Blog 42-Maraton de Las Madres de la Matria Tomasa Monte y Flor Beltran

I didn't need to know where Viviana, along with Jimmy, Osmani, Fausto and Tirso had vanished once we got back to Palenque from Arrecife. So I didn't know and didn't ask. I guessed they'd gone Hillside, heading for the Territorio Libre. We'd parted just outside El Comedor. Julia and I rushed back to our shelter where Machi, Lagarto, and Robles were sitting by the fire watching the Karaya Grand Prix race on a tiny battery tv set, propped on the rocks that framed our fire pit. Taina was cradled in the crook of Machi's crossed legs.
When we left for Arrecife we'd left Taina with her school teacher Rosa, whom she adored, but she was overjoyed to see Julia, ran to her, clutched her legs. Machi had taken to telling me next to nothing of his actions with los muchachos other than to sometimes show me whatever they had posted on the web. He waved me over and after we kissed, he showed me on his phone a short clip of the very moment when Marquito waved away his guys and said to los muchachos, “Vámonos.” He laughed. “This one went viral.”
In the bars in Coral, at la Providencia in Palenque, on the tv set in El Comedor, and on a large screened tv set up in La Fábrica, on radios and television sets, on telephones and laptops, everywhere, all of Cayo Karaya was watching the Grand Prix even without Marquito. I heard the resonant voice of the sportscaster narrating the race as I passed each shelter on my way to La Fabrica where nobody this morning was actually writing. Anacaona and Tanama were hanging a banner and waved to me from their ladders. Still, I'd come here to write and I would write. I found my favorite spot with a view of the Hillside jungle through the coconut trees surrounding the tabernáculo and began to write the tale of our Arrecife adventure. I had a couple of hours before the launch of the marathon reading of Tomasa and Flor's writing, one of the yearly lead-ups to Grito Day held on Flor's birthday, June 12. Patria had told me already that Adela was coming for this. I was almost, almost ready to see her again.
I wrote steadily, not bothered by the commotion. I started a contagion of writing. Elba Luz, Tanama, Guille and Lagarto all set themselves up close to where I was sitting and we were a cluster of deeply concentrated writers surrounded by chatter, laughter, dragging of chairs, hanging of extra lights and banners. In honor of the Huelga de Hambre Victoriosa this year's Maratón would focus on Tomasa and Flor's writings in prison or about prison.
When the music started the five of us went across the coconut palm grove to El Comedor to grab some food and joined the general conversation about El Secuestro de Marquito Palomo. Guille set down his huge laptop and stood. “There are lots of rumors in Palenque about where he is but I just got back from the Territorio and I actually know.” He lowered his discurso voice. “Marquito is being held in El Pico and a Canje de Prisioneros is almost in place.” I almost jumped off my chair. “A canje? And how do I get Ori to be part of that?” As we walked back to La Fábrica Guille whispered. “Talk to Capitán Jodeda. Talk to Padre Ezequiel. They are the strange bedfellows who can help negotiate something like that.”
When we got back to La Fabrica from the Comedor people sat in most of the chairs and even our writing chairs had been added to the semicircle. Those on deck to be part of the first hour of the Maratón were seated in the other half of the circle, with the rough wood podium in the center. Over the course of the 24 hours everyone's places and roles would change. There was no one who didn't get to read Flor or Tomasa's words. Anacaona was just finishing her introduction to the event. As we arrived she was saying the traditional words, “There is an empty space, enter it” and the group rose to sing Despierta Karaya, the old song about indigenous resistance to the Spanish conquerors that had been adopted as the Himno de Palenque.
The first reader was the winner of the Flor y Tomasa essay competition in Rosa's Escuelita this year. I'd never seen so confident a 13 year old. She was tall, thin, with long jet black hair in braids, dark reddish brown skin, and wore a special dress of red fabric with black stripes woven by Hillside artisans from the faldas of El Pico. She began by reading the poem by Flor Beltrán on which she had based her essay.

Presidio # 7
En la barriga del Morro
vi las catacumbas
y pensé
así se sienten los pecadores
cuando llegan al infierno

En el rostro del guardia
ví demonios
y pensé
el diablo somos nosotros
Prison #7
In the belly of the Morro
I saw catacombs
and thought
this is how sinners feel
when they first arrive in hell

In the face of the guard
I saw demons
and I thought
we ourselves are the devil

After she'd finished with the poem everyone applauded, chanting, “Tomi, Tomi, Tomi.” Guille leaned over to me and told me the young girl was named after Tomasa. She looked at each of us, waited for the applause to end, and read in a clear, firm, high pitched voice:
“If Flor is right, and the Presidio stands for hell, and we ourselves are the devil, that is good news for us in Palenque. When I read this poem I cried. I cried and cried. My Mami Paloma came to my sleeping bag and asked me if I was sad. I said, “No Mami, I'm crying because I'm so happy.” She crawled into my sleeping bag beside me. She said, “Tell me, why are you so happy that it makes you cry?”
I read her the poem. I said, “Mami, If the Presidio is hell and we ourselves are the devil, if hell and the devil are made by us, then it means that so is heaven. Then it means that we ourselves can be angels. We can be angels if we choose, and if we choose we can make heaven. Right here in Palenque, if we choose, we can make heaven.”
Tomi passed the reading stick to Elba Luz. She stood tall in her woven lilac floor length dress from El Pico, and read, “First my forms were filled and stamped in a small room with a small window and some light. I had been in the catacumbas several days. How to know how many? And when I was taken out I assumed it was for another round of questioning. My greatest fear was for my eyeballs. I prayed over and over that I would not die from having my eyes plucked out. Next, I feared being given a vaginal douche with acid. These were true forms of sadism that had killed some of my comrades.
“But this was not to be the day. Instead, my paperwork was being done by a burocrat of terror. I could study the man closely because he barely looked at me, never made eye contact for one moment. He was thin, had the sunken cheeks, pursed lips and yellow fingers of a heavy smoker. He wore a thin gold wedding band. Knowing what he knew, doing what he did, how did go home every night to his wife and children? For one moment, before he looked up and finally spoke to me, I wondered about her, his wife. Did she touch him? Did she love him? Was she able to not know, or forget what he did here?”
Seño Rosa arrived then with the children. There were maybe 20 of them, ranging in age from five to 15. The older girls and boys helped Rosa shepherd the little ones. They filled the center of the semicircle and sang a song they'd written for Tomasa and Flor. One by one, each child stepped forward, said the Taino word they chose, and mimed it....

Tanama mariposa
Yamuy cat
Yabisi tree
Tiburon shark
Tonina dolphin (This was Taina's word....)
Rahu children
Qemi rabbit
Nana girl
Nanichi my love
Maja snake
Manatee cow of the sea
Maca tree
Macana club
Mucaro owl
Zun zun hummingbird
Moin blood
Hura wind
Huracan center of the wind
Cuyo light
Cocuyo lightning bug
Caona gold
Ana flower
Ama river
Guey sun
Karaya moon
Taino good people (here they waved their hands in a circle that included all of us)

These are the things Tomasa saw
The things Flor saw
When they were free
After the chidren's song Julia came to get me, she was done with her shift in El Comedor, and we walked home with Taina to spend some time on the beach. Taina wanted to wear her pink dress with the long skirt for the gala portion of El Maratón, with the celebrity readers. We got there before the switch to more pomp and almost as soon as we'd sat Anacaona ushered Julia to the podium, handed her Tomasa's Monte's Cartas y Memorias del Presidio, and pointed her to a paragraph in the middle of a page in the middle of the book.
I was surprised by Julia's confidence. She'd changed, or become more her true self, since we'd livedin Palenque. She looked at each of us and spoke in a steady voice.
“Revolution will be unstoppable when it is everywhere. From where I sit in my tiny cell our petty differences appear clearly as parasites of the enemy's thinking lodged in our own minds. We must purge our thinking of their thinking. We must develop the ability to know our mind from theirs, cleanse our thinking. When we are purged it will become more and more clear that there is no real opposition between our liberations, all of us around the world. The only opposition is between our oppressions. Then we will simply step away from the oppressions and toward each other, toward liberation. We will at last withhold our consent....”
As she finished her paragraph Julia caught my eye, gave me a smile of complete relief. It had grown dark and the small lights that had been strung earlier in the day came on now, glowing like cocuyos.
My turn. Anacaona passed me Flor Beltran's Poemas Breves, the same bilingual edition I'd left on my desk in the city, open to one of my favorite poems, Small Geometry.
Blue square
Gray square
window
cell
bricks
The stories
of the hands
that laid each brick.
We work
to make prisons.
My square grief
My lone zun zun
visits my lone
square window
After I was done a spotlight was shined onto the podium and without introduction a woman I recognized walked toward the light. The ex-wife of the biggest Karayan crossover movie star, Pedro Biaggi, had embraced full time activism after their divorce. Her hair was now a white crown glowing against burnished brown skin. She had the same unlined face and confident serene expression she'd had when she'd helped me get Ori released after he'd been imprisoned during the repression sweeps that followed the first Asalto al Presidio. Julia handed her the Prison Letters. She stepped to the podium to read.
"Soy Ana Marta Biaggi."
“From my small square of real estate I had a better understanding of the world than I had ever had when I was free. I was forced to reflect and my forced labor in the laundry left my mind free to think. I didn't lack information because my guardia Blanca Rosa brought me Verdad and smuggled the books I requested from my lawyer Don Pablo, and kept them hidden in her own locker. I had a vision, one that we humans are born having, but are oppressed to forget. One that every child has, one that we fight to remember and often forget. We are born free, born to be free, born to let others be free. Tyrants rule because we let them, because they convince us we are alone, make us forget we are free. They make us forget we can win, make us forget our freedom is not something we can lose, only something we consent to forget. More and more of us, individually and collectively are remembering. El pueblo unido jamás sera vencido. There are no legitimate differences between us. There are no human enemies, only oppressive systems. These rigid, unthinking false constructs are carried out by human agents and these false constructs have armies. But no matter, the agents and soldiers (like my own Blanca Rosa) have a human side, are ones of us. All we must do is free ourselves, mind by mind, step away from our false personas. And we are freeing ourselves mind by mind, organizing ourselves into forces here in Karaya, but not only here, all over the world, country by country, city by city, campo by campo, calle por calle, block by block, building by building, prison by prison, workplace by workplace, home by home, mind by mind.”
When she first stepped onto the podium my first thought was, this must be Adela's daughter, but of course she had no daughter, and this was Adela. When she looked up into the light I saw the marks of age on her after all, a softer jaw, lines at the corners of her eyes. Her hair was streaked gray, still in a crown of braids. She wore a Hillside artisan embroidered blouse from El Bajío, the same kind she often wore when I knew her. She waved to a man and a boy settled on the floor right in front of her. The balding man was Noel and the boy must be the unborn child she was carrying when I last saw her the day before I returned to the City just after the Primer Asalto al Presidio. Just before she began to read she saw me. Our gazes held for a moment, and she smiled. Together forever.
As she began to read I recognized my very favorite of Flor's poems, one that Adela and I had read together on the beach near La Morada that day years ago when instead of driving to work at InfoDes we'd kept driving, escaped.
"Soy Adela Barro.
Dream of a General Strike
This is the morning
We woke
Finger snapped from our hypnosis
Thunder clapped alive
They told us it was the rapture
the resurrection
all along it was this
dream
of a general strike
Everywhere, at once
history at last
washes us
onto the shore
of the real
we step away from every lie
we say in unison
today
at 3 o'clock
in the pouring rain
We no longer consent
to our chains
we put down your arms
make our peace
The assembly of all of us
Todos
declares ourselves free

The poem always made me think of Ori and Paco and all of us with our dreams of a general strike. I remembered how in the end, a series of general strikes had won the Venturan revolution, won victories that arms might have made possible, but had been unable to win.
After she was done reading Adela looked at me and made a slight wave with her hand and I followed her away from La Fabrica. We stood under the coconuts in the moonlight hugging, crying, shaking in each others' arms. We looked into each other's eyes again. Together forever. For that moment words weren't necessary, there could never be enough of them. “Juntas en Palenque.” She held me closer. She said she was here just for tonight, for El Maratón, was leaving right away next morning for the Territorio where she was chairing the planning committee for the Trackers Convergence, but we'd make some time together when she got back to Palenque for Grito Day after that. We realized what Tanama and Inaru were singing, rushed back inside and stood listening with tears in our eyes holding hands. They'd created a lovely melody sweet and fierce at once and put to music Dreams of a General Strike.

Adela in the center of La Fabrica, reading from Edad de la Indignacion
Anacaona persuaded Adela to do a small reading from Edad de la Indignacion in the morning before she left, and more of us than I expected came, the Fábrica regulars, the Señoras from the Comedor who provided cafe con leche and pan con aguacate. Even Machi showed up!
Most things are less terrifying in reality, than my terror of them before they happen. What state is the opposite of terror? Peace, ignorance, connection, love, disclosure? That morning Adela and I were in each other's arms within seconds, as if we'd never been parted. And, at least for that moment, nothing she had done, nothing she had accomplished, took anything away from me. On the contrary, it was as if I was part of her triumphs...and maybe, maybe she was part of mine. Because to her, she said so, my very being here in Palenque was clearly a triumph of some kind. How wonderful to see myself through her eyes, victor eyes, even for that short moment before she began to read.
It seemed, amazingly, that Machi remembered her, the way young people remember adults they knew briefly when they were very young, adults who had been able to be fully with them. Adela was fully with all those five and six year olds then, her second cousin Lydia (who was now Guada), her neighbors Tina (who became Anacaona) and Elpidio (now Lagarto), even Machi who was around for a few months. She hadn't forgotten what it was like to be young. She was able to follow the young peoples' minds, not ignore or invade their minds the way most adults did. We met her 12 year old son, Kairi who had the long face and small amber eyes of his Father Noel, desaparecido after the First Presidio. The sweeps in Isla Karaya had been harsher than those in the City that had first taken but quickly released Ori. I needed to ask Adela how she found Noel, what Patria meant when she said he'd found himself. Or maybe I could ask him. I hadn't expected to see Noel with them but here he was. She told me the amazing story that after almost a year he had turned up at his sister's in La Morada, on the faldas of El Pico, after he escaped not from the City Force they had all believed took him, but from the guerrillas who had taken him because they thought him a security risk for what he knew, whatever that might have been. Maybe the whole story was in her book? Later I discovered Noel's own TODOS webpage.
Adela stood in the center of La Fábrica, her book propped on the rough wood podium. After she introduced her Anacaona said, “There is an empty space, enter it,” and invoked us all to write for five minutes, and then to read or say one word, one phrase from our own writing, our own mind. In unison. I wrote: Most things are less terrifying in reality, than my terror before they happen. What state is the opposite of terror? Peace, ignorance, connection, love, disclosure.? I read the words: terror and connection...
A wash of sunlight shone through the tall branches around La Fábrica's Tabernáculo and we were one mind with Adela as she read. (I'll make a tile and enter some of her memoir that really stuck with me...or better yet, I'll find her Todos page. Surely she has one.)
After the reading there was a breakfast at Justice Works' space in Coral. Most of us made the 20 minute walk and a few of us rode in battered four wheel drive yipis. I was among the walkers along with Elba Luz, Tanama, and Guille, my writing partners most mornings. By the time we arrived the patio behind Justice Works was crowded. It was hard to push my way to the food and coffee table, and the thrum of voices was so loud you could barely hear the guitar trio's bolero with lyrics about revolución.
First time I'd seen Danny in years. The unnameable cad. I saw him and Patria standing by the long table in the patio where the café con leche was being served, leaning toward each other with their heads close. I knew. He and Patria were lovers. The mysterious friend she visited late at night and at odd hours of the day was Danny! What had become of his wife Amina Díaz?” My mind realigned my relationship with Danny in seconds. For one, I could think (and now write) his name. Yet another incarnation. He'd been high school friend and high school boyfriend, ex-lover who broke up my marriage and then dumped me (so cad whose name I couldn't utter); and now, I saw, he was just the catalyst, nothing more. My life, my marriage, had been shattering on its own. Maybe he was reborn yet again as someone who must be my ally, was my ally, who must help me find Ori.