Corporeal Activism in Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X: Towards a Self-Appropriation of US Afro-Latinas’ Bodies

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 CORPOREAL ACTIVISM IN ELIZABETH ACEVEDO’S THE POET X: TOWARDS A SELFAPPROPRIATION OF US AFRO-LATINAS’ BODIES 1 MACARENA MARTÍN MARTÍNEZ Universidad de Sevilla [email protected] Received18 June 2020 Accepted 29 November 2020 KEYWORDS Afro-Latina; racism; gender; body; slam poetry; sexual desire; embodied discourse; self-representation PALABRAS CLAVES Afro-Latina; racismo, género, cuerpo, poesía “slam”; deseo sexual, discurso encarnado, autorepresentación ABSTRACT Scholars have typically studied Chicanas/Latinas in the US and African American women separately. However, this paper explores both the cultural appropriation of Afro-Latinas’ bodies in the US and the strategies they employed to reclaim their bodies and agencies through Elizabeth Acevedo’s novel, The Poet X. The protagonist’s body is simultaneously and paradoxically hyper-sexualized by racist discourses, and called to chastity by the patriarchal Catholic doctrine presiding over her Dominican community. Nevertheless, I argue that the protagonist makes her body a site of activism as she re-appropriates the agency over her body by moving from a selfimposed invisibility and silence in order to try to avoid the hypersexualization of her incipient curves, to a non-objectified visible position through her sexual desire, self-representative embodied narrative, and performance of her slam poetry. RESUMEN La crítica académica ha estudiado a las mujeres chicanas/latinas y afroamericanas de manera separada. Sin embargo, este artículo explora tanto la apropiación cultural de los cuerpos de las 1 An abridged version of this paper was presented in “V Congreso Internacional de Jóvenes Investigadorxs con Perspectiva de Género” (3rd, 4th and 5th June 2020). 2 Macarena Martín Martínez Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 afrolatinas como sus estrategias para reclamarlos a través de la novela de Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X. El cuerpo de la protagonista es simultánea y paradójicamente hipersexualizado por los discursos racistas y llamado a la castidad por las doctrinas católicas patriarcales presentes en su comunidad dominicana. No obstante, argumento que la protagonista hace de su cuerpo un sitio para el activismo ya que consigue moverse de una posición auto impuesta de invisibilidad y silencio para evitar la sexualización de sus incipientes curvas a una posición de visibilidad no cosificada gracias a su deseo sexual y a la recitación de la poesía que proviene de su cuerpo y la representa. I. INTRODUCTION This paper explores both the cultural appropriation of US Afro-Latinas’ bodies and the strategies employed by them to reclaim their bodies and agencies. For this purpose, Elizabeth Acevedo’s verse novel, The Poet X, is analyzed since the protagonist’s body is dominated by racial and patriarchal discourses, especially, in the form of the Catholicism imposed both by her Afro-Dominican community and her mother. Nevertheless, the protagonist manages to re-appropriate her body and her subjectivity by means of her own sexual desire and self-representative embodied slam poetry. Although since the 80s, works such as Joseph Harris’ and Paul Giroy’s have marked a turn to African diaspora within Black studies, the literature has mainly focused on Black anglophone communities and men. Among others, Ledent and Cuder-Domínguez (2012), Durán-Almarza and Álvarez-López (2014), or Melissa Schindler (2014) have criticized this biased view that misrepresents diasporic women and the large African-descended population in the Caribbean and Latin-American (Gallego 58-61). This critical neglect has been sometimes attributed to the ideas of mestizaje that have circulated in Latin America and the Caribbean, and which have made blackness invisible. However, intellectuals such as the Brazilian scholar Lélia Gonzalez have been long claiming the existence of Latinegros and establishing the bases of Afro-Latin feminism. Journals such as Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism means a contemporary significant contribution to this field. Despite the growing literature on Afro-Latinx in Latin America and the Caribbean, not much attention has been paid to US Black Latinos, their double diaspora, identity negotiations and racial Corporeal Activism in Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X: Towards a Self-Appropriation of US Afro-Latinas’ Bodies 3 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 fluctuations. It is also important to focus on this context since true diasporic and transnational studies do not only address the global, but the specific in order to “work through difference” and escape essentialism (Lorde “Women Redefining Difference” 284-5). As Brent Hayes Edwards claims, “diaspora is a linkage only through and across difference” (65). In the US, Chicanos/Latinos and African Americans have been typically studied separately (Mills 112). Latinx Studies do not usually include US Latinos of African descent. On the other hand, US Black studies usually focus on the experiences of African Americans, disregarding the experiences of other Black people in the US who also live a racialized identity. Nevertheless, the pioneer volumes by Jiménez-Román and Flores —Afro-latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the US (2010)— and Rivera-Rideau, Jones and Paschel —Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas (2016)— have established the bases of Black Latinidad in the US that subsequent articles and thesis have followed. Nevertheless, there is still much to do regarding Afro-Latinx literature, especially female authors. US Latino anthologies, like Norton or Oxford one, do not normally address Afro-Latin writers specifically, and when they do, they mainly focus on “Nuyorican Poetry.” 2 Both Richardson’s The Afro-Latin@ Experience in Contemporary American Literature (2016) and the later special of “Label me Latino/a” issue, also edited by Jill Toliver Richardson, on Afro-Latinx Literature and Performance (2017) have implied a turn away from the previous focus on “Nuyorican Poetry,” considering other genres and nationalities, and featuring more recent authors. However, these compilations do not specifically analyze female authors. In that sense, Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora (Vega, Modestin and Alba, 2012) means a very helpful source for gender issues, although it does not address US Afro-Latinas’ literature. Thus, taking into account that US Afro-Latina feminist and literary studies are still a developing field, this paper also considers other literary and feminist bodies of work, such as Black, Latina/Chicana, Afro-Latina and Afro-Carribean theory in order to explore all the intersections that US Afro-Latinas’ fluid, transnational and diasporic identities have. As the US Afro-Dominican feminist 2 The Norton anthology of Latino Literature, edited by Ilan Stavans and Edna Acosta- Belén, Norton (2010). Herencia: the anthology of Hispanic literature of the United States, edited by Nicolás Kanellos, Oxford University Press (2003). 4 Macarena Martín Martínez Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 and literary scholar Omaris Zamora claims, “we are not a fragmented body, even if we embody multiple understandings of feminism” ((Trance)formations of an AfroLatina 175). As a relatively neglected field of study, much could be said about US Afro-Latinas’ experiences and literary representation. In this context, this paper focuses on the cultural appropriation of Afro- Latinas’ bodies and their corporeal strategies to reclaim them. To do so, Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X is analyzed. She belongs to a new generation of Afro-Latin authors, who the latest critical reviews and anthologies, such as Richardson’s (2017), have not yet featured. Acevedo’s work won the 2018 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and the 2019 Pure Belpré Author Award for celebrating, affirming, and portraying Latinx culture and experience in the US. 3 In this semi-autobiographical novel made of narrative poems, the Afro-Dominican and New Yorker national slam poetry winner, Elizabeth Acevedo, tells the story of Xiomara, an Afro-Latin teenager, whose incipient body curves are problematizing her adolescence in Harlem. This “portrait of the artist as a young woman” deals with Xiomara’s evolutionary process of self-representation as a poet. Through this metanarrative, the reader accompanies a fifteen-year- old Xiomara on her journey from echoing dominant images and stereotypes against Afro-Latinas in her poetry to developing her own voice. In this journey, she also has to make the difficult decision of discontinuing confirmation class, for which her mother signs her up, to go to the poetry club run by her Afro-Latina English teacher, Ms. Galiano, as they are scheduled at the same time. Thus, she evolves from having her body appropriated by racist and sexist discourses, especially in the form of Catholicism, to reclaim both her body and subjectivity through slam poetry and the desire she experiences when falling in love with Aman, one of her high-school classmates. In this way, during her adolescence, Xiomara does not only develop her pubertal body, but also her agency over it. This paper is organized in two sections. The first one, “The Appropriated Body,” analyzes how Afro-Latinas’ bodies are on one hand hyper-sexualized by colonially rooted discourses and on the other, called to chastity by Catholic doctrines. The second section, “The Reclaimed Body and Subjectivity,” studies the corporeal practices (desire and slam poetry) that Xiomara uses to finally link 3 www.acevedowrites.com/about Corporeal Activism in Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X: Towards a Self-Appropriation of US Afro-Latinas’ Bodies 5 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 her agency/subjectivity and body after centuries of disassociation, and which, therefore, reclaim the latter from oppressive narratives. II. THE APPROPIATED BODY Xiomara’s incipient curves are intersectionally sexualized due to her racial and cultural origin by dominant racist and sexist discourses and forces which can be traced back to the bodily practices of colonization and slavery and continue operating through current systems such as capitalism, and at the same time are called to chastity by the patriarchal Catholic ideology that prevails in Latino communities, as The Poet X shows. Colonialism conquered female bodies just as it did territories. Indigenous and enslaved African women were not only physically exploited —women were commodified both as workers and bearers of new slaves—, but also culturally abused by the imperialist narratives that classified them as animals, uncontrollably sexual and wild (Lugones 743). Part of this racist imagery is the “Jezebel” stereotype which objectified Black women’s physical attributes, such as the buttocks, by considering them “excessive” and therefore signs of their animal hypersexuality (Collins, Black Sexual Politics 119-148). This narrative of dehumanization and sexualization was made to justify rape and sexual abuse. However, the exploitation, objectification, and fragmentation of colored female bodies did not end after slavery and colonization. In its different formulations like neocolonialism and capitalism, the dynamics of oppression in race/class/gender/sexual relations continue working to create bodily hierarchies and structures of power in order to make profit. What bell hooks calls “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” that is, the intersection of all these current forces, is one of the most effective forms of Foucault’s “biopower” (hooks 2004, IX; Foucault 2003, 277). Foucault defines biopower as the modern systems of restriction, which no longer imply physical punishment, but exercise control through social constructions. 4 Capitalism and neocolonialism do not use slavery, military force and other clear ways of physical violence as imperialism did, since the idea of control is less tolerated. However, these systems use cultural coercion by making narratives 4 While old political systems, like monarchies, had power to take life through violence, current systems of biopower control the population while they are living beings through different methods such as social constructions (Foucault 247). 6 Macarena Martín Martínez Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 such as the Jezebel stereotype prevail in the social consciousness. 5 This symbolic violence over Black female bodies culturally appropriates them. In the poem “How I Feel about Attention” (Acevedo 48), Xiomara comments on how her body is constantly under surveillance. She contends she feels like “a myth, a story distorted, waiting for others to stop and stare” (Acevedo 48). Xiomara is referring to the male gaze that objectifies her and makes her a passive subject who can only wait for others to look at her. By using the words “myth” and “distorted story,” Xiomara shows awareness of the constructed component of racist and sexist discourses. Xiomara knows that myths, race and gender are social constructions that have been created to justify structures of power. However, she also warns that the discomfort she experiences when being looked at, as a result of these discourses, is real. If situations are socially defined to be real, they are real in their consequences. By feeling scrutinized through the lens of racist and patriarchal discourses, she considers that this male gaze makes her body “something to be slayed, conquered” (Acevedo 48). In this way, she fantasizes about being a “Dominican Medusa” to transform into stone those who look at her (Acevedo 48). The conquering effect that these distorted narratives continue to have over racialized women’s bodies in nowadays society can be seen in other poems such as “It’s Only the First Week of Tenth Grade” (Acevedo 46-7), in which Xiomara narrates an abusive scene during the first week of classes: Today, I already had to curse a guy out For pulling on my bra strap, Then shoved a senior into a locker For trying to whisper into my ear. “Big body joint,” they say, “we know what girls like you want.” (Acevedo 46) By introducing the boys’ words —“‘ big body joint’ they say ‘we know what girls like you want’”— just after their actions —pulling on her 5 Nevertheless, it is necessary to say that violence persists as a means to circumscribe Black lives. The actions denounced by Black Lives Matter and Me Too in the United States context, the assassination of Marielle Franco in Latin America, and female genital mutilation in Africa are examples of the atrocities that are still committed towards Black female bodies around the world. Corporeal Activism in Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X: Towards a Self-Appropriation of US Afro-Latinas’ Bodies 7 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 bra and whispering into her ear—, Acevedo shows that boys feel entitled to act this way because her “prominent body” is read as a sign of invitation and consent. This scene confirms that that the jezebel stereotype of “excessive and consequently hypersexual Black female bodies” is still used to justify abuses against them. In “Unhide-able” (Acevedo 5), Xiomara also speaks about the hypervisibility of her body, its connection to hypersexuality and of the aggressions she suffers as a consequence of it. Her body, being described as “too much for a young girl,” is impossible to hide, and its “excessiveness” is again linked to notions of sexuality (Acevedo 5). In this poem, not only does the male gaze slay her, but also girls and their rumors echo the racist dominant stereotypes that connect her body with hypersexuality by calling her “Ho. Thot. Fast” (Acevedo 5). Xiomara dates all these instances of harassment and offensive names from when she grows breasts and gets her period. The fact that she does so shows that at the beginning of the novel she blames her body for being the cause of others’ behaviors: “And I knew then what I’d known since my period came: my body was trouble” (Acevedo 151). Xiomara has internalized from patriarchy “the provocateur myth,” which blames the victim, rather than the perpetrators of harassment. As Nadia Celis Salgado claims, for Afro- Caribbean girls adolescence is an incarcerating process in which their bodies become both origin and victim of male gaze and abuses, so teenagers do not only face physical transformations, but also the loss of their own subjectivity at the expense of the objectification that these corporeal changes bring along (22). In this way, after the bra scene, Xiomara wishes to fold her body into the tiniest corner so she could hide in it. The fact that she says “for me to hide in” clearly points to the dissociation of her body and her subjectivity that patriarchy achieves through objectification (Acevedo 47). Xiomara does not say that she wishes to hide, but rather that she wants to hide herself in her body, thus implying that her body, being appropriated by society and its cultural constructions, is neither an integral part of herself, nor a bearer of her subjectivity. While her excessive body takes space, her agency and subjectivity being removed from it do not have any room left. As she herself recognizes, her body takes more room than her voice (Acevedo 5). In “Games” (Acevedo 50), another boy, who again alludes to Xiomara’s big and hypersexualized body —“that’s a lot of body for someone as small as you to handle”—, calls her “mami.” The term “mami” is used in Latin cultures, especially in music genres such as 8 Macarena Martín Martínez Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 reggaeton, to express that a woman is “hot.” The fact that he uses such an ideologically loaded Spanish word to address Xiomara does not only sexualize her, but also makes clear that he can perceive her Afro-Latin identity. It is worth noticing how Black Latinidad is recognized for sexual purposes, while rendered silent and invisible for many others. Whereas US Afro-Latinx are normally taken as African American for their phenotype and poor scholarly attention has been given to their literary production, the titles of porn videosuse the term “Afro-Latinas” or “Black Latinas” quite often. 6 It is precisely necessary to consider how Latinidad intersects with race and gender in the appropriation of Afro-Latinas’ bodies. In this way, Catholicism has to be understood as part of the cultural appropriation of Afro-Latinas’ bodies. Religion is one of the divergent points between African American and Afro-Latin experiences that warns of the dangers of an essential Black feminism. Although there are some Black feminist critiques of patriarchy, sexism, and homophobia in Black churches, in general terms African American authors depict religion in a more positive way than Latin Americans. While the Protestant church has often been instrumental in channeling the social and political struggles of the community (Manigault-Bryant 175), many Latin American feminists consider Catholicism, being linked with Spanish colonialism as a strategy to subdue societies, to play a negative role in reading Afro-Latinas’ bodies and sexuality in more positive and emancipatory ways. 7 Xiomara lines up with these Afro-Latinas who take a critical view of Catholic patriarchal discourse. Several poems in the novel convey Xiomara’s rejection towards this patriarchal discourse of Catholicism. In “God” (Acevedo 14), she complains about how the holy trinity doesn’t “include the mother;” in “During Communion” (Acevedo 56-7) about God giving her life, but not allowing her to live it the way she wanted to; and in “Church Mass” (Acevedo 58-9) about how girls should be passive and submissive as she is told to wait and obey. In an attempt to show her disagreement with the Catholic 6 “PornHub”, “Xvideos”, “Let me jerk”, “SpankBang” or “Thumbzilla” are examples of pornographic webpages where videos using the tag “AfroLatina” or “Black Latina” can be found. 7 The Afro-Latina hip-hop artists Krudas Cubensi denounce in “Mi Cuerpo es Mío” the Catholic control over their bodies and sexuality: “Saquen sus rosarios de nuestros ovarios, saquen sus doctrinas de nuestras vaginas” (take your rosaries out of our ovaries, take your doctrines out of our vaginas). Corporeal Activism in Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X: Towards a Self-Appropriation of US Afro-Latinas’ Bodies 9 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 doctrines she entitles one of her poems “Talking Church,” as an irreverent allusion to the expression “talking shit” (Acevedo 132). In “Church Mass” (Acevedo 58-9) Xiomara is also very critical with the racist discourse of Catholicism, and especially with the intersection of racism and sexism within the Church: When I’m told To wait. To stop. To obey. When I’m told not to be to like Delilah. Lot’s Wife. Eve. When the only girl I’m supposed to be was an impregnated virgin who was probably scared shitless. When I’m told fear and fire are all this life will hold for me. When I look around the church And none of the depictions of angels or Jesus or Mary, not one of the disciples look like me: morenita and big and angry (Acevedo 58-9) Xiomara holds that there is no room for girls in Catholicism, especially for girls like her, who are “morenita, big and angry” (Acevedo 59). 8 She complains about the fact none of the religious figures look “morenita” like her (Acevedo 59). Indeed, the only biblical character related to Black folks, Ham, the putative father of Africans, was cursed with heritable servitude, which is interpreted to be a justification for slavery (Keaton 165). Beside this, Xiomara wonders what her position within the Church is if Catholicism’s only role 8 Although “morenita” literally means “little tanned or brown girl,” Xiomara is phenotypically Black. The reason to call herself “morenita,” rather than “Black,” as a person like her would be catalogued in the US’s “one-drop” racial system, can be found in her roots. In the Dominican Republic, the terms “morena” and “prieto” are used for dark-skinned Blacks (Cruz-Janzen 171). Not using the term “negro” responds to the discourse of mestizaje that prevails in Latin America and the Caribbean. The black subject is a direct threat to the project of whitening the population through the idea of mestizaje. Mestizaje is central to the “racial democracy thesis,” which asserts that Latinos are so racially mixed that they transcend racial discourse. However, this delusional myth of racial mixture and racial sameness do not exempt Black and indigenous Latinos from racial discrimination. Furthermore, mestizaje dismisses centuries of African legacy and black political mobilization against racial injustices and inequalities in Latin America and the Caribbean. For further information, please read “Ni de aquí, ni de allá”: Garífuna Subjectivities and the Politics of Diasporic Belonging (Paul Joseph López Oro). 16 Macarena Martín Martínez Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 are possible. 10 In Western epistemological traditions, sensuality and bodies have often been considered distractions to be overcome in order to attain true knowledge. However, several decolonial and feminist scholars have denounced this expulsion of bodies from epistemology. The Chicanas authors Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga (1987) have coined the term “theory of the flesh,” and Afro- Latin scholars such as Frantz Fanon (1967), Jacqui Alexander (2006), Lorgia García Peña (2007), and Omaris Zamora (2013 have also defended corporal knowledge politics in which the body is interpreted as an embodied archive. 11 It would not make sense to write about racism and patriarchy, oppressions that these women feel due to and though their bodies, and not doing it through them. In “Holding a Poem in the Body” (Acevedo 79) Xiomara proves wrong this Western separation of mind and body that links the mind and reason with higher faculties and the body with wild instincts by claiming that her poem comes from and is memorized by her body. Indeed, it could be said that Xiomara’s body (re)members since by becoming a site for knowledge, discourse and memory, her body ceases to be mere set of objectified members to be transformed into an instrument of subjectivity. Xiomara uses the metaphor of a puzzle to explain her journey from objectification to self-affirmation and integrity. Her body used to be fragmented (butt, boobs, mouth), as the pieces of a puzzle. However, by making the body a site of artistic production, as the creation of a puzzle is, she can put all her pieces together and build an integral body and self that is able to have an embodied discourse. Tonight after my shower Instead of staring at the parts of myself I want to puzzle-piece into something else, I watch my mouth memorize one of my poems (Acevedo 79) 10 “Write the body” is a concept that the post-structuralist French feminists (Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva) coined to express that writing about one’s own body is a tool for women to return to the bodies which have been confiscated from them in patriarchal societies (Judith Still “French Feminist Criticism and Writing the Body”). 11 For further information on corporal epistemology, please read Decolonizing Post- Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality (Ramón Grosfoguel) and (Trance)formations of an AfroLatina: Embodied Archives of Blackness and Womanhood in Transnational Dominican Women’s Narratives (Omaris Zamora). Corporeal Activism in Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X: Towards a Self-Appropriation of US Afro-Latinas’ Bodies 17 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 Thanks to poetry, the body is reclaimed from dominant discourses. It is no longer about the textuality of Xiomara’s body, that is, her body as a tabula rasa or passive bearer, a recipient of meaning for dominant racial and gender discursive regimes, but rather about the embodied discourse of her texts as Xiomara produces meaning and knowledge from the experiences she obtains through her body. In this way, the biblical passage that entitles the second section in which The Poet X is divided —"the word was made flesh”— is reversed. Through embodied discourse, the word was not made flesh, but the flesh was made word. This is just one of the examples in which writing is presented in opposition to religion. Not only do the poetry club run by Ms. Galiano and the confirmation class take place at the same time, but while Catholicism means listening to commands, writing involves articulating her own voice. Besides this, writing gives Xiomara what religion was supposed to. It does not only provide her a way to spirituality and reflection, but also a community, which is formed by the poetry club and the Nuyorican café where she recites her slam poetry. In fact, Xiomara claims that words “connect people” and “build community” (Acevedo 287). Xiomara chooses her own way to spirituality and community, rather than accepting what religion and family impose upon her. Furthermore, writing grants Xiomara a place to be beyond the church —the Nuyorican café and the club. Finding a place is a key aspect of slam poetry for Xiomara, as Afro- Latinx communities in the US have been linked to displacement due to their double diasporic heritage and the current gentrification they are experiencing in cities, as Acevedo shows in one of her poems: “the neighborhood had changed, that there were no more Latino families and the bodegas and sastrería were all closed down” (Acevedo 127). Xiomara does not only write her poems, but recites them in the Nuyorican café. Slam poetry links Xiomara to her African roots as orality occupies a central position in African tradition. However, it is the performative component of slam poetry, in the sense that the body is in use, what takes Xiomara’s embodied discourse to the next level adding extra value to slam poetry as a tool for reclaiming her body. Performing just feels the right approach to embodied poetry. As writing through the body seems logical because it is the site from where the world is experienced, it makes even more sense to perform what is written through the body. As Moraga says, “my writings have 18 Macarena Martín Martínez Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 always had bodies and as such are best rendered through the physical space of staging” (36). Apart from being the best way to render embodied discourse, performance allows the re-appropriation of bodies for different reasons. In the first place, performance stresses presence. Both Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Gail Lewis believe that performativity reminds us of hereness, fleshy and rooted presence (96, 4). This is important to stand up again for embodied discourse and knowledge, as Xiomara does in “Holding a Poem in the Body” (Acevedo 79). Versus a dominant detached epistemology which claims that universality is precisely achieved through an incorporeal and delocalized subject, decolonial and feminist critics embrace the geopolitics of knowledge and discourse and claim that the standpoints (such as an ethnic, racialized and gendered identities and bodies) from which knowledge and discourse are produced should not be erased in favor of a hypothetical universality that does not include a diverse range of perspectives. The clearly present dimension of performativity stands up for a corporeal and rooted knowledge and discourse, that implies a reappropriation of the body and of subaltern subjectivities. The power of performance is such that the scholar Melissa Blanco Borelli coined the word “hip(g)nosis” to refer to the feminist corporeal tactic of performing that Afro-Latins can engage with in order to challenge the objectification of Black women bodies by demonstrating that Black women’s bodies are a primary site of knowledge production (gnosis), and I would add, of art (6). It is precisely the power of performance to dismantle bodies’ objectification what constitutes the second use of slam poetry. According to Latinx and Black scholars, performing is the transgressive act through which the same bodies that were supposed to be possessed, fragmented and objectified by others in different forms (physically, culturally) are reclaimed for self-affirmation (Moïse 146, Brown 32, Brooks 41-70, Escoda-Agustí 291, Jacobs 49). Xiomara’s body is no longer a sexual object, but a tool for her empowering and embodied art. Indeed, Xiomara confesses that she “could get addicted to” this new type of attention on the stage, as there her body is not an object, but a discursive and performative instrument that finally “feel[s] important” in a non-sexual way (Acevedo 259). As has been said, Xiomara overcomes dislocation by finding the Nuyorican café and the poetry club to go. However, beyond the Corporeal Activism in Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X: Towards a Self-Appropriation of US Afro-Latinas’ Bodies 19 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 physical space of the stage, Xiomara also overcomes another type of displacement that The Poet X focuses on, the corporal one. Xiomara’s agency and subjectivity were removed from their body as it was constantly objectified and made a bearer of racist and patriarchal dominant discourses of hyper-sexualization. However, through her slam poetry, Xiomara achieves the goal of inhabiting her own body. Her inner self and a body are no longer disassociated. When her body and subjectivity were two separate entities, she wanted to make her body disappear. There are several poems in which she refers to it. For example, in “The Last Fifteen-Year-Old” Xiomara says that she wanted to forget about “this body at all” (151), and in “The Shit and the Fan” Xiomara confesses to have tried “to make all the big of [her] small”, refereeing to her big and hyper-visible body (193). However, now that her subjectivity and poetry are embodied and are part of her whole self (body and subjectivity), she embraces her body and let it takes the space it wants, instead of folding it or making it small, as is told in “Holding a Poem in the Body” (Acevedo 79): I let my body finally take up all the space it wants. I toss my head, and screw up my face, And grit my teeth, and smile, and make a fist, And every one of my limbs Is an actor trying to take the center stage. (Acevedo 79) IV. CONCLUSION Racial and patriarchal discourses have dominated the Afro Latina body for centuries as a result of slavery, colonial and neocolonial regimes, capitalism, and oppressive Catholic doctrine. Nevertheless, the body can also be a site of activism, resistance and subversion for Afro-Latinas in the US. What better scenario to reclaim the body from these dominant discourses that the body itself? Xiomara in The Poet X shows that embodied practices such as sexual desire and its self-representation through performative and embodied poetry are mechanisms to combat the cultural constructions against Black female bodies that objectify them. Thus, by becoming a desiring and artistic site, the body can be transformed into an instrument of agency and subjectivity for Afro-Latinas. 20 Macarena Martín Martínez Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 WORKS CITED ACEVEDO, Elizabeth. The Poet X. Harper Teen, 2018. BENNETT, Michael and Vanessa D. Dickerson. Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women. Rutgers UP, 2001. BLANCO BORELLI, Melissa. “‘Presencing’ Pleasure and Pain in Hispanophone Caribbean Performance.” The Black Scholar, vol.49, no. 4, 2019, pp. 6-19. BROOKS, Dafne A. “The Deeds Done in My Body:’ Black Feminist Theory, Performance, and the Truth about Adah Isaacs Menken.” Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women. Rutgers UP, 2001, pp. 41-70. BROWN, Jayna. “Body.” Keywords for African American Studies. New York UP, 2018. COLLINS, Patricia Hills. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. Routledge, 2004. ——“Black Women and Motherhood.” Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, edited by Patricia Hill Collins, Routledge, 2000, pp. 173-199. CELIS-SALGADO, Nadia. “Entre el Fetiche y el Cuerpo Propio: Las niñas en las escritoras del Caribe hispano.” Cuadernos de Literatura del Caribe e Hispanoamérica. El Gran Caribe en femenino: dos volúmenes plurales, no. 18, 2013, pp. 15-34. CRUZ-JANZEN, Marta. “Latinegras: Desired Women-Undesirable Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, and Wives” The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, edited by Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, Duke UP, 2010, pp. 282-295. DINES, Gail. “Nicky Minaj: Little More Than a Big Butt” Huffington Post, 27 Sept. 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/gail-dines/nickiminaj_b_5629232.html. Accessed 22 November 2020. DUANY, Jorge. Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States. The University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Corporeal Activism in Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X: Towards a Self-Appropriation of US Afro-Latinas’ Bodies 21 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 DURHAM, Aisha et al. “The Stage Hip-Hop Feminism Built: A New Directions Essay.” Signs, vol. 38, no. 3, 2013, pp. 721-737. EDWARDS, Brent Hayes. “The Uses of Diaspora” Social Text, vol 66, no. 18, 2001, pp. 45-73. ESCODA-AGUSTÍ, Clara. “I Carve Myself into My Hands:” The Body Experienced from within in Ana Mendieta Work and Migdalia Cruz Miriam’s Flowers.” Hispanic Review, vol. 75, no. 3, 2007, pp. 289- 311. FLORES, Alma Itzé. “A Chicana Mother-Daughter Spiritual Praxis.” The Chicana M(other)hood Work Anthology. The University of Arizona Press, 2019, pp. 195-211. FOUCAULT, Michael. “Society Must Be Defended” Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76. Picador, 2003. GALLEGO, Mar. A Ambas Orillas del Atlántico: Geografías de hogar y diáspora en autoras afrodescendientes. KRK Ediciones, 2016. GIRÓ MIRANDA, Joaquín. Mujeres inmigrantes. Invisibilidad y práctica cotidiana. Ayuntamiento de Logroño, 2009. GROSFOGUEL, Ramón. Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality. 2011. Berkeley U, Master thesis dissertation. HINE, Darlene Clark. “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs, vol. 14, no. 4, 1989, pp. 912-920. HOBSON, Janelle. Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture. Routledge, 2005. HOOKS, bell. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. Routledge, 2004. JACOBS, Elizabeth. “Shadow of a Man: a Chicana/Latina Drama as Embodied Feminist Practice.” NTQ, vol.31, no. 1, 2015, pp. 49-58. KAPLAN, Elaine Bell. Not Our Kind of Girl: Unraveling the Myths of Black Teenage Motherhood. University of California Press, 1997. KEATON, Trica. “Race.” Keywords for African American Studies. New York UP, 2018. 22 Macarena Martín Martínez Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 KOCKLEMAN, Paul. “Agency: The Relation Between Meaning, Power, and Knowledge.” Current Anthropology, vol. 48, no. 3, 2007, pp. 375-401. KRUDAS CUBENSI. “Mi Cuerpo es Mío” Poderosxs, El Fila, 2014. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=x-Pgwldfx8U. LEWIS, Gail. “Questions of Presence,” Feminist Review, vol. 117, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1-19. LÓPEZ-ORO, Paul Joseph. “‘Ni de aquí, ni de allá:’ Garífuna Subjectivities and the Politics of Disporic Belonging.” Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas, edited by Petra Rivera-Rideau, Jennifer A. Jones and Tianna S. Paschel, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 61-84. LORDE, Audre. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” Words of Fire. An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Shetfall, The New Press, 1995, pp. 284-291. —“Learning From the 6os” Calling All Black People: a Black Arts Movement Reader, edited by John H. Bracey, et al, University of Massachusetts Press, 2014, pp. 656-662. LUGONES, María. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia, vol. 25, no. 4, 2010, pp. 742-759. MANIGAULT-BRYANT, LeRhonda S. “Religion.” Keywords for African American Studies. New York UP, 2018, pp. 174-179. MILLS, Fiona. “‘In Between’: The Identification of Afro-Latino/a Literature” MOÏSE, Myriam. “‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ Grace Nichols and M. NourbeSe Philip Re-Membering and Healing the Black Female Body.” Reconstruction, vol. 40, no. 2, 2018, pp. 135-147. MORAGA, Cherríe. A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness. Duke UP, 2011. NASH, J. C. “Strange bedfellows: Black feminism and antipornography feminism.” Social Text, vol. 26, no. 4, 2008, pp. 51–76. QUINN, Rachel Afi. “This Bridge Called the Internet: Black Lesbian Feminist Activism in Santo Domingo.” Transatlantic Feminisms: Women and Gender Studies in Africa and the Diaspora, edited by Cheryl R. Corporeal Activism in Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X: Towards a Self-Appropriation of US Afro-Latinas’ Bodies 23 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 25, 2021. Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, pp.1-23 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2021.i25.01 Rodriguez, Dzodzi Tsikata and Akosua Adomako Ampofo, Lexigton Books, 2015, pp. 25-44. SIMPSON, Leanna B. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Recreation, Resurgence and a New Emergence. ARP Books, 2011. SPILLERS, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price Herndl, Rutgers UP, 2009, pp. 443-464. STILL, Judith. “French Feminist Criticism and Writing the Body.” A History of Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Gill Plain and Susan Sellers, Cambridge UP, 2007. WHITE, Cindy L., and Catherine A. Dobris. “The Nobility of Womanhood: ‘Womanhood’ In the Rhetoric of 19th Century Black Club Women.” In Centering Ourselves: African American and Womanist Studies of Discourse, edited by Marsha Houston and Olga Idriss Davis, Hampton Press Inc., 2002, pp. 171-86. ZAMORA, Omaris. (Trance)formations of an AfroLatina: Embodied Archives of Blackness and Womanhood in Transnational Dominican Women’s Narratives. 2016. Texas U, PhD dissertation. ——“Black Latina Girlhood Poetics of the Body: Church, Sexuality and Dispossession” Post45, www.post45.org/2020/01/black-latina- girlhood-poetics-of-the-body-church-sexuality-and-dispossession/. Accessed 22 November 2020.