boundaries between written and spoken word are transcended. A place where she can give her black embodied archive a voice. As M. Jacqui Alexander writes in Pedagogies of Crossing, "So much of how we remember is embodied: the scent of home: of fresh-baked bread; of newly grated coconut stewed with spice (we never called it cinnamon), nutmeg, and bay leaf from the tree . . . Violence can also become embodied, that violation of sex and spirit."17 Xiomara is punished because of the desires of her body. The physical and spiritual violence Xiomara endures are recorded in her journal and on her body—the body remembers. Mami finds her notebook and discovers she's been writing terrible things about boys, church and her.18 She burns the notebook filled with hundreds of poems and years of writing in front of Xiomara, who yells:

"Burn it! Burn it.
This is where the poems are," I say,
thumping a fist against my chest.19

Bodies and archival memory are linked to form an embodied archive, a place where memories are kept. How do we approach this archive that emerges from the body? Furthermore, how are race, gender, and sexuality re-configured through it? Xiomara taps into an inheritance of our Black enslaved ancestors who couldn't write their stories so they passed them down through oral histories, music, and story-telling. The pain Xiomara feels is so intense that the only way to survive it, is to run away from home. I echo Alexis Pauline Gumbs' work Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivities—in that this is also a scene of a Black girl seeking freedom from gendered and anti-black violence. "Crying in the wilderness" is a way of spilling that which can no longer be contained — a praxis of Black embodied poetics that reconceptualizes the spiritual as grounded in the relationship between the body, experience, and memory.

Poetry opens up a portal into the wilderness — that unknown territory that offers so many possibilities where one arrives undone: post-violence or post-trauma. Unlike Xiomara, my fugitivity was different. After college, I left Chicago for grad school in Austin, Texas where I ran away to breathe. Xiomara leaves to Aman's house to also breathe where she exercises her agency of choosing not to have sex with him until she figures out her own emotional entanglements. Fugitivity is not freedom—for me grad school gave me the space to write and theorize from the flesh as Cherríe Moraga has reminded us to do. But institutions are by no means a space of freedom. In the novel, Xiomara returns home with Father Sean, a member of a religious institution and the only person her mother will listen to, and they reconcile to make the relationship work by attending family therapy. In real life, family therapy doesn't always happen. Sometimes Black Latina girls in the Bronx, like Karol Sanchez, stage kidnappings when their mothers threaten them with sending them to their native Honduras to "correct" their behavior. Sometimes Black Latina girls, like Cardi B, run away from home to live with their boyfriends and then become exotic dancers to make enough money to free themselves from their violent hands and economic power over them. Fugitivity is not always pretty or free of violence.

Amidst fugitivity, Black women and girls have created maroon communities that have become our new church. Poetry club is Xiomara's new church, which she describes as a place where, "we get together and talk about ourselves, about being human, about what hurts us, we're also talking about God. So that's also church, right?"20 Poetry, and literature at large, became a church for me in the way Xiomara describes:

. . . about any of the words that bring us together and how we can form a home in them . . . I only know that learning to believe in the power of my own words has been the most freeing experience of my life. It has brought me the most light. And isn't that what a poem is? A lantern glowing in the dark.21

Poetry in the post-traumatic provides the space for Xiomara to create a new self, a new subjectivity: the Poet X. X marks the spot of where she stands, but also the everchanging variable to solve for and can be any number of things. X is about always being in the process of becoming "by any means necessary" as Malcom X would say. Like Xiomara who redefines "church" for herself, I have also redefined it for myself by centering the agency of my flesh and holding intimacy and the erotic as sacred. Black diaspora feminisms have reminded us that sex, sexuality, and our bodies are sacred and divine for the re-conceptualization of humanity and humanness originating from our black bodies. Church for me was fellowship, community, healing through song and encouraging words and sharing some of those moments with others — I miss those things. But leaving The Church has also meant that I chose to fight against my own dismemberment and self-dispossession as Christina Sharpe has tasked us to do.22 The church I now turn to is made in the insistent, powerful practice of preaching Black Latina phenomenologies, creating work with the Black Latinas Know Collective, and building community with other women of color as my spiritual praxis. I am committed to living, and that means that I love my body so much more now. Unapologetically.

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