Angelitos Negros Hablan en Samaná: Darrel Alejandro Holnes in Conversation with Patricia Encarnación
Samaná was once a place of refuge for Black families who sought to escape U.S. slavery and racism in the early 19th century. Situated on the northeast coast of the Dominican Republic, it is also a place of immense natural beauty, which prompted interdisciplinary artist Patricia Encarnación and award-winning poet Darrel Alejandro Holnes to meet up for a pilgrimage of sorts, spending the day in Samaná before heading back to the capital of Santo Domingo, where the two would discuss their shared diasporic identities, the influence of U.S. imperialism on their personal and familial trajectories, and the creative process behind some of their current work, among other topics. Featured below is a short video produced by Encarnación that serves as an introduction to their conversation.
*Editor’s Note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Darrel: Can you talk a little bit about where we are?
Patricia: So we're in the colonial zone of the city of Santo Domingo, where colonization started on this side of the world. This cathedral [La Primada de América Cathedra-Santa María de la Encarnación] was meant to be the core foundation of the city. From there, the city expanded. It wasn't finished until 1541. Santo Domingo also hosted the first art pieces ever imported to the Americas. That cathedral used to hold the altars of all the different Black ethnicities that lived here. Eventually, [they] were moved to another location or Church of San Pedro.
Darrel: And what ethnicities are those?
Patricia: There were many ethnicities, but one I can think of is Lemba [one of the 69 ethnicities, Spanish colonizers documented under their (mis)understanding]. Lemba is considered an ethnicity, but it was a person, too. Sebastián Lemba helped to start the first Black rebellion in the Americas in 1521. He helped to free a lot of the enslaved people at that time. He was executed a few blocks from here
Darrel: This reminds me so much of Casco Antiguo or Casco Viejo in Panama, which is the Old City. It was similarly built hundreds of years ago. And the figure that you just talked about reminded me a lot of Bayano, who escaped slavery in Panama and waged war against the Spanish to liberate over 1,000 people. There's actually a poem in the book called "Black Parade" that I wrote after writing a play about him.
I'm excited to be in Santo Domingo with you, where I'm having an opportunity to learn just how much we have in common and how much our cities and our cultures have in common…and the beautiful differences as well. We just drove to Santo Domingo from Samaná and it's been really fascinating learning about the people and the culture that have been there. I'm reminiscing about one particular moment where we saw several young men on horseback wearing gold chains and basketball jerseys from the U.S.
Patricia: It was really interesting to see this aesthetic while they were riding horses on the highway, which was just recently constructed. When we talk about Caribbean aesthetics, that specific combination is like a clash of time and aesthetics because we have had so many influences—from colonization to U.S. imperialism. Also, having a huge Dominican diaspora in New York, most of those jerseys and chains are probably from their families who brought those things here. I think the influence of all these elements and moments in history is a beautiful, poetic way to describe the aesthetics of the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean in general.
“Dame Tú Mano” from Abya Yala series. By Patricia Encarnación.
Darrel: It made me think about your visual artwork, because sometimes you work with collage. And there is a sense of layered history, layered time, right? And it's presented in a combination of aesthetics. Can you tell us a little bit about the role that collage plays in your work? There's also a fun little story about how the collage piece that you created is now the cover of my poetry book!
Patricia: It's like this overlapping of elements. The images I explore visually convey these realities that can happen in Abya Yala, specifically in the Caribbean, because it's my home. In the end, I see myself collaging other entities and all the different elements and aesthetics that I can experience in these spaces. Simultaneously, showcasing how polarized these experiences can be depending on who you are. For example, suppose you come from the perspective of a tourist, a diasporic person, or a local person. In that case, one can perceive the landscapes, the bodies, and economics differently. That’s why collaging allows me to do that, to recreate that Caribbean surrealism.
Darrel: It's an intersection of vantage points.
Patricia: And breaking through the landscape, no? Breaking through the aesthetics and the elements that compose this region—through nature, colors, and elements that we borrow from the diaspora, the government, colonization, etc.
Darrel: That's one of the things that really attracted me to your work. When I saw these collages, I saw a poem because I saw a gathering of images that are arranged according to a particular thought or question or an idea that you, as the speaker, had of the poem. And I saw multiple stories happening at once. Those are essentially the ingredients that make a good poem.
Patricia: Right. But you also work a lot with intersectionality. Based on what I read: immigration, gender, family—all these elements are really important for your work. How do they make it through a poem to compose these pieces?
Darrel: When I write poems, I'm usually summoning something in a very practical way. I'm recollecting an event that might have happened to me at one point or another. But I also feel that through that exercise of recollection, that I'm also summoning the histories that support this experience.
For example, I have always been torn over my identity as a Panamanian who has U.S. citizenship. And that tension is a historical one that has existed within my community, the Black community in Panama, especially the Afro-Antillano community—many of whom came to Panama specifically to build the canal. Although some of that immigration started before the construction of the canal, the bulk of it happened during. And it was primarily to realize this great engineering marvel under the control of U.S. companies and the U.S. federal government.
Blacks from the West Indies were not considered U.S. citizens. Many of them struggled to get Panamanian citizenship because they were classified as migrant workers, which also meant that they were supposed to be transient. So when they stayed to contribute more to the country, it became a source of tension as racism was and is really strong in Panama. There was this movement to try to keep Panama for Panamanians. Which would also mean to deport as many Black people as possible back to the islands where they came from. And when you look at a lot of early 20th to mid-20th century Black Panamanian literature, you see the divide between Blacks in Panama writing about a sense of sovereignty or sense of patria that is stronger than race. Then you see Blacks presenting their narratives and identities where race comes before nationality because of this weird way that race and nationality are sometimes put against each other. So because you're Black, you are other—unless you renounce your race. Then you're just Panamanian: not Black Panamanian, not white Panamanian, just Panamanian.
When it comes to my poems, if I'm talking about my identity, I'm always talking about my history, my family. I'm always talking about so much more. So it's not hard to be intersectional, it's kind of the only choice.
Patricia: It's such a complex and layered history because you said your family comes from the Caribbean as well. That's how they arrived in Panama.
Darrel: The majority.
Patricia: Does your family relate to race above nation? Or do they hold onto national identity?
Darrel: I think it depends on who you ask in my family. But it might arguably come down to their complexion and how Black they are perceived and if they've only experienced being read as a racialized body in the Panamanian context, or if they've also had that experience abroad—whether in the United States or elsewhere.
I would say that I was raised thinking about Afro-Antillano identity as the root of my Afro-Panamanian-ness. There is this overlap between West Indian traditions in the islands, and Black West Indian traditions in Panama. That's one of the interesting things about living in Crown Heights. I'm not Jamaican or Trini, but when someone talks to me in Jamaican Patois, I can actually understand what they're saying. Or if I go to the jerk chicken shop and it's not fresh, I can tell. At the same time, I can literally go from the jerk chicken shop to a Dominican barber shop, and feel completely at home. Because I'm also part of the Spanish crew. So to be a Black Panamanian is to be at the intersection of those things.
Patricia: Interestingly, we touched on how race can be depending on their privilege and their position in your family. You also told me how your mom had this great American Dream, and how it was sort of imposed on you, too. Do you think even though she's perceived as a Black woman, this “American dream” was inculcated in your mom because of her relationship with the canal's history?
Darrel: Absolutely. As her son, in proximity to the story that she lived, I would say that there were a lot of challenges that she experienced growing up as a Black woman, specifically how it intersects with patriarchy. That's not my experience, I'm not a black Panamanian woman. I wonder sometimes if that was the difference between my dad wanting to have a family in Panama, and my mom wanting to stay to have the family in the U.S.
I'm actually interested in what you have to say about the intersections between race and gender in your work. Thinking about the the image from the Abya Yala series on the cover of my book, you have mentioned to me how the figures are genderless. But it feels like they're set up in a way where someone could project gender onto them.
Patricia: So the ambiguity with this particular series when it comes to gender is to challenge our understanding of the Americas, which I believe is one continent, the American continent, viewed through the lens of colonialism, as we perceive it today. Abya Yala could become a project of constructing something completely new. But we need imagination for that. And ambiguity is an important element when it comes to reconstructing or reimagining something.
Throughout the series, I use elements of nature that can repeat and become this narrative of elements of nature, landscapes, and bodies that we can perpetuate in order to imagine this new stage of the continent, Abya Yala. We form this new space.
These particular two elements are going opposite ways, but at the same time, supporting and contrasting each other. That's the beauty of collage. It's almost like a beautiful accident. I have an idea of what I want to do, but then I look in my archives of images and things kind of fall together.
Darrel: I'm so happy that you talked about how those images are in motion because that's definitely how I see them. And also, these stories started out as storyboards for films.
Patricia: Actually, it wasn't this series that started as a storyboard, it was just the first series of collages, which is called "I'm From Where You Vacation." And those were really visualizing a sarcastic, surreal world of how it looks when others are enjoying these spaces that people go to vacation. It’s my home at the end of the day. How can these spaces become disposable for some, while it's the homeland for others? It's definitely critiquing systems and norms.
Left: “Por la Sombrita.” Right: “Ni Una Más.” From the series I am From Where You Vacation, 2019. Digital Collage.
Darrel: It's so interesting because we were talking about the tourists that were in Samaná. We may not be those tourists, but we're still a sort of tourist. And tourism is a significant portion of the economy. What does it mean to be a citizen of the world at the same time that you are a tourist? What does it mean to participate in an economy as a tourist that maybe the locals don't have access to?
The other point I was gonna make is a connection between labor and exploitation. Because I do think that is something that's at the heart of a lot of the poems in my book—this question of the citizenship of the Blacks in the context of Panama. It's also a question of labor and the relationship between laborers and the state. Because you have the negro coloniales who were descendants of enslaved people, who were considered property and completely exploited. And then you have the Afro-Antillanos, who were brought as migrant workers and recognized by neither country as belonging to them.
Patricia: Basically stateless.
Darrel: But you are recognized as a laborer because we'll pay you a wage so you can work and leave. So there is that question of "I'm from where you vacation." And it's like, "Am I from paradise? A country that has such a contentious history regarding how Black people are part of its population?” I don't know if people realize that literally tens of thousands of people died during the construction of the canal. And every time you're flowing through those waterways, you're surrounded by ghosts.
Patricia: Sadly, the entire construction of this side of the world is full of blood, fueled by our wrong ideas of progress and success. And it ties into what we were talking about earlier with liberation: what freedom actually means and how it can be different for others. But when it comes to the question of is this just an extension of colonialism? When we just go back to a plantation and keep exploiting these people who have been disposables since our countries' beginning, or am I really from paradise? I think those two elements intersect. Because at the end of the day, we haven't stopped being colonized. Imperialism is still vivid in these spaces. The idea of our independence as a country is fake since the “revolutionaries” were just European descendants that didn’t want to continue paying taxes to the empire but wanted to maintain the same exploitative systems to keep their profit to themselves. And tourism is definitely an extension of colonialism. In the end, I would prefer to believe our countries are paradise because if you remove the social and political aspects, the land is still there, and our beautiful resources are there. And that's what we need to be proud of. We shouldn't be proud of a nation, una patria, or the idea of Latinx. We should be proud of what the earth has given us. I am from paradise—I am paradise!
Darrel: That's so beautiful.
Patricia:. So how has U.S. imperialism influenced your experiences?
Darrel: I would say U.S. imperialism has defined my experience, but I'm trying to think through the lens that you just articulated and it's hard for me to wrap my mind around that because I keep on hearing it as someone else's paradise. I think that my paradise was supposed to be the United States. To think of Panama as my paradise even though I've been raised to look at it through the lens of its complicated history and its problems with race, I'm struggling, frankly. But it's an important exercise and I'm so glad that we're having this conversation because I do think that I need to continue to define my relationship to nation-state outside of U.S. imperialism, but it's hard because the whole project of nation-state is linked to Empire and the Empire of the greatest significance in our region, in our lifetimes, is the United States. So that's my project. How can we think of ourselves as paradise outside of these constructs? What does it mean to be of the land and not of the passport?
Patricia: I never wanted to go to the U.S. I've been going to New York City since 1996. I have uncles and a grandmother living there. I didn’t like going there. I didn't understand why my parents would bring me. They would force me to spend my summers [in New York City] to keep the visa. And we all know New York is a harsh place. Imagine back then as a seven-year-old? I never thought I would end up there, but sadly, these cycles of oppression and understanding of high and low culture still exist. I was raised thinking that I would never make it if I stayed here. So I accepted a scholarship and completed my BFA at Parsons. My parents were jumping for joy. But now I’m forced to leave my homeland. That's why it's hard for me to fully fall in love with a place even though it has become my home because of U.S. imperialism.
Darrel: There's a poem in my book called "Poder" that's about Central American migrants marching towards the border, which is honestly very different from how I got here...on a plane.
Patricia: We have to own up to our privilege. I arrived in New York with a scholarship to study art. How many immigrants get that? I do not want to sound ungrateful. The crazy thing, something that we have in common, is that I am my parents' dream. My mother cried when I got my citizenship. It's something that I cannot believe. I just sold my soul to the devil and my mom is crying of happiness.
Darrel: It's a huge generational thing. It's very meaningful for my mother that I was able to make it here because of what she had to give up. My parents fell in love in the middle of a dictatorship, and then started working and were trying to raise a family in the midst of an invasion and corruption on many levels. It was a different time, and I will never really know what that was like. It's fueled my work to look at the differences between their perspective, and what my experience is, what their hopes and aspirations and dreams were for me, and then what my reality is in this country. That's what the book is about.
Darrel Alejandro Holnes is an Afro-Panamanian American writer and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Poetry). His poems have previously appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poetry, Callaloo, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. Holnes is a Cave Canem and CantoMundo fellow who has earned scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Postgraduate Writers Conference at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and residencies nationwide, including a residency at MacDowell. His poem “Praise Song for My Mutilated World” won the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize from Poetry International. He is an assistant professor of English at Medgar Evers College, a senior college of the City University of New York (CUNY), where he teaches creative writing and playwriting, and a faculty member of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.
Patricia Encarnación is an Afro-Dominican artist who explores the perceptions of being Caribbean through quotidian objects, landscapes, and aesthetics she was exposed to growing up in her homeland. Her work intends to dismantle impositions of social roles and biased history by showcasing their effect on herself and surroundings. She has participated twice in The Centro Leon Jiménez Biennial, winning the prize awarded by the city of Cadiz for cultural immersion and a special nomination by the French consulate in Martinique. She has participated in residencies with MuseumsQuartier Vienna and Kovent Catalonia. Encarnación received AAS degrees in Fine Art and Communication Arts at the School of Design Altos de Chavon in La Romana, Dominican Republic, and a BFA from Parsons the New School of Design.