In her stunning second collection, Muse Found in a Colonized Body (Four Way Books, 2022), Yesenia Montilla begins with a quote from Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” These words are a particularly apt introduction to the collection’s memorable explorations of identity, race, sexuality, love, and history, delivered through the eyes and in the voice of an Afro-Latina woman, the child of immigrants, a poet living in a tumultuous twenty-first century America.
The searingly straightforward voice that propels the collection forward is interlaced with moments that highlight Montilla’s gift for lyrical expression. A deep sense of indignation animates the “colonized body” that inhabits the poems, whether they are dealing with an entitled woman at a bodega, the arrival of the Spanish in the Caribbean, or the death of an innocent Black man at the hands of the police. These pieces exist alongside—and in conversation with—poems of hope and love and humor: introspective poems of self-reflection and self-realization.
In the collection’s mix of the assertive with the meditative, one can hear the influence of writers such as Audre Lorde. While Lorde speaks in her seminal work Sister Outsider of being “defined as ‘other’ in every group she is part of,” emphasizing differences experienced in the context of the world at large, she also speaks to the idea of conflicting differences experienced within oneself. A vivid example of this is the poem “A Perfect Game.” In it, Montilla tells a story about the famous baseball player from the Dominican Republic, Sammy Sosa. The poem serves as an evocative metaphor for this idea of a divided self. Montilla begins, as she does in many of her poems, with sweet memories of her beloved abuela and growing up in a Dominican neighborhood in New York City:
Sammy Sosa came
along
with his smile a reptile that only knew about
laying in the sun.
His arms were cannons & his skin burnt
cinnamon
that glistened in my dreams.
Everyone said he was not beautiful.
Out in the streets where the men set up shop
playing dominoes
I’d hear them say between yelling of
capicú
‘como juega, pero feo como el
diablo.”
The Dominican men, speaking of a baseball hero from their own country, comment: “how he plays, but he’s ugly as the devil.” They are immigrants in a place that categorizes and marginalizes them based on appearance and skin color in particular, and yet, despite knowing the corrosive effects of such treatment, they inflict similar judgment on one another.
Montilla continues:
I knew nothing of my history
of the in-fighting on an island in which
one side swore
it was only one thing: pallid, pristine. &
I didn’t know
that Sammy carried this history like a
tattoo.That he wished every day to be white.
She continues with the personal:
It makes a grandmother ask her granddaughter
if she’s suffering
from something feverish
because that could be the only excuse why
her hair has not been straightened
like a ballerina’s back dyed the color of
wild
daffodils growing in an outfield.
In this poem, Montilla has created a devastating commentary on the historical self-loathing first planted by brutal colonizers centuries ago and which has been perpetuated through succeeding generations. Her choice of word spacing and lineation adds to the sense of fragmentation that these multigenerational wounds create. Indeed, the sections into which the book itself is divided begin with pieces of the fragmented poem for which the collection is named. One of these fragments in “Muse Found in a Colonized Body” begins with the lines:
Trauma is inherited
They built a country on trauma
A country with a death wish
A mad country
Muse brings to mind other collections by poets who have written of this sense of a divided self, including Shara McCallum in No Ruined Stone. Like Montilla, McCallum is multiracial and writes elegantly and eloquently of that experience and of the ambivalences that often accompany someone who, in a very real sense, had her feet planted in vastly different cultures. Both poets speak to the struggles that can result from this as well as the tremendous sense of responsibility they feel to remember and honor their ancestors. In each of their collections, the poets celebrate their grandmothers and recount influences they exerted on them.
From McCallum’s poem, “Inheritance.”
remember
with every surface
what lies beneath
in journeying here
what choice was I given
but to morph
shape shifting to what she feared
in learning to be
more of you more
like you mimicking
your speech your dress lacing
myself invisibly
Into your world a shadow
passing seamlessly
through your cosseted rooms
And from Montilla’s poem “Some Notes on Being Human”:
I once had a lover who told me:
You’re soooooooo Black
I took it as a compliment
He meant it as
Goodbye
Every Sunday I call my abuela
& we go over all the week’s tragedies
She is brown & woman
trauma is the only way she stays tethered
to the earth.
She tells me ponte las pilas
& for hours I search my body for slots
where batteries might fit
because I imagine the only way to save humanity
is to be a little less human
The messages cut to the bone: your mixed blood is a stigma conferred upon you, and you will be better equipped for surviving in the world if you surrender to the temptation to deny who you are in order to fit in.
Echoes of other poets, such as Patricia Smith, come to mind. As in Smith’s brilliant and heart-rending Incendiary Art, in her Muse Montilla looks racism straight in the eye by naming the victims of police brutality.
“Philandro Castile’s Name is so Beautiful I Remember Love Making” speaks of the thirty-two-year old Black man fatally shot during a traffic stop in Minneapolis and whose killing was recorded by his girlfriend. At the end of the poem, Montilla, at perhaps her most angry, writes:
In this dead world
full of the dying
I no longer care about losing my
dress or my heart.I only care about revolution
& the ugly business of revenge.
In another poem, also reminiscent of Smith, she writes of one of her muses, Sheila Abdus-Salaam, a Black judge whose “suicide” remains questionable to this day. In this poem, as in the one written in honor of Philandro Castile, the voice is informed by righteous anger:
Whiteness thinks Blackness is whiteness.
Whiteness thinks we the same. & how
could we be? We be the starved,
the overlooked, the myth whiteness
makes up to feel better about their
place in things–& sometimes we’re
too loud & sometimes they decide we
gotta go, & when we are murdered we are
like a tree, no one around to hear us
fall
Listen, a judge died, she was Black,
let that not be a noiseless death,
let it be earsplitting, let it be thunderous—
Other poems entwine humor and quick observational wit while commenting on gentrification and white entitlement, as in “La Bodega—A Gentrification Story.” Here, as in many of Montilla’s poems there is a sense of immediacy, of being fully present in the moment of narration. She tells the story of being in line at the local bodega when a white woman cuts in front of her:
El bodeguero looks in
my direction, he knows I carry
inside me the kind of ancestors
that would cut a bitch
but I say
nothing.
The lines invite humor yet at the same time remain poignant and caustic. The white woman then tells the bodeguero about all the high-end groceries he should stock so she doesn’t have to go out of her way to the supermarket. Montilla continues with her speaker who, instead of staying angry, starts laughing as she reads the headline on the Dominican newspaper:
“Exclusivo: Quién es Cristóbal Colón” which translates as “Exclusive: Who was Christopher Columbus?” She answers, giggling to herself:
I know at the very
least he was the kind of human
that landed in a place some called
paradise & instead of enjoying the view
he asked for organic eggs & cut the line—
Montilla’s vivid rendition of the situation makes the poem amusing, and the humor makes the critique even more trenchant and effective. In the end, the clueless woman is chastised and put down in the speaker’s mind, her real or imagined agency over the speaker deactivated.
A discussion of this collection would be incomplete without mentioning one of its pivotal themes: the poet’s relationship with her body and the idea that allowing herself pleasure in that body may be a tool of empowerment and activism. She states in an interview with poet Mihaela Moscaliuc in Plume:
“Love, lovemaking, pleasure are all central to my activism. I can’t be engaged in radical imagination if I am not actively in love with myself, my body, my fine ass Idris Elba, my friends, my beloved. . . . . I am gorgeous, I deserve pleasure, I deserve beauty, and in affirming that I am filling and refilling my well and this is what keeps me writing dreaming breathing. . . . There will be no liberation without these tools and so yes, I will always write about my body, lovemaking, mouths, touch, because all of it should be central to activism work.”
An example of this fearlessness is found in the poem “On Finding Out that Eartha Kitt Engaged in a Threesome with James Dean & Paul Newman.” In it, Montilla seeks reassurance and direction from the famous singer and actress who is also of mixed race. Kitt apparently spoke boldly of this ménage à trois with two of the most famous white actors of the time as the “most celestial experience.” Montilla uses Kitt as her muse to get in touch with her own strength and power as a way to assuage her fear and anxiety over existential threats:
I am on to something
& I imagine the war that led Eartha
to that kind of lovely tangled
mess, how her body made them bend.
How they were rope,
snake & rod. How they worshipped her.What power Kitt possesses! The poem continues:
I pray to Eartha for her quick wit, her fine ass
body, her opportunities; so I may lose all sense
while the tear gas is set loose, while the dictator
reigns—fuck I am only human & all I want is
to feel safe.
What power Kitt possesses! The poem continues:
I pray to Eartha for her quick wit, her fine ass
body, her opportunities; so I may lose all sense
while the tear gas is set loose, while the dictator
reigns—fuck I am only human & all I want is
to feel safe.
“all I want is / to feel safe.” This powerful statement in many ways sums up the entire collection. She speaks of all the muses that have inspired her, from the murdered and oppressed, to Eartha Kitt to Karl Marx to her beloved abuela. In the end, the poems accrue into what reads like an extended answer to the central question she expressed in the interview with Moscaliuc: it “has to do with survival. . . . As a person of color with ties back to Africa I have a responsibility regardless of how light my skin might be . . . to fight for survival, to find pleasure and joy in life while also persevering in the face of white supremacy.”
Montilla has given voice to all of that: the history that cannot be forgotten and the damage that has been inflicted but also the resilience, strength, and hope that voices like hers give to all those who have suffered and continue to suffer.
