Thread by @UMBCHumanities

TODAY: "The Fractal Caribbean: The New Literatures of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic" w/ Puerto Rican writer Mayra Santos-Febres. 5:30pm in the @UMBCLibrary

my3.my.umbc.edu/groups/dresher…

.@deardelirious is introducing Mayra Santos-Febres, novelist, essayist, and poet from Puerto Rico. A @GuggFellows and recipient of the Juan Rolfo award, Santos-Febres is currently a professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.

The Fractal Caribbean is nonbinary, although it contains the binary. Try listening to jazz, which contains improvisation, but also a consistent rhythm. Intrustments playing different yet the same rhythm. #umbchumforum

Silence and sounds; black and white; rich and poor - all things working both toward opposite ends, but also towards the One, which contains multitude. #umbchumforum

Family in the Caribbean always meant a different thing. It wasn’t just my mother, father, my brother, and me. It includes my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and neighbors. They were white, Black, mulatto; Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican. #umbchumforum

Family, for some people of different races, might be a linear ancestry that can be traced through time. Family on the island can be a system; an activist community. #umbchumforum

Caribbean history is not lineal. The construction of self and even agency is not lineal. History can violatile. #umbchumforum

With every breath I take, I honor the ancestors who took breathe for me to be. I stand on their shoulders. They are here - DNA. They present in your nose; your eye color; and the texture of your hair. #umbchumforum

If literature is the narration of a people spoken from the perspective of one person meant to represent one universal truth, I suggest that we are post-literary in the Caribbean. #umbchumforum

Caribbean literary has always been in the periphery in relation to Eurocentric works from the right and the left. #umbchumforum

If you want to learn about Caribbean fractal literature, you have to come see it in our barrios. In the streets, in digital activism and poetry challenges while the police fires rubber bullets at marchers. #umbchumforum

Maybe is the island, or the web. Maybe it’s the UnoMultiple and the Oracle. Or maybe it’s the fact that , finally, after the long voyage I started decades ago to escape the repeating islands has finally deposited me back home.

We end the talk with a video from Rita Indiana, a Dominican writer and singer-songwriter. Her song, “Da Pa Lo Do,” which criticizes the division of the shared island of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

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