Occupation. Rematriation. Liberation

We don’t get to romanticize rematriation while overlooking the role imperialism plays in our being forced out/ born/ raised abroad in the first place. We don’t get to separate rematriation from liberation—the one we struggle to practice daily; the one humanity must struggle for globally.

How do you summarize the past month in one statement? The emotions? How do you reconcile such extreme loss, package it into words, only to find that the losses grow significantly with each edit? How do we work, report, tell stories, paint, live in such times? How do we function when social media shares the atrocities in real time, between Halloween costume selfies? But it is the only way. To grieve lives lost, to overturn genocide, is to live loudly, fully, boldly each day. Even while grieving, hurting, dragging yourself along the way. It is to be a vivacious expression of life, even with all its shadows and suffering. Feel it, claim it, face it. It is the only way to change it, transcend it.

This statement has been in process for weeks. Today I finally piece it together in such a way that feels okay to post. “Okay” will have to do for now. I generally don’t write statements like this in times like this because my work, since its inception, has always been pro liberation, which is also to say that it has always been anti-imperialist. A path walked, lived daily. A path that doesn’t only activate, react when something is shared on the news. Regardless of what is or isn’t on the news, we already know. We dread each day that it will escalate to the point of mass violence. We dread knowing that liberation, on this planet, too often requires these escalations for people to notice, respond, to stop the systems humanity has long outgrown. Most only see drastic, mass violence. They have grown accustomed to, normalized, even rationalized the daily, perpetual violence that though it may not always claim lives, kills spirits on all sides.

People can choose to overlook one’s work and its message, whole revolutions and their benefits, just as many are choosing at this time to ignore and keep silent around what is happening. Explicit statements therefore become necessary. Having long dealt with censorship, being excluded, uninvited from spaces and opportunities because of my views, my political stance, it would be self-sabotage to choose silence. I would be complicit if I chose to censor myself at this time, or any time for that matter.

I am done with UN resolutions protecting a people’s right to self-determination by any means. Done with Decolonization Committees that every year of my adult life my people plea to for a recommendation on Puerto Rican liberation, only to live out the same colonial conditions. Done with the very entity that supported the 1948 creation of this new state on occupied territory. “Never again” became another thing to be waged in a different place on a different people. Barbed wire and prison walls have no place in anyone’s promised land. Europe instigated much of this mess, then removed itself from the conversation, still censors those who try to raise it. Europe and the US presided over displacements, extermination, the dividing and distribution of lands. Colonizers still steal lands from people only to later gift it back contaminated, like Vieques. Colonizers still sit back judging wars that unfold over their colonial scraps as entertainment.

I am a product of genocide. The last baby born from a womb sterilized at a time when one third of our women of child-bearing age had been sterilized. My own womb weeps witnessing this very public, overt genocide unfolding before the world’s eyes, unstopped.

Though I write from my ancestral womb of Borikén, I was born and raised in Brooklyn. East New York, Brooklyn, what others might call hella ghetto. Where schooling was intercepted each morning with a whole strategy on how to not get into a fight and what to do if you did. Where street codes intermingling with nursery rhymes was being raised right. You can’t watch someone get jumped and not jump in or try to stop it. You can’t fight dirty. Even boxers are ranked by division according to weight. So why would I keep silent when those wielding power, funds, influence would vilify the people they have detained, contained, displaced, oppressed, imprisoned, and murdered for over seventy-five years?

We should be disturbed that the name Palestine no longer appears on maps. All humanity deserves that we speak out against apartheid and genocide. If this is permissible today, they can come for you and your land tomorrow. I too live on occupied land. You won’t see it on the news, but our freedom fighters have also been imprisoned, killed, called terrorists. And for all I have lived and known about my homeland, it does not compare to the atrocities Palestinians have lived for decades. And for all the atrocities lived by Jews, justice cannot be claimed from another people. We can instead commit to justice everywhere.

No justice, no peace. Those in power continue to inflict injustices then condemn the oppressed for not responding peacefully. Planetary pathology.

The dream of a safe homeland to return to is a beautiful, necessary dream, but never when it involves displacing a people, and worse, exterminating a people, erasing a nation off maps. Liberation and access to a safe and secure homeland is the birthright of every human. The challenge is how to secure that right for every human on this planet without competing for the same spaces, without imposing our needs on others. How many folks in the US might say that Indigenous people taking back cities across Turtle Island, containing all settlers into colonizer-crafted reservations patrolled by military personnel doesn’t ring as righteous?

Conquest placed the planet in the hands of empires weaponizing religion to legitimize their violence. God is light and love. There is nothing Godly or holy in war and conquest. Descendants of colonized people, some of us still colonized, peacefully work to reclaim our lands, our seeds, our ancestral essence, but are still labeled too violent, too aggressive when we protest. Too angry for simply speaking our truth. But hasn’t it been systemically imposed that our goodness, our success, is contingent upon our proximity to the colonizer’s ways? Has violence not long been the way of the colonizer? Empires buckle under the weight of their own contradictions.

Built your penitentiaries
We built your schools
Brainwash education
To make us the fools
Hatred’s your reward for our love
Telling us of your God above
-Bob Marley

People under siege are always expected to respond pacifically. To manifest planetary peace, we must first commit to bringing about global justice, not this superficial hypocrisy that places destructive weapons in the hands of a select few to bully the rest into submission. What you call peace is just silencing; menacing; pacifying; inequity; unequal distribution of resources; maintaining your supremacy. Commit to the cause of true justice and peace will be the effect. Justicia y paz, universal laws not to be tampered with. Universal laws set forth by the same God folks worship in different buildings, different countries, different languages.

Rematriation has been my liberation practice, even long before moving to my homeland almost a decade ago. Globally, rematriation connects communities to their original essence. Whether reclaiming indigenous ancestral remains, sacred art objects, Indigenous seeds, reclaiming rightful space and place, it is an expression of self-determination and liberation. A necessary reconnection to homeland, to ancestors, traditions, rematriation becomes both salve and strategy towards healing and undoing the destruction that imperialism has caused, continues to cause, across our planet. We don’t get to romanticize rematriation while overlooking the role imperialism plays in our being forced out/ born/ raised abroad in the first place. We don’t get to separate rematriation from liberation—the one we struggle to practice daily; the one humanity must struggle for globally.

Beyond what we seek in our return, what are we bringing? What medicine do we carry, harness, offer? In what ways have we come to serve? How do we open ourselves to be expanded by the traditions and wisdom of our ancestral soils? What is the energetic exchange we are offering in returning? Those of us returning to our ancestral homelands must ensure that we are not aiding in gentrification, displacement. If we have been given the opportunity to live/ stay in our homelands while others have not, what responsibility do we have to the collective? Those around us, those beyond imposed or geographic borders, those beyond this Earth realm? Our existence is not for us alone. We each play a crucial role.

Displaced people live longing for home. This longing is perpetual, even for those of us on our own homelands still wishing to root, ground, feel safe, embraced. Others die longing for home. How can any of us ground anywhere on this Earth while too many of us are still being killed for our soil? Like Justice and Peace, Rematriation and Liberation become necessary to all humanity if we are to ascend above conquest and occupation.

My prayer:
May those forced to transition suddenly, violently, delivered from this imposed Earthly state of perpetual fear, be liberated in the universe, freed to go on to more evolved, benevolent worlds. May their lost lives not be in vain. May each, as a seed, sprout collective liberation across the planet. May we all become the flowers of their gardens, rising free for every olive tree cut down.

Images details are from “Love Lessons”, 2018, Yasmin Hernandez, Acrylic on canvas 8 x 8 feet. Commissioned by The People’s Forum, New York, NY. 

Brooklyn-born and raised, Yasmín Hernández is a visual artist, writer, and activist based in el oeste de Borikén in the archipelago known as Puerto Rico. Her work is rooted in rematriation and liberation practices. Rematriating Borikén is her project lifting the conceptual and physical return to her ancestral homeland. CucubaNación in Mayagüez is Yasmin’s community art space inspired by Boricua bioluminescence. She shares her art at yasminhernandezart.com and chronicles the journey home at rematriatingboriken.com .