Letter to Yemanja

-“Um sereia preta, por favor?”

-“Meu filho, nao existir!”

(Bahia, 9 December 2003)

Today, the woman at the feira declared you dead.

She pronounced this fact and no one contradicted her.

Your skin, they say, is fair, your hair the color of the moon.

Your eyes like the sea. You come for men at night.

In the land the world says is more African than Africa,

oh Mother of the Fishes, Mother of the Orisas that form

all things between earth and sky, my Truth is shunned.

Mother Who Nurtures The World’s Children, in this land

among even those who think me Baiana,

there is only place for the saints and blond hair.

Mother of the Soft Rising Mist, You Who Are The Wave And Foam,

I no longer want to explain: Eu nao falo Portuguese. Eu sou caribi.

Where I come from, mermaids are every shade, especially Black.

The morena arrived blood soaked along the Mercy and Matilda,

keened Memory and your name into the souls that survived living.

They show themselves when called, and can sing sanity

from men who plead for love or riches.

In the curve of their tails, they cradle abandoned children.

I should be enchanted. The way people blend.

The way they have collapsed divergent violent histories

into one nationalistic view of imagined unity.

The way Brasil called me back after six years, begging to be understood.

My relationship with this land of Orisas is long.

My grandfather walked here once, and I walked once before him.

Both memories are buried under church stairs

and hunger so deep even the trees starve.

Oh, Mother Whose Reach Has No Boundary, Mother of the Rainbow,

your children should look for your face in the sun, dive

into your great skirt and follow your voice to the depth.

Mother of the Middle Passage, the One Who Fed Us Even As We Refused,

You Who Rocked Us To Sleep in the Womb of Death,

they would find what I find each day when I bow to your blazing beauty,

a woman caressing the bones of her drowned children,

her skin burned to sugar, her hair seaweed and shell locked,

and in her heart a space for us all.