After we moved to the United States and left New York City, I spent the remainder of my early life in a rural Central Florida—or I like to say I did because of how formative it was to spend years seven through twenty-two between Orlando and Gainesville. In the 1990s, the development and city sprawl did not quite extend its scabbed reach of pavement as it does today, which meant I lived in a heavily forested neighborhood.
Bodies of water were never far off, and in the tannin-dark river swam all manner of creatures just beyond sight. It was this mystery and threat of looming danger that found me poring through field guides to wildlife in the library at school, in Oviedo, in bookstores. I wanted to know about the potentials: the potential for threat, the potential for incredible wonder. The delight of seeing nonhuman creatures in a disappearing ecosystem, like I knew that the forest was going to be leveled into a parking lot. The immanent threat of paving over the earth, its own archive of memory palimpsest-ed into oblivion as its vernacular of leaf and wing was a language most could not and cannot still read.
And the use of the Bible to justify suffering. This was also muddled with the escape that the natural world meant for me: escape from God-the-Father who pits brother against brother, when every example that I had for a father was violent. It was finding poetry that reintroduced my heart to the wilderness. Consume consume consume, God has made enough for us. Spare the rod and spoil the child.
When writing the poems in Seabeast I was really obsessed with the state of the “fact” in contemporary discourses—the way they represent a rhetorical end of argument unless the facts are spouted in order to manipulate a populace into voting away their rights. But as far as science and knowing are concerned, I am always going to be interested in the archive of feelings that is the human body, the experience that rises from the affective reservoir and how they point to memory and survival mechanisms.
I do not fault survivors for surviving in any way they need to, even if that means forgetting Bhojpuri and speaking only English in the home. I find the “fact” a jumping off point, or actually a jumping-into point, where the poem has the space to unfurl. I am probably the most uneasy about this poem and choose to not read it for audiences, which makes it feel like the poem from the collection I want to write on. This poem is about intersecting violences.
“Manatee” in Seabeast is the third poem that I have published that concerns the West Indian Manatee. My way of looking at “fact” was heavily influenced by Jeffery Yang’s 2007 book An Aquarium that presents a bestiary of ocean creatures. His poems are obsessed with the textures of scientific languages and lyric terseness—a compressed marriage that sends my mind spinning into the potentials for significations of morphemes.
I do not remember the first time that I ever saw a manatee, but there were some important times when I did. Every year in the winter, manatees swim up the spring fed rivers in Central Florida and people flock to state parks to see them. Once on a glass bottom boat a naturalist described the ways that humans leave indelible marks on the environment, that every manatee alive (then) is scarred from propellers. Every. Single. One. I imagine poetry being scratched on paper (tree-pulp) or on the internet (the energy and water it takes) and recognize my own complicity here on another, more technological level.
Thinking of violence, the natural world, growing up, and Florida, I remember my brother, who I am estranged from. We were never meant to be friends, competing jealously for our parents’ favor. At every turn my own effeminacy betrayed the “Mohabir”—how could I be so girly and not a great (maha) warrior (bir)? Even now, I’d rather still be on the water, at the beach, on a trail, in the forest, someplace beyond another person’s reading me and disciplining my body into their categories.
In the first part of “Manatee” I use the words mantí (breast) and manus (hand), from Taíno and Latin respectively, to imagine a West Indian pun: that the manatee means both of these things (thanks Jeffery Yang!) while teaching the reader a fact. The first section, with the texture of scientific language added, I hope, acts as a kind of natural history text through the speaker’s act of confiding in the reader: the truth of human violence.
This felt like the closure of the poem. Yet there was some more work to do with the fear that I had as I wrote deeper into the associations that my mind was making. Manatees, my brother lying about his unfinished science project to protect himself from harm, my joy at not being the one chosen for the whip, my mother’s absence.
Moving into the second section, I remember, somatically, associatively, the connections between the hand and the breast, and I do not think of tenderness but abandonment. The mind is a cruel lover. I wanted this cruelty to erupt for the reader, as they learn the force of the words mantí and manus and what we do to other’s breasts with our hands.
In some ways, the reader is the Amma, as am I as I read and reread this poem, spectating at the abuse, unable to say anything. Complicity in three dimensions. It feels that way still—remembering helplessness, the joy that at least it was not me at the other end of my father’s horse whip; the intense environmental degradation that it does not seem like we are able to vote ourselves out of.
