Traveling Freely (Curbstone Press, 2024), Roberto Carlos Garcia’s collection of essays, explores Blackness through an Afro-Diasporic lens. Garcia skillfully explores politics, gentrification, masculinity, grief, and love. His work is a masterful blend of personal narrative and cultural criticism. I met Garcia in Newark during the launch of my collection, I’ll Give You a Reason. I was instantly comforted by the presence of a fellow Dominican writer whose poetry I loved and appreciated.At the time, Garcia’s collection of essays had yet to come out, so I didn’t know how much I needed his prose or how his essays would inspire me and challenge me to further examine my Blackness, my Dominican identity, and my place in our shared literary community.
Roberto Carlos Garcia is a 2023 New Jersey State Council of the Arts Fellow. He is also the author of four poetry collections: Melancolía, black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric, [Elegies], and What Can I Tell You: The Selected Poems of Roberto Carlos Garcia. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, NACLA, Poets & Writers, The Root, BreakBeat Poets Vol 4: LatiNEXT, and Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3. Garcia is the founder of Get Fresh Books Publishing, a literary nonprofit.
I recently spoke with Garcia via email about his collection, his creative process, and how Traveling Freely came to be.
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The Rumpus: In your essay “black / Maybe,” you write, “The children of the African diaspora, for complex reasons, have some difficulty owning our Blackness. History has a lot to do with it; what our family teaches us also has a lot to do with it.” What revelatory experiences did you have that led you to embrace your Blackness? How long did this journey take?
Roberto Carlos Garcia: I think I knew early on that I was descended from Africans because people never let me forget it. In the United States, you’re forced to understand the Black/white dichotomy very quickly. I encountered a lot of “passing” by light skin or Castilian Latinx, and that passing often meant that I was the target of racism and jokes about my hair texture and skin color. The realities of racism and microaggressions in American life made me hyper-aware of the customary racism in the Latinx community because many Latinx groups bring anti-Black racism and internalized racism with them from their native countries to the United States. In her book Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary Law, and the New Civil Rights Response, Dr Tanya Kateri Hernandez provides a wealth of information on this topic.
The other side of this is that if I love myself, I have to know myself. I have to know who my ancestors are, and I have to know that I can’t believe what racists say or think about me. I was also fortunate to be in NYC, the birthplace of hip hop, and Harlem! The literary mecca that is Harlem. We had so many artists teaching in their raps. We had murals of James Baldwin and Maya Angelou, and, and, and. It wasn’t only African American history but the history of the African continent and diaspora. That was very formative for me as well because it pointed the way to understanding my ancestral journey and that I’m part of a people.
Rumpus: Do you think that this journey of self-acceptance is easier for those of us living outside the island and here in the United States?
Garcia: Living in the United States or the UK gives you a different perspective because of the racism you experience every day but also because of the amount of scholarship we have access to. It opens your eyes if you have access to it. On the island, they’re still using textbooks provided by Spain and France. That being said, there are plenty of people on the island who understand racist dynamics and racism within the Dominican superstructure and are fighting against it.
To a family struggling to eat every day, these big ideas mean little. For people on the island, living in poverty, it’s about class struggle. For many people on the island, nationalism supersedes racism. For the elite, who control the means of production, maintaining the conditions that keep people ignorant to neo-colonialism is integral to their hierarchy. There’s a vested interest in preventing as many people as possible from achieving that level of “knowledge of self” I talk about in the essay.
Rumpus: In “Trapped in History,” you write about language: “Aren’t we invoking white supremacy when we try to master the master’s language?” What other traps do you see us falling in? How do people like us exist without always thinking about the legacy of oppression? Is there a world where we are truly liberated?
Garcia: One of the pitfalls of these arenas we’re in—academia, publishing, teaching, community organizing, nonprofits—all have specific languages. These languages come from white power structures, a structure of dominance. We have to be very careful not to become involuntary puppets of that power structure. So, many of us, myself included, either believe we can change systems from within, or we believe that we have to at least try. We also know that by disrupting and challenging the language, or dismantling the language, we can, hopefully, dismantle white supremacy.
As a consequence of this colonial experience, we’ve had these languages, these ways of thinking and being, pushed on us. Our Indigenous languages were written off by colonizers as savage. Acknowledging how this language exists, and how it can ensnare us, is the first step.
Rumpus: In “Men Don’t Cry,” you write about vulnerability, about your experience and journey healing from toxic masculinity as a Black Dominican man. How has race or ethnicity played a role in preventing you from being vulnerable?
Garcia: I cried very easily as a kid and was always ridiculed for that. For Black Caribbean boys, homophobia is introduced very early on because if we have a tendency to cry easily, we have homophobic slurs lobbed at us. We’re labeled as effeminate, and then that homophobia and misogyny are tied to ostracism, and it metastasizes into hatred.
On the one hand, Black parents are trying to raise Black boys who will be able to survive in this racist world as Black men. However, resilience, courage, strength, endurance, and understanding don’t have to come at the expense of vulnerability, tenderness, acceptance, and openness. If we do that, we’re no better than the colonizers and their inhumane systems. As fathers and as mothers especially, we can’t perpetuate that. The image of the strong Black man or woman who will endure anything is cap. We know what we need to do to survive and how crazy it is out here in the West. I’m trying to normalize being a human being with a full range of emotions.
Rumpus: When you wrote these essays, did you envision cultural criticism becoming such an integral part of the process?
Garcia: I wanted the essays to be well rounded. Part personal experience, academic research, cultural and social criticism, call to action. I envisioned it but as part of a larger picture.
Rumpus: In your essay “Home,” you write about living in the suburbs, evidence of upward mobility, especially for those of us who grew up in inner cities. “I live in the suburbs now. This is a different kind of survival, a different violence—here it is a perversion of idyll. We take and we want, we want and we have.” How did this transition affect your experience writing this piece? How does this speak to the different violences that people like us endure?
Garcia: I had this love-hate relationship to it. I hate capitalism, but I also knew that I wanted to live differently. Having or owning land, a big backyard where you can grow food, make a garden, or just plant big shade trees you can sit under is a beautiful thing. But damn, what it takes to get to that point, economically, where you can own land, is monstrous. The amount of work that the racist power structure has done to keep us out is also there, in every lawn and driveway. If you do enter those spaces, everybody is questioning who let you in. It’s not 1960, but we still deal with that. So, part of me questions: “Does having this mean I’m selling out? How long do I want to be one of a handful of minorities in this predominantly white space? Am I starting to feel like I’m exceptional because of that?” Oh god. And then, it dawns on you that everyone can and should have access to a patch of earth to call their own. You see golf courses and manicured lawns and you’re just like, what a waste of useful land.
I’m constantly comparing this peace and tranquility to the inner city I knew, and then thinking about what it takes to allow these spaces to exist. A lot of different kinds of violence are at play: redlining, racial profiling, and the “penning” in of BIPOC into inner cities to keep them out of the suburbs, with the exception of domestic service work, landscaping, etcetera.
Rumpus: The last paragraph from “Home” is remarkably beautiful: “I live in the suburbs now. I worked hard for this, strove for this, yes sirred, no ma’amed, and overtimed for this. And I forget home for this—from time to time. Home is nothing to write love songs about: there is no romance, only the memory of hunger, adrenaline, pain, the growl of the wolves, and the cries of the meek.” What is home to you?
Garcia: I am home. Wherever I am is home because home is within me. I’ll never forget this line from Naughty by Nature’s song, “Uptown Anthem.” It goes, “You can run, you can hide but you can’t go far / no matter where you go there you are.” Becoming my best self for me so that I’m good with me, means I can be at home anywhere.
Rumpus: After reading “American Violence,” I couldn’t help but think about my own consumption of violence and how it manifests in my life. How do we keep the violence we consume from seeping into our art?
Garcia: I try not to consume gratuitous violence from visual media, social media, or literature if I can help it. There’s so much violence being done to us, real-life violence like poverty, genocide and on and on, that we’re pushing the limits of what caring about ourselves means. Being addicted to consuming violence for entertainment is like being addicted to self-destruction in many ways. The impact on our psyche and spirit and our mental health is damaging. I also understand that escapism is a real thing. I understand that sometimes we turn to violence to escape violence.
Rumpus: What has changed your perception and feelings toward violence?
Garcia: We have to face the things that make us uncomfortable and in a safe way, the things we fear. I want to understand violence as much as I can, its sources, its triggers, how to survive physical violence, if and when I’m confronted by it. I don’t want to embrace it in a way that normalizes violence of any kind, but I understand that I can’t run from it. I can’t bury my head in the sand. For example, I encourage people to train in martial arts, to learn how a gun works—even if you don’t shoot one or buy one—how knife attacks work, and how muggings happen.
I also want to make visible the callousness within our institutions that lead to violence on a broad scale—poverty, houselessness, discrimination—so that we can fight against these things more effectively.
Rumpus: In “The Self Sheltered in Place,” you write about multiple selves: “On occasion, I’m stopped cold by the version of me that appears at any given moment, or when he’s not supposed to. I don’t recognize me, but I know myself. And in those situations, I’m quiet. I accept what’s happening and hide until another me, the right me, shows up.” To what extent can we attribute these identity crises, or moments of disconnection from the self to colonialism?
Garcia: Colonialism wants us to be submissive subjects, to be willing participants in our own subjugation. Capitalism wants us to be ravenous consumers that do not question anything. To sit with and explore yourself, to recognize different aspects of yourself freely and without hindrance is a radical act. You’re breaking out of the paradigm of the “individual” and stepping into the complexities of being multi-faceted. That is a type of liberation that neither colonialism, nor capitalism want. The “disconnection” is of a false self from these structures towards a free self, and I think the pandemic proved to many people that the world doesn’t have to be structured the way it was pre-pandemic.
Rumpus: Talk to me about the vulnerability it took to write “. . . a walk through this beautiful world. . . .” How was this process of being vulnerable different while writing an essay compared to poems?
Garcia: Not too different, really. I try to stay vulnerable, regardless of the genre I am writing in. It is interesting to see how many more people engage with prose than they do with poetry. We need to work on that. I’ve found that it’s definitely a different experience for readers.
When it comes to this particular essay, I’m fortunate to have processed and healed a lot over the years. That healing made writing about suicide possible. A different level of vulnerability is possible in the space of healing and processing. Because it is challenging to treat such a personal decision, one that will extinguish the flame that is your life, and that impacts the people who love you, in a naked essay like “. . . a walk through this beautiful world. . . .” I wanted to be honest about my experience as a survivor, and as a person who has lost people to suicide.
Rumpus: Did you have a specific structure or format in mind for the essays, or did you allow each piece to develop its own form organically?
Garcia: Each essay developed organically. I didn’t know right away that I wanted to write an essay collection. I was just experimenting with the form. And then the essays just kept pouring out of me. Nice problem to have at the time.
Once it became clear to me that I was talking about my life and experiences between two different places and cultures: Dominican Republic and the US, that made it easy to split the book into two parts: “The Diaspora,” and “This is America.”
Rumpus: What is the significance behind the title, Traveling Freely? How does it encapsulate the essence of your essay collection?
Garcia: We are not free. We are either forced to move through different aspects of our world for somebody else’s gain, or we’re prevented from moving freely within the world, again for somebody else’s gain. How easily can we move away from poverty to economic stability? How easily can we become fully realized human beings? How much control do we have over our so-called elected officials or our political processes? We are not free, but there is a subset of our population that’s free to do, say, and act as they please. The title is a reflection of that tension.
Rumpus: Are there any themes or stories from Traveling Freely that you feel you have only begun to explore and might return to in future works?
Garcia: Definitely, I’m still exploring family history in the DR, and I’m still examining the way institutions function to exploit and oppress people. I’m still exploring how we, in the African Diaspora, do and do not engage each other in the liberation struggle. I’m researching what Pan-Africanism can look like in this century and in this moment right now. I’m envisioning what solidarity within the Global Majority can look like.
Rumpus: I know you have a background in poetry. What was it like to switch to nonfiction?
Garcia: It was fun and somewhat liberating because formally the constraints were off. I could just write and not worry about things like line length and stanzaic patterns etc. It was nice to just let it go. I learned that sometimes you just need to write an essay because a poem might not be the right vehicle for what you’re trying to say. And that’s okay.
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Author photograph courtesy of Roberto Carlos Garcia
