Introduction

This collection of poems by Maritza Arrastia was performed with music by percussionist Valerie Naranjo at Celebrate Brooklyn in the Prospect Park Picnic House in 1987.

Yaravi was the name some of the Indians of the Greater Antilles gave to their funeral songs. The islands were inhabited by the Tainos and the Caribes. It is said the cannibal Caribe warriors enslaved Taino women and killed and ate Taino men. The Tainos believed the dead returned at night to dance with the living and make love to them in hammocks. The dead could only be told from the living by their absent navels.

This Yaravi is in memory of Puerto Rican painter, diorama maker and independence fighter Dennis Urrutia. In it, the grieving poet speaks as Mortal Woman, Warrior, and Goddess. She rails at and invokes her giants and her goddess. The giants are Puerto Rican nationalists Don Pedro Albizu Campos and Lolita Lebron, Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, and Mexican panter Frida Kahlo; the goddess is Atabey, Taino force of water and birth.

(First published by Caribana Press, Brooklyn, NY, Copyright 1987 By Maritza Arrastia)