Bomba: Re-Remembering Boriken
By A.L. Sanchez
The frog in my throat squirmed and expanded like a balloon, much like the fever that induced it. And, at the time, I didn’t mind catching the flu, even if it gave me cold-sweat covered dreams of swallowing coquís to a slimy gag; because sickness meant I didn’t have to go to ballet class. My mother put me in dance classes because, as a child, I heard music in silence. It bumped like a heartbeat or drum – much of the same thing – and I stomped my feet and swung my hips like a little witch. Ballet wasn’t what I wanted. It made my body wrong, and every time I lifted my leg, my left hip popped out of place with a sound much like I used to hear in my head. I’d rather choke on frogs.
Sometimes I’d fake a sickness, or I’d sob and beg for absence; but it never worked, and I continued to go for twelve years. It was by the final year that a new pointe instructor from Russia gestured to me in the packed dance studio. He spoke with fierce certainty about my “attitude” that I apparently communicated through a glance upon meeting him.
“You.”
By the ballet barre, I pointed at myself and raised a brow.
“Yes, you. You think you’re something?” he asked. “You will never be anything.”
Self-proclaimed prophet. By the time I sat on the sidewalk after, sobbing with an aching hip from unnatural stretching, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t like to dance. I didn’t feel music. I didn’t know movement as intimately as I thought I did. So, I quit and refused to do so much as tap my foot for months after.
My left hip felt severed from me even after leaving. A friend convinced me to start taking yoga classes in a Boston shopping center. With each stretch and raise, I was forced to stop and pop my hip back into its socket. It was like a ghost lodged in my joint. I’d even gone through a three-month phantom ailment where the left side of my body felt detached. Unfastened. Numb. The doctor said it was only anxiety, and I should practice mindfulness. Maybe start yoga.
I avoided moving my legs, because whenever I did, one of them tried to escape me. I thought I knew my hips. But I’d only ever seemed truly intimate with them when I didn’t recognize they were there, long before I knew I was in a body, and I was only mind and music. But childish ambitions grew to reputation, because even after quitting ballet, I was only ever known as the girl who danced. Even when working my first funeral job, I checked on the freshly powdered face of a dead schoolteacher and listened to my coworker approach with the makeup case.
“I was trying to remember where I know you from,” he said.
“Me?”
“Yes,” he said fondly. “You’re the dancer. I’m Suzanne’s husband– she taught ballet. I remember watching you when you were just a pup. What a talent.”
“Thanks.” I nodded and focused on the corpse because it spoke less.
“I haven’t seen you at the studio.”
The schoolteacher looked asleep, and I wondered if the dead could dream. I shrugged.
“I don’t really dance anymore.”
It was only at my aunt’s wedding that I remembered the dream about the frogs, the one I had ten years prior and had long forgotten. Sitting by the soon-to-be-stolen center piece on the table, a foil-covered wallet with SAN JUAN written just above a cartoonish coquí made me nauseous. The room was stuffy from the collection of familial bodies stomping to Danza Kuduro, despite it already playing three times. There was heat from the muggy, humid New Jersey air sneaking in through the open windows. Heat in my head, heat in my hips. Because my fingers tapped on the table unknowingly, withholding my body from standing up despite the thump moving from the floor, up my legs, and into my chest.
“Miss dancer, come over here,” my aunt called with a wave, still stomping to the beat.
I clasped my hands in my lap and gave a quick smile. “I’m okay. I have a bad hip.”
But she only rolled her eyes and kept rhythm as she rushed over to me. She pulled my hands from my lap and the rest of my body with it, all until I was in the swarm.
A twinge of embarrassment dug its claws into my chest. I hadn’t been in a mess of movement in a long time, and I worried what it would make of me. I was stiff and kept my arms close to my body, because it was easier to swallow myself up than move in the way I was taught to reject. But my aunt held my hands again and forced me to keep rhythm, twirling me around the sticky event hall floor.
The spinning blurred the surrounding world into a disorienting mess of colors and skin. Air was scarce in the movement; and for some reason, spinning felt longer than it actually was. The whooshing in my ears dulled the music until all I felt was the thump of the beat. It shook the floor, sending vibration up to my hips, and I was reminded they were there. I might’ve even worried about them for a moment, but it didn’t last, because I was still spinning and the world was still water-colored. And in it all, I saw flashes of bodies in the blur. Surely they were my cousins or sisters, but they were unrecognizable in the movement. They clapped and threw their hands in the air as if preaching, and I felt feverish– on fire. My skin was so warm that a distant but familiar image from a story painted in my skull.
Fire grew in the center of a pit after a hurricane. People danced around the flames that illuminated a monstrous, stone-carved god. I was told the story in a Dunkin Donuts, born from another story in a language no one knows anymore. The story of an island formed by luck, inhabited by dancing people who named it Borikén and believed they found gods in water and dead things. The dancing people placed sticks down their throats to cleanse their bodies before circling the heat, sweating with the petrichor pulsing from the hurricane-shaken dirt. Maybe the sticks in their throats croaked like frogs. Drums bumped, thumped, bumped. I was told they danced to hear the voices of the past, and that’s how they knew what they were.
In the midst of the bodies, my hair swung around in the movement. I’d never thought much about what I was – or how I came from those dancing people, the Taíno – even when asked with a plain voice: What are you? I just didn’t know, because I knew I was supposed to be Puerto Rican, but I took ballet and could scarcely speak Spanglish, and I’d never stepped foot there. I was always more familiar with Boston's snow-slick streets than the warmth of the Caribbean, the place that was supposed to inspire a lust of movement, of beats. I could feel it through the hardwood, through the foundation of the building. I suppose that’s why I somehow stomped and moved my hips in a way I hadn’t in a very long time. I was swept up in it. Bump, thump, bump. A collection of claps with all of our hands sounded like thunder.
This was different from the dance I knew. Despite how much I moved, my left hip stayed in its socket. With every swing and jolt, it remained attached to me. I wondered why there wasn’t any defiance. But beyond this, I wondered why I hadn’t danced this way before, not since I was a messy child. Refinement had slowly silenced the steady music I used to hear so naturally, because I was told that bachata and bomba wasn’t “real” dance. I was told that there was only truth in solitude, in straight-backs and pointed toes that followed Mozart.
After my freshman year of college, I saw a bomba dancer on a cold, New England beach. She was surrounded by drums and blurred into a splotch of white skirt and shadow. Sand spewed up with her bare feet stomping. It was a shock to me, because all I’d known about dance up until that point spawned from 15th century royal courts. I’d been trained to meticulously follow a tune, assimilate to unity. If I didn’t bend my arm or tilt my head the same way as thirty other girls in a room, I would be scolded to a reddened, sweaty face. I didn’t recognize this spontaneous burst of movement. I didn’t recognize the beat.
That’s when I noticed something. The sandstorm dancer wasn’t following a beat, she was the beat. The drummers watched her enchanting movements and matched their sound to her lead. The reflection of her jolting body in my eyes was like a spell. She could’ve been any woman alive or dead and I wouldn’t have been able to tell, because she moved like every bone in the world was her own. She puffed her chest and swung her skirt in a sharp movement, messy but direct. It was so different from the sterile routine I grew up with, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. And as she reflected on my pupils, I could’ve sworn my heartbeat started keeping pace with her steps.
Mozart never did that to me. Really, nothing had ever done that to me. It was an entirely new feeling that I knew I should’ve felt long ago but somehow hadn’t. It was ancient. It was natural; and I began to wonder if I’d ever felt natural before seeing that woman. I wanted to feel that way again. I wanted to be the feeling in its entirety.
Bomba was formed from bambula, a Congolese word meaning to remember again– born between the blistering sun on Puerto Rican sugar plantations. Africans enslaved on the island found that plantations blurred languages, making communication difficult. But dance is never hard to understand. A blend of Taíno beats and West African moves. It’s a wedding dance, a birthday dance, a holy dance, a life dance, a death dance. It’s performed in absolute celebration and devastating grief. And to this day, it serves as a heartbeat for an island pulsing with people who work while discarded, language unstable; the only permanence is movement. When resorts sprung up on hundred-year-old homes, the ghosts can only live through dance. When insular police fired rifles into crowds on Palm Sunday, the sounds of the shots could only be processed through dance. Crack. Boom. Thump. A young man dragged himself to the steps of a building and palmed the blood pooling from his chest to write a phrase on the wall.
"Viva la República, Abajo los asesinos."
A seven-year-old girl was shot in her back by a police officer while walking to church.
Hosanna en las alturas.
Watching the bomba dancer made me wish I knew the feeling of fire beyond fever. I’ve lived lacing pointe shoes and patching up bleeding toes massacred by moves not meant for me. Dislodged and disjointed. My body fought against all I was, protesting an unnatural socket. My skin felt too big, like a second-hand sweater stretched by the wash.
It was no secret that I never knew who I was. In some moments, I thought I knew, all until someone came to offer me something different. Like when a stranger at a flea market asked if I was some kind of Spanish, to which I told him I’m Puerto Rican. I don’t use that word, he said, as if being Puerto Rican is some half-solid, fabled phenomenon. I’ve always been met with some denial of the island’s personhood, and at moments it brought me to wonder if it truly existed– maybe it is a fable; because it has never been allowed to be detached from another thing.
In 1493, the Taíno of Puerto Rico dwindled by the diseases of invaders and decimation of culture. The Spanish wanted the people of the island to become something else. They refused to call it by its name – Borikén – and proclaimed it Puerto Rico: Rich Port.
¿Como te llama?
Ya no sé.
They squashed stories and traditions in the hopes of subservience. This new Puerto Rico wasn’t Spain, but it also wasn’t Borikén. It instead was some other thing that had no recognized identity, not unless associated with another thing. Another thing for another thing.
In 1898, the island was plucked up by America, to which it still belongs. Hot potato, hot mango, all the same. An ex-colony that prides itself on freedom from across-the-sea imperial rule happily accepted the status of across-the-sea ruler. This Rich Port, this place of fruit is sweetest when it comes from labor. The language that became another language was suddenly meant to become another language.
What is your name?
I don’t know anymore.
Because the people of this place were supposed to be canvases; a moldable collection of skin where sugar cane calluses and new culture can harden.
Showcase of America.
There was a popular educational video in 1962: Showcase of America. It stitched together fuzzy clips of smiling Puerto Rican factory workers, straw hat-capped men hacking in fields. The news-anchor-like-voice of the host described the dark ages of slums and poverty on the island before becoming American property. According to the voice, American industry discovered something more valuable than any resource they could hack. Not sugar or grain. I listened intently to the video as the faceless man spoke over the images.
Industry has discovered one of Puerto Rico’s best natural resources.
The people.
I was fourteen when I was first told I was a good resource. I scooped ice cream thirty hours a week for a boss that never failed to commend my “grit”. I stayed beyond my hours when asked and didn’t complain when he forgot to give me a paycheck week after week. A few weeks turned to three months without pay, and I still worked beyond what was promised, because I thought my worth came from over-exceeding. I figured he was doing me a favor– he hired me, hadn’t he? I assumed I should’ve been grateful, because what was I without serving? I had this innate feeling that I owed myself to this mysterious entity that hadn’t a name.
When I was told the story about the dancing people and the fire, I’d fallen into a pocket of silence within myself. It was like a lull before thunder, or a quiet pause before remembering something I’d forgotten. I wondered: Is this what I was meant to be? Was I meant to be soul-led, fueled by an organic beat? My family told me that’s who I came from – the dancing people – but there was so much that happened between them and me that made me feel like I couldn’t be farther from whatever heartbeat sustained their rhythm. It was the rhythm of fire snuffed out over and over again.
In fact, I used to worry that it all worked. The handlers wanted erasure, so they diluted us. I grew up stuffed into too-pink ballet tights, unable to understand stories because I didn’t speak the language. I shoved my hip back into its joint despite its protest, because that’s what I was meant to do. I don’t know the quick syllables of the dancing people, because they were forced to learn Spanish, and then English. I don’t know the prayers of Yúcahu because of the whippings of a foreigner’s god. I don’t know the names of people who flow through my veins because they were changed to something easier to pronounce.
But why does my body recognize what my mind doesn’t? I eventually came across a seemingly insignificant paragraph in a hand-me-down textbook; it said that understanding and answering rhythm is genetic. Do I know if that’s true? I don’t know. Still, when I move, I know I respond to those melodic beats the same way the storied dancing people responded to palms against drums. A beat mimicking the heart that mimicked another thing we can’t hear. Even if I could hear it, I wouldn’t be able to understand what it was saying. But I move in some primeval defiance. In this, I might know what I am.
You’ll never be anything.
Half-true, because I know I’m something, but I don’t know what it is. I know I must be something because last week, I moved to the middle of a near-empty bar, glittery heels and straightened hair fighting to curl from my sweat. I don’t remember moving from the seats my friends messily laughed around, nor do I remember the song that enticed me to stand up. But I ended up there anyway, shrouded in darkness with a silent mind. The thumps of music persuaded me to stomp my feet and twirl, and I wasn’t hesitant. I wasn’t mimicking anyone or anything, but I felt composed of many people as the beat traveled to my thumping heart. Did you forget me? Perhaps you’ve forgotten yourself. My head fell back with my hair in my face and my arms stretched above me in prayer– or maybe possession. Hosanna en las alturas!
The music was so loud that the beat reached my throat and stayed there like a stick or a fever-induced frog, and I sweated out movement; because movement is memory. My hips jolted one way and the other, and I was outlined by the glow of people I never knew. No one could see it, not even me, but I felt it in me like a second organ. I felt wet dirt beneath my feet despite being enclosed in shoes. My eyelids captured the glow of a disco ball, and it almost looked like fire behind my flesh. And in the blur of swaying hips, I may have looked like another woman, who looked like another woman, who looked like another woman–
Remembering again.
References
Gosse, Van. 2019. “United States Textbooks and Puerto Rican History.” Modern American
History (Cambridge.) 2 (2). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 179–82. doi:10.1017/mah.2019.20.
Rouse, Irving. 1992. The Tainos : Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Power-Sotomayor, Jade, and Pablo Luis Rivera. 2019. “Puerto Rican Bomba: Syncopating
Bodies, Histories, and Geographies.” Centro Journal 31 (2). New York: Hunter College, Center for Puerto Rican Studies: 5–39.
“Puerto Rico - Showcase of America.” The Travel Film Archive, The Travel Film Archive, 1962,