Selected AFro Poems February 2021

I am snuggled up in a crevice of the steep mountain in my sleeping bag looking up into the immense starry sky, and listening to the sounds of the encampment below where refugees prepare for the flood of people arriving tomorrow to commemorate the third anniversary of the Acteal massacre. Today a man told me that the earth we stand upon is saturated with the blood of his wife, and of his baby, yet unborn when the paramilitaries cut open the womb and tore the child from her home. There are no names written on the cross marking the common grave where the bodies of his wife and child now lay among the 45 people killed that day. Only words "time to plant," are written there. As one survivor said: This is not a communal grave, but the burial of our entire community. Although there are no gravestones to mark the place where each body lies, not their name or their age is written here, nobody fears anonymity or that anyone will be forgotten. In our community spoken words are stronger than written words. Many dangers threaten us, but forgetting is not one of them (Hernández, Rosalva Aída 1998: 32) [1]

2018

American Anthropologist, 2002

Revolutionary Medicine: Health and the Body in Post-Soviet Cuba, 2012

WALKING WITH MY INTESTINES HANGING THROUGH THE STREETS OF QUINOA, AYACUCHO – PERU CHUNCHULCHAYPAS WARKURAYASQAM PURIRQANI (With my intestines hanging I walked) (Atena Editora), 2024

Este artículo examina el contexto de violencia política en Ayacucho, Perú, donde mujeres indígenas quechuas fueron sometidas a esterilizaciones forzadas. A través del testimonio de una víctima, se describe la crueldad de estas prácticas, comparando figurativamente la experiencia con la extirpación de senos y la fractura del útero para evitar que tuvieran más hijos. Se utiliza un enfoque cualitativo con un método descriptivo, analizando el caso de una mujer afectada por estas intervenciones. Los resultados muestran que las esterilizaciones fueron llevadas a cabo de manera coercitiva y sin el consentimiento de las personas, en un contexto de planificación familiar. A pesar de haberse llevado a cabo en un hospital de primer nivel, la negligencia médica resultó en una herida mal suturada que se infectó y se volvió crónica. La mujer caminó durante cuatro largos años con los intestinos expuestos (CHUNCHULCHAYPAS WARKURAYASQAM PURIRQANI - Con mis intestinos colgados caminaba), debido a la falta de recursos para recibir tratamiento adecuado. Este estudio concluye que estas esterilizaciones forzadas fueron parte de un plan demográfico arraigado en el contexto de violencia política en Ayacucho entre 1980 y 2000. Es crucial reconocer y abordar esta tragedia ignorada para garantizar justicia y proteger los derechos humanos.

2017

One way neoliberalism and patriarchy maintain power is under racial hierarchies that legitimize the removal of non-white bodies to places of disposability. I aim to illustrate this violence and how it plays out through migrant domestic workers in a Lebanese context, tracing their pathway to incarceration. I also attempt to dispel the myth that suggests migrant domestic workers are victims in their location of disposability through my experience facilitating a mental health intervention in a Lebanese prison. I demonstrate this by reflecting on how Western medicine reinforces the oppression of migrant domestic workers relative to my own subjectivity and how they resist through acts of feeling and care-work.

Journal of Africana Religions, 2013

This article examines the ceremonial practice of smallest scale and greatest prevalence in Afro-Cuban religions: elders' oral narration of initiation as an "unchosen choice," pursued solely as a response to affliction. This article marshals evidence to show that the conditions of scholars' involvement in these traditions have contributed to the dearth of analysis concerning these stories and proposes that the initiation narrative be classified as a distinct speech genre, with both traceable historical sources and concrete social effects. Drawing on several years of ethnographic research, the author contends that the verbal relation of such narratives has redounded to the enlargement of Afro-Cuban traditions, chiefly by promoting the spirits' transformative reality and healing power. Both the methodological critique and theoretical argument are offered in hopes of redirecting the study of Africana religions toward embodied micropractices that assist in the gradual coalescence of social identities and subjectivity. [He] was learning to be a healer as part of his being cured from a deeply disturbing affliction. In so doing he was going through a cycle of affliction, salvation, and transformation that seems as eternal as humanity. Yet the power of this cycle stems not from eternity, but from the active engagement with history that affliction depends upon for its cure.

The American Historical Review

Ann-Marie Adams. Review of Brown, Vincent, The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. H-Atlantic, H-Net Reviews. June, 2012.