Blog 4-Back to Week 1 in Palenque

When she first sat me down to write in La Fabrica Anacaona put me in a low, deep, gray weathered wood chair, put a plank across the arms, and propped my laptop on it. She helped me spread out the notebooks and flashdrives I had in my knapsack alongside the laptop. I told her the first thing I planned to do was cull from the notebook journals and laptop files I'd been making since I got here, maybe start with my entries for my first week in Karaya. She said, “Select, randomly if you have to, a trace, a gage into your moments. You'll begin to unravel the mystery of intention and accident that leads us to capture as text this fragment of our life and not that one. Or if you don't unravel it, at least you experience it. Just show up and write."
Following Anacaona's instructions, on my second work session in La Fabrica I intended to go through my notebooks. What to include on my TODOS page? Overwhelming. How to begin? “You can always make another tile, try different things." She'd tilted her chin down as she smiled, a gesture I now remembered from when she was little Tina. She squatted alongside me and pointed to the flashdrives I'd taken from my knapsack. "Think of how lucky you are to have all this to work with. Think of all you now get to discover about who you were, who you are, who we were, who we are." I felt myself mimicking her down tilted smile. "Me acuerdo, la alegria de esribir."
She showed me how to import images from my phone to my page to make an icon. I shook my head. “You're just about Machi's age and you know more than I do.” She laughed, “So does he!” She held my gaze. “I got to stand on your shoulders, my mother's, all the women of your generation. But you were the daughters of the phantom mothers of the First Karaya Wars. They lived, they survived, and Oh how that matters! But colonization, war, rape, genocidal targeting of them, their husbands, their sons, ravaged them and they barely had inner arms to sustain themselves, to pass on to you, and you had to make your own.” She grinned. "Put another way, your mothers were even more distracted by oppression than our mothers."
When I looked away, she pressed my hand and brought her face close to mine, made me look into her eyes, spoke almost tenderly. “We carry all our ancestors in our chromosomes. It took all of them for us to survive, the ones who fought and lived and won, the ones who died fighting, the ones who gave up, the ones who colluded and sold out in order to stay alive.” She fell onto her knees and leaned into me. I let her hug me hard, chest to chest. What joy to feel her heart against mine. “We got lucky, we had you for our mothers, revolutionary, feminist mothers. We had your arms and our own.” She moved away just enough so we were face to face. We were both small women, she a few inches taller than I. She spoke softly into my ear. “We don't know more than you, we know different. Just as the phantom women knew even if they didn't know they knew. It's only together, todos, that we all know more.” She kissed my cheek. “But you know that. You wouldn't be in Karaya if you didn't.”