Creative Disobedience in Nuyorican Writing (Edwin Torres

CREATIVE DISOBEDIENCE IN NUYORICAN WRITING

(Presented at a poetry panel at Fordham University Lincoln Center, NYC, NY)

And that title makes me question “What artist is NOT creatively disobedient?” Who among them would say they stay inside the lines when they color their shape? Which makes me wonder how far to push my artistic disobedience before I’m ignored as a mere Latino, or even further into the multi-culti pile, a Nuyorican? Was it my people who disobeyed the reason to find borders? The generational routine of “not fitting in”, incorporated as a daily performance? Could disobedience be a cloak that defines minority when we include minority in the collective other of being artist? My tangent into other…a representation of being culturally enlightened enough to know that I make a difference by not following the path. My other against normalcy, my ethnic against a nation I thought I was born in. And that awakening itself, being the path itself.

I am choosing here to raise a ruckus by questioning the fact of disobedience. And is that a character trait defined as Puerto Rican or New Yorker or wise guy or smart ass or Lower E-sider? Loisaida…my vison…my home…inside me? Kazuo Ohno, master of Butoh and all things kinetic, said “my playpen is the universe” to which I, edwiiiiiin torrrres master of all things edwin, would add the word “inside”…my playpen is the universe inside. My home is always with me. As a poet, a citizen of the world, my nationality is my language. My baggage. My creative chaos is a right born into my heritage. And if my nationality is Artist, I am now the captain of my mutiny…head be my sail, bodyship be my captain. Excuse me, were there words asked to be written for this panel? Were we asked to arrive as representatives of an other? Yet one more other to exist inside each of us? I have a two-line poem called “Mystery Prize” — “Let me tell you something about arrival, it only means you’re not where you were.”

My creative disobedience can be traced before Taino—the indigenous owners of the land I claim in my chromosome, before the European queen and her migrant serfs decided on a vacation spot, before the Spaniards outlawed indigenous thinking to make room for their own, before the idea of originality had roots in stones and thread. I am a living exfoliant of NEW Nuyorican hyphenation, a lingo beyond baba-loon. A by-product of an imaginary dream…a ghetto Romeo and Juliet in a harlem West Side Story, where jets and sharks play out their ballet to the death. A poet yes, but a thinker beyond. You, out there in the audience, are all thinkers beyond because I’m telling you you are. Because the brain is a mercurial god that feeds your muscles the movement you need to move in this world.

If there is just one people to represent disobedience, I don’t think we Boricuas can claim a mantle on that shelf. Believe it or not, there are others who disobey. But our creativity