Native Echoes by Michél Claudio

Native Echoes

by Michél Claudio

Sometimes I read things on social media and think there’s really no reason at all that I should be writing. All my people are supposed to be extinct anyway. Who really wants to hear what a Taino descendant has to say? We are Guanina—rare and unwanted in a literary world. We come speaking a dead language for which there is no Rosetta Stone; a language no one wants to decipher. Our words tremble on fingertips attached to bodies they couldn’t burn or bury or completely breed out— words that are sucked into the vacuum of space, edging its way into a black hole threaded together by all the invisible ones.

I wish I had a ship or a statement that could sail through these uncharted pages, over scrolls of broken tongues back to the place where we were once whole— the place where we could speak again.