The Black Jacobins / C. L. R. James / 1938

The Black Jacobins narrates the story of the Haitian revolution largely through its focus on one of its most critical figures Toussaint L'Ouverture. James narrates the military drama with a novelist’s eye for detail, psychological depth, and tension. His occasional asides to provide his own thoughts and connect the history to his times are revelatory and shrewd. It can be easy to be fatalistic about the rise of technofeudal fascism in our era, but during the Haitian revolution, a largely enslaved population had to shake off the chains of three imperial powers: the French, the Spanish, and the British. James spares no detail on the cruelty of the slaver’s torture tactics, from the burying of Africans to be devoured slowly by ants to the dogs to the branding. In some of its most moving passages, James narrates how in the last battles of the war, the generals told their men they did not need to fight with bravery but with an abandoned rage to survive and win; the formerly enslaved faced their deaths with an unhinged pride and resolution that stunned the colonizers. James astutely points out the catch-22: the enslaved were accused of being less than human for their “willingness” to accept slavery, but when they resisted it with all their might, sometimes petting the dogs sent to devour their limbs, other times placing the noose around their own necks at the gallows, they accused them of being incapable of feeling human pain, of being monstrous in their strength. I could say more, but you ought to just read it. 5 out of 5.

Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism / Yanis Varoufakis / 2024

Known for his charisma and charming writing, Varoufakis is one of the leading leftist figures arguing that our economic system has fundamentally transitioned so that its axis rotates not around capital, but cloud capital, thereby ushering in the age of technofeudalism. While the distinction between technofeudalism and capitalism may seem like technical minutiae to most folks--and likely is--for political strategists and organizers especially, it is critical to have clarity on who are enemies are and how to best combat them. 

The term technofeudalism does a great job at singling out our greatest enemies of the moment--the tech oligarchs--and describing their vice-like grip on the economic system. Anushka would argue that the critique of technofeudalism make the bloody-thirsty capitalists of our day almost seem like poor victims of these new gangsters, and Varoufakis himself argues in the last pages of Technofeudalism that we would in fact need to create a broad base coalition including capitalists of many stripes to defeat the challenge technofeudalists pose. The risk here is that people forget that we need to dismantle capitalism in order to escape these hellish cycles of history. In “Critique of Technofeudalism” by Evgeny Morozov in New Left Review, the author outlines technofeudalists thinkers, including Varoufakis, but also including right-wing thinkers (Thiel and Yarvin). Morozov covers impressive ground outlining the differences between feudalism and capitalism and ultimately arrives at the conclusion that as ugly as this phase of capitalism is, it doesn’t merit another term because companies like Google and Facebook earn money through much more than just “rents.” 

As a non-economist, I have few horses in this fight. Reading Varoufakis, however, did clarify for me some of the basics of global economics and the challenges tech oligarchs pose, and he did so in really captivating and easy-to-parse prose. Because of this, I highly recommend his book. Morozov may be more correct, but he was way more academic and drier. Ultimately, I think most of us just need to understand the grip these bastards have on the globe better and Varoufakis can help you get there quicker. As the US continues to undergo a technical coup and flagrant Nazism spearheaded by tech oligarchs who subscribe to right-wing technofeudal theory, Varoufakis focus seems more and more necessary, although I admit I’m unsure if he is technically correct--I simply am not an economist. 

Wednesday February 26th, Robert Evans published a summary of a warning Democratic insiders are sharing among themselves about the dangers of Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk, and “Neo-Reactionaries.” The letter outlines what could be called a technofeudal plan to dismantle the United States. Technofeudalist might ultimately still be capitalists, but I think the term is worth retaining for understanding how they view themselves within the capitalist landscape. For me, the dramatic speed of technological evolution--we’re literally in a world with killer robots and AI-boyfriends--justifies a terminology that distinguishes this phase of capitalism from the last. 4 out 5.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed / Paolo Friere / 1968

Many professors and ethnic studies students are at least aware of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and many have at least read chapter 2, which distinguishes the vertical banking method of education from a horizontal dialogic one. I decided to read the whole book because Ceiba Collective wanted to begin doing study groups and the committee decided a leftist book on pedagogy felt like a good place to start. I’m grateful I read the whole book, especially because of chapters 3 and 4, which argue that dialogic problem-based education is essential for revolutionary struggle. Everywhere you see liberals and the left talking about the desperate need for better messaging, sloganeering, etc. Friere would argue they’re doomed if they simply play the same game of the right, manipulating the masses and treating them as incapable of building solutions to their own problems. Friere argued for the need for dialogic problem-based education through every level of the revolution, building a strategy for struggle alongside the working masses. This is critical, because if we only win through messaging, every victory of the left will be short-lived as the masses will not have developed the critical thinking skills to see through the lies of their enemies. For me, this is the most interesting part of his argument, and worth debate in leftist organizations.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed was specifically used to develop popular education with illiterate folks meant to organize them in defense of their community. Friere’s method was used widely throughout the world and in particular Central America during their revolutionary struggle in the last half of the twentieth century. At the same time, Friere’s advocacy for education also meant that his work was used to construct systems of mass education, which despite Freire’s advocacy for a revolutionary method, still served ultimately as a force to colonize the poor and indigenous, disrupt their ways of life in service of an education that frequently ill-prepared them for the challenges of their community. Gustavo Esteva is especially critical of Friere on this part, although his criticism is laden with the worst types of decolonial nonsense, such as arguing that illiteracy should be celebrated and cherished, as if many colonized people, including First Nations peoples throughout the Americas, didn’t have sophisticated reading systems prior to colonization.  4 out of 5. 

Love is an Ex-Country / Randa Jarrar / 2022

I read this book at the recommendation of my friend Casira, although it’s been high on my diaspora literature list for years. This memoir is bookended poorly, starting with an eat-pray-love-esque road trip across the US searching for purpose and ending with a hardly believable scene of “healing” her troubled relationship with her father. 

In a creative writing class once, a poet once told me good writing requires at least two of the following: 1) incredible personal experience 2) astute observation or 3) excellent fluency and artistry with language. Of course, a master writer would have all three. Jarrar mainly has #1 with a spark of #3 sometimes. The memoir is compelling because of the unenviable amount of abuse Jarrar suffers, which she narrates bluntly and painfully. We get glimpses of child abuse, overcontrolling parents, abusive partners, and even dystopic scenes with Israel locking her in a holding cell and preventing her from returning to Palestine. Her descriptions of kink are clumsy, however, as well as some of her expression of her own feelings around the messy bits of race, gender, and queerness. The narration of kink especially reads as the journal of someone who just experienced something, not someone who has thought about the discourse around it and is entering that discourse thoughtfully. Even so, it was a captivating read, even as it fell into so many traumatophobic tropes.  3 out of 5.

El Verbo J / Claudia Hernandez / 2018

Written in a breathless, breakneck speed, El Verbo J narrates the story of a trans woman during the wartime El Salvador. Once I realized what was happening in the book, I practically foresaw with terror and heartache the inevitable plotline: you get story of the boy bullied for his queerness, forced to hide and flee from el ejército, as well as the story of sex trafficking during migration and suffering the AIDS crisis in one body. The magnificent and shattering work of El Verbo J is to remind us that queer people existed during these times as well. While most wartime narratives are derived from the stories of masculinist guerrilleros a la Che Guevara and Roque Dalton or in self-sacrificing parents, El Verbo J zeroes in on queer stories submerged within the howls of others, whose stories dominated more historically. The story is told with a swift almost stream of thought narrative that whiplashes you, dropping you into scenarios without context only to unravel and explain later. Central American scholars talked up this book to me a lot before I got to it (via LibroFM :D) and it deserves all its praise and more. 5/5   

Todas las voces / Anarella Vélez / 2013

Vélez escribe sin ojo ni oreja, enfocándose en la angustia política y quizás en ganar lectores que simplemente sienten esa misma angustia. Solamente un poema (“Angeles”) me movio. Los demás no tienen suficientes imágenes o música para que sean memorables. Las traducciones de algún modo son peores que estos poemas. 1 out of 5.   

Shake Loose My Skin / Sonia Sanchez / 1999

In 2024, does your house have lions by Sonia Sanchez was one of my favorite reads. Shake Loose Your Skin is my first deep dive into Sanchez’s work and it provided a curious snapshot into her legend. does your house have lions? is likely the apex of her career, as she has only published one book after this new and selected, and the poems from dyhhl were by far was the best part of the new and selected. In content, many of the poems and essays in this collection grapple with gendered violence and surviving toxic masculinity in intimate relationships. Sanchez details the pain of adultery and addiction repeatedly in a confessional and heartbreaking voice with little literary stunting. Reading Shake Loose Your Skin made me feel the same way I did after catching up with a homegirl after far too long and too much has happened. I was pleasantly surprised to find a long poem dedicated to Tupac Shakur. Giovanni had a poem for Tupac too and it makes me happy knowing all the dope Black women were writing poems for him. The poems carry a natural musicality, relying on the rhythms of AAV, rather than stringent form or other phonetic flexes. While many poems are obviously meant to be sung or spoken aloud, they are still rendered on the page with a subtly that rewards close readings for deceptively smooth line breaks and evolution of arguments. 3 out of 5. 

The Management of Savagery / Max Blumenthal / 2019

I picked up this book looking to better understand the history of US intervention in Afghanistan and the Middle East, as well as reactionary and perhaps revolutionary violent resistance against it. In order to contextualize Afghanistan, Blumenthal begins in the Cold War, when the US began arming tribal Islamists, including Al-Qaeda, who were frequently compared to US independence heroes and Star Wars rebels by interventionists. In particular, Blumenthal does a great job disentangling the ways the military industrial complex manipulates the media to sanitize allies, demonize targets, and muddy an admittedly complex terrain to audiences to justify intervention and pull Washington’s purse strings. Inevitably, Blumenthal ends up playing defense for the Assad regime in Syria, pointing out untrue propaganda against his regime, a move his critics see as apologetic but I see as simply nuanced. Blumenthal can be seen as a tankie by some, and that’s probably inevitable for a writer who spends so much time countering hyperbolic US propaganda against its enemy nations, who are of course as flawed and complex as any other nation. I particularly appreciated Blumenthal’s writing on the rise of Alex Jones, who had an early career as a 9/11 truther through documentaries like Loose Change, which I had watched as a middle schooler. I never connected the dots from Loose Change to the Sandy Hook massacre denialism to the rise of Trump. Blumenthal includes a skillful argument about how neocon and neolib US military interventions led to the rise of Trump by destabilizing once functional countries and increasing the amount of terrorism and refugees in Europe. This increase led to a rise in ultranationalism and xenophobia the far right thrives on. As someone who was too young during the 9/11 era and didn’t pay enough attention to the interventionist wars during the Obama era, Blumenthal provided an incisive and clarifying narration of the history I lived.  4/5 

Why I'm Leaving Meta and You Should Too

I’m shutting down my Meta accounts and migrating everything to BlueSky soon. The level of censorship on Meta is atrocious, but more importantly, Meta makes money off of us staying on Instagram and Facebook, which means every second we spend on their apps we’re monetarily supporting fascism. For me, switching to BlueSky means losing a literary following I spent over a decade building and connection with loved ones. However, it doesn’t NEED to mean this.

Look, i know leaving isn’t easy or fun. each of us has sentimental, professional, familial, or health reasons for staying. I know friends who would be dead without gofundme campaigns on meta. i have dead friends whose profiles remind me of our love. the money i make from poetry makes a difference in my ability to maintain myself and take care of my family. below are my responses to the most common counter-arguments to leaving.

TO THE MISSIONARIES OF SANITY

I get it. you want to use your voice to convince the people close to you. you know you have trumpists in your followers. you think you can charm them or convince them with logic. here are the issues:

1) You'll be competing against the algorithm for meaningful dialogue and boosted if you're engaging in more toxic ways. the apps structurally reward polarization. people already have their guards up and engage with social media brain when they view content on these apps. most importantly, rational argument are being censored. i recently posted an NYT article in response to meta user asking for proof of trump’s racism. it was gone within minutes. Instagram literally censored #democrat for a day. even if you are successful, you likely will be censored out.

2) social media activism is not the same as community building in-person, where relationships of trust, solidarity, and mutual support are more effectively forged for allies and across the aisle. you have a much better likelihood of changing a heart and mind in person than online.

3) if you're putting a dollar in a fascist’s pocket, every time you engage on these apps, you better be a master propagandist with thousands of followers to justify your presence here with the algorithms stacked against you. i wish you luck, because you’re cutting each of us every second you spend here.

To the Mourners

I am sorry for your loss. No one but you know what it’s like to mourn your relationship with your loved one. Losing the profile of someone who meant a world and a dream to you is terrible. One of the most difficult parts of leaving is knowing i’m leaving behind the profiles of people who supported me at my lowest, when i came out, and more. Here’s what i’m doing now: i’m going to their profile and downloading my favorite screenshots and photos of them.I’m making plans to create a digital archive of our memorabilia and to create a physical altar to their memory in my home, whether its a scrapbook or a shoebox or a series of frames. I’m not sure yet. I just know none of my dead would want their memories to fund their enemies.

To the Professionals

Your livelihood depends on your content. You can’t survive, much less fight fascism without your meta or x accounts. that’s real.

if you care about stopping fascism, here’s what you can do:

1) diversify your social media presences. the tiktok ban and reversal prove what a volatile battleground social media will be in the upcoming years. prepare by by building your followers across platforms. Bluesky is the best option for now.

2) start an email subscription. your own personal database will give you more power to control your presence without being beholden to the algorithm. it’ll be harder for outsiders to troll you. this list will serve you no matter what social media drama goes down in the upcoming years.

3) start a patreon. you deserved to get paid more anyway.

4) begin transitioning off social media now. you don’t need to rush off like i am. let people know you are sunsetting your accounts. explain why. let them know how to re-engage with you. in this rushed 3-day effort, i’ve secured 63 email subscriptions and 51 followers on bluesky. these are real people who actually want to engage with my work, not just social media zombies who will just scroll past. you’re much cooler and savvier than me. with proper planning you can pull this off and emerge stronger.

“But family and friends!”

Our relationships (and mental health) have deteriorated across the globe because we have allowed social media be a stand-in for true in-person connection. the vast majority of us need to simply stop pretending social media does anything other than give us an illusion of a relationship with our loved ones. the folks who have forged deeper relationships already already know that the relationship will survive and even grow deeper without meta. for the rest of you (me included), be honest with yourself in deciding who you really ought to grow closer to and reach out. even my slipshod process of dm-ing folks has forced me to revive relationships and draw closer to people who i have interacted with in years. use this not as a severing, but a way to more meaningfully tether to the people who do matter. all of this is work, of course, but if you’re not willing to put in the work, at least stop pretending meta is doing the work for you.

For those of you leaving

DON’T GO AWAY QUIETLY. Be as loud as you can. People are inspired when they see others Lead. DM your followers and accounts you want to keep following letting them know where to find you and asking where you can find them. My efforts alone have convinced at least a couple dozen people to leave in a week.

For those still looking for a social media community, BlueSky and Mastadon are the best options right now. For the record, BlueSky isn’t perfect. It’s run by a tech oligarch Jay Graber. She is a cryptocurrency freak, which is troubling since bitcoin is great for scamming and money laundering and awful for the environment. A friend informed me that “Bluesky is funded by a company owned by Brock Pierce a venture capitalist, crypto bro, who was at the Trump inauguration and has been buying up a lot of land in Puerto Rico, trying to get Puerto Ricans to invest in his scams.” However, right now at least BlueSky one of the most viable options for those looking to still post on social media.

Friends don’t let friends post selfies that fund la migra. Friends don’t let friends fund fascism because of the funny memes.

Pimp / Iceberg Slim / 1967

Pimp / Iceberg Slim / 1967

Pimp is the memoir of Robert Lee Maupin, who spent 24 years of his life enslaving women in sex work and performing a variety of other cons for a life of lavish, fear, drugs, degradation, and prison. I’d like to imagine that this memoir is simply unpublishable these days, but we have a rapist in the White House. America likely has the appetite for a Pimp 2.0. 

Maupin narrates his life with stunning narrative clarity and verve. Pimp is a masterclass on pacing. Reading Pimp is like watching a car crash in hi-definition with multiple camera angles to zoom and hawk out: it’s spellbinding and horrible. Pimp combines flashy writing with probing observation and reflection. Maupin doesn’t cut himself much slack in acknowledging the wretchedness of his crimes. He doesn’t try the readers’ patience in asking for a forgiveness or compassion he doesn’t deserve. In this way, Maupin creates an enticing ethos, giving the reader the sense that they are truly glimpsing into the life of a hardened Black criminal underworld. Maupin makes the reader a trick, using their morbid curiosity and desire to eat the other as a hook for his self-mythos. Likewise, the rugged oscillation between cold observation and confessional trauma dumping on the page likely mirror the same charisma that ensnared a number of young women in the flesh. 

As in any memoir, the writing obviously cuts away some of the complexities of life, using composite characters and so forth, to present a narrative that’s easier to follow. Sometimes, the narrative voice is so street it’s comic. By the third time, Maupin claims to “skull-note” something, I’m facepalming at how goofy he sounds. There’s also a scene where Maupin describes his first con--dressing in drag to lure in and rob white tricks eager for Black pussy--which reminded me of the homoerotic and genderbending scenes of Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle. Early on, I realized that Paul Beatty actually satirizes Iceberg Slim’s voice in The White Boy Shuffle, from the slang to the fishbowl voyeurism into Black poverty to the queer scenes. 

I wanted to read Pimp to potentially teach it in a hip-hop literature course alongside To Pimp a Butterfly. Unfortunately, it feels irresponsible to teach Pimp. It provides too much fodder for an undergraduates’ racist biases. Even if you had an undergraduate class with the social savvy and chops to engage the text, it is simply too misogynistic, foul, and horrifying to expect many people to stomach it. In the copy, Maupin calls Pimp a manual, akin to the Art of War by Sun Tzu. It’s true enough. Maupin does provide the rationale and strategy for enslaving women and dodging the law. It’s definitely outdated by now, but some principles likely still apply. Yet, I’m still tempted to teach it. Like The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Pimp opens with a first-person description of the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. Pimp is another side of the coin of the violences of racism, poverty, patriarchy, and misogyny. What it says about America is horrifying, but bitterly honest. 

Pimp ends with a story of Maupin’s reformation into a best-selling writer with a wife and three daughters, living a square-ass life. Whether Maupin deserved this redemption or not, his story does demonstrate the ability of people to grow and change into functional members of society. His stints in prison were truly wretched, but justice and healing aren’t transactional. In any ethical world, Maupin would have carried the weight of his crimes for life and he likely did. Some of the best writing in Pimp comes from his descriptions of prison--including an eye-popping prison break. I want to talk with prison abolitionists about Pimp. Maupin’s stunning writing, reformation, and reflection raise questions about abolition, crime, and justice worth teasing out if you can bear the disgusting realities of its world.  

5/5

Huida Constante / Manuel Tzoc / 2016

Constante Hida / Manuel Tzoc / 2016

My friend brought me back Constante Huida by Manuel Tzoc back from Guatemala this past fall. I've been itching to read their work for years and was so grateful! Tzoc is a monumental queer Maya writer from Guatemala, one of the first voices you’ll have recommended to you when you ask. That said, I’m not sure if this is the collection by which to get to know Tzoc’s work. Most of the collection is a well-crafted irreverent queer ennui diatribe. While Tzoc sprinkles the collection with playful puns and eye-catching images here and there, there are one too many poems bemoaning the challenges of writing for me to understand where all the pomp was coming from. There are definitely glimpses of real pathos on the page, such as “por el día/por los días.” Either way, I’m glad to have read it and will be seeking out more of his work. 2 out 5

The Undocumented Americans / Karla Cornejo Villavicencio / 2020

As an employee at a refugee-serving organization and former megaphone-wielding activist for undocumented folks, I admit I’m likely a mark for stories like the ones in The Undocumented Americans. However, since I spend quite a bit of time with these stories and the discourse around them, I usually have my fair share of critiques of how the stories are being told or used. Cornejo Villavicencio’s unvarnished depictions of the undocumented in all their human oddity, mundanity, and trauma resists the common romanticization of the immigrant community and creates an infinitely more familiar portrait of the undocumented. Cornejo’s coverage of Flint’s undocumented community and the undocumented who served as first-responders during 9/11 are especially provocative examples of the injustices undocumented folks suffer that usually get overlooked within the explosion of discourse around them. My only real criticism of the book is that at one point Cornejo Villavicencio critiques newspapers for referring to the undocumented as “undocumented workers as if all these men are worth is their labor” (paraphrase). For a community afforded so little, I get where this critique is coming from; however, I do see value in hearkening to the labor rights traditions of the left and in acknowledging the contributions of undocumented folks.  Regardless, I cried several times when reading this book and found its stories a useful reminder of the actual conditions too often invisibilized in the US. 5 out of 5.

Pornografía para piromaníacos / Wenceslao Bruciaga / 2023

I picked this book up at a Guatemalan bookstore based off the title and premise alone, and I was blown away. My interest in erotic literature started with Anais Nin earlier this year, where I was surprised that something that was ostensibly smut could have so much to say about intimacy, queerness, and relationships, veering into the unsayable aspects of human experience. I entered Pornografia para piromaniacos piqued by its inciting incident: the suicide of a gay Latinx porn actor and closeted trans woman that rattles the industry. The novel follows two characters, Pedro and Jeff, in the aftermath of this loss. Both are aging porn stars struggling to adapt to a gentrifying San Francisco, an ever-evolving queer culture, and unsatisfying relationships. 

Pedro sees himself as the breadwinner for a nonbinary trophy husband, who is also a porn actor, who manages Pedro’s social media platforms, as well as his own up-to-date queer influencer channel. Through their relationship, porn scenes, and flashbacks we learn about the traumatic origins of Pedro’s queer discovery and the dark circumstances of his migration to the United States from Mexico. Pedro lives his life in fear of cancellation, as he has seen many of his peers go down for a mix of different toxicities. His precarious economic well-being depends on his reputation, and the pressure makes him act out violently periodically throughout the novel. 

Jeff, on the other hand, is reeling from a heartbreak with a closeted baseball star. While Pedro’s excellence and hotness provides him with a sense of power and purpose, Jeff’s relationship to pornography and sexuality feels more reflexive, an escape he cannot wield with discipline. Interestingly, Jeff was raised by two lesbians who hate pornography. Jeff and his parents make faint efforts to rekindle their relationship, as Jeff’s musical stardom begins to rise. Jeff’s musical allusions flood the novel, providing several playlists worth of listening material that will dizzy anyone unfamiliar with 90s rock. I spent a lot and not enough time looking up songs and listening to the soundscape they provided. Like Pedro, Jeff also violently lashes out against those who betray him. 

The novel is full of sharp observations. Porn scenes have the bawdy, campy language of porn scenes, but manage to do more than simply convey raw masculine lust. The scenes often intersect with challenges in the actors’ personal lives, frequently include complex and/or traumatic dynamics between actors and directors, and trigger devastating and soulful flashbacks. Bruciaga manages to say something heartbreaking and ugly about masculinity through these scenes. Bruciaga conveys brutality with tenderness. 

Pornografia para piromaniacos ends with pessimistic conclusions on masculinity and its toxicities. There is something about Jeff and Pedro’s many rants in the book, however, that give me a sense of hope. If the voices of aging queers continue to be silenced or disappear as times shift and their voices become inconvenient to some, the book provides a space where the voices of some of our queer elders can be heard. They provide some well-argued critiques of contemporary queer culture, even if they as characters fall victim to their own toxicities, ultimately proving themselves wrong. 

I’m on the lookout for more erotic novels this brilliant. Sex undergirds far too much of human life to not read writing about it seriously. I would love to translate it one day… it’d be a dream.  5/5  

The Volcano Daughters / Gina María Balibrera / 2024

Following the trails of Consuelo and Graciela, two daughters kidnapped from Izalco, El Salvador, The Volcano Daughters is a loving and ambitious attempt to re-tell Salvadoran history for the Salvadoran diaspora. In many ways, I feel like this book was written specifically for me, as a Salvadoran poet interested in Central American history. It takes as its backdrop the single biggest moment of historic trauma for Salvadorans outside of la conquista, which is of course La Matanza of 1932 where between 10k to 50k (depends on what scholarship you subscribe to) mostly indigenous folks were murdered in a couple of weeks. The novel manages to encapsulate Salvadoran history from the memories of indigo plantations in the 19th century to about the 1950s. I am not exaggerating when I say this novel will probably save young Salvadorans a decade of serious study in the sheer quantity of allusions it gathers and arranges into a coherent narrative. 

The Volcano Daughters opens with a preamble of sorts, describing the importance and perspective of the story, quite reminiscent of Junot Diaz’s opening chapter to The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Here, we become acquainted with one of Balibrera’s most genius storytelling devices, namely she uses the ghosts of young massacred girls, kin of our protagonists Consuelo and Graciela, as part interlocutor, part muse, in telling the story. The story is channeled explicitly through the author, Gina Balibrera, by these ghosts. The ghosts then interrupt the narrative, sometimes with shady commentary, other times contesting the story with their own biases, and sometimes even critiquing the author’s own language. This is a powerful and useful device that allows Balibrera the opportunity of dipping into debates about Salvadoran history and literature. 

The Volcano Daughters is peppered with allusions to literature, history, and scholarship by or about Salvadorans. A lot of these asides are astute and apt interventions, such as when the ghosts interrupt an allusion to Roque Dalton to point out that he had a sexual relationship with the underage daughter of a comrade, something that Salvadoran literati and academia have not grappled with seriously yet because it is really inconvenient to have a figure as important and beloved to our leftist history as Roque be guilty of such a heinous act. This is one of the many necessary feminist interventions to our understanding of our own history. 

Other times, however, I believe these asides are largely distracting. As much as I am curious about Balibrera’s criticisms of Joan Didion, her memoir Salvador literally falls outside the timeline of The Volcano Daughters. I’m ultimately only interested in the critique because I’m into Central American studies and even then, I’m not sure I got much out of that rant. If I wasn’t aware of Joan Didion, I wouldn’t have even picked up that it was her work being critiqued, as many of these allusions happen obliquely. Roque Dalton, for example, isn’t even mentioned by name. While one can argue that it’s up to the reader to do the research and study up to fully appreciate the work, I think putting this much of an onus is a tad ridiculous. As someone who has gone out of their way to study more Salvadoran history than most people I know in the diaspora, even I was sure I was missing out on crucial context for some of these asides, especially when it came to the conversations within the European art scene. These at times confusing allusions do, of course, present me with the opportunity to research and study more, but it definitely bogged down the narrative and wasn’t as effective at delivering such a critique as another forum or form may have been. 

There is a trend right now of powerful, headstrong, reactive Latinas in Latina literature right now, who respond surprisingly boldly in violent confrontations. I’m thinking of Betita in Land of Cranes who tries to fight against ICE officers as a nine-year-old. I’m thinking of Tia Tere in my own collection where she assaults a thief, as she did in real life, and later when I imagine her landing a punch against a military officer, which she didn’t do in real life. In The Volcano Daughters, for example, one of the ghosts punches a military officer that later massacres her and the family; later on, Graciela stabs the 1930s-40s equivalent of ICE in Hollywood before fleeing. The latter example, especially, felt not very well thought out narratively, requiring a deus ex machina where Graciela flees following the ghosts as butterflies, somehow doesn’t get caught despite being in front of a Hollywood filming crew, and disappears in the Bay Area. Of course, Latinas are strong and powerful, many do resist, sometimes violently, against their oppressors, and we deserve to see that represented. But I’m not always convinced by the characterization of these headstrong women. They feel a bit more like tropes, caricatures than trauma-informed portrayals of real people. In a similar vein, I struggled with the voice of the novel at times. The amount of puchica’s was heartwarming and familiar, sure, but I feel like the characters are sometimes too easy to caricaturize. My own family says puchica, but not that much. 

The story is propelled sometimes successfully, sometimes less so, by the drama of the era. Knowing La Matanza is coming in Salvador and the Nazis are coming in Europe creates some good narrative tension, but sometimes the question of why we were still following the characters through their lives lingered, especially as they meandered through their new lives. As a whole, The Volcano Daughters definitely succeeded in capturing the struggles of Salvadoran women in this era, as Graciela and Consuelo fumble through their trauma, romantic relationships, childbirth, racialized expectations of their behavior and careers as artists, etc. In this way, the novel succeeds dramatically and beautifully, even if it occasionally steers away from its focus.

All that said, I treasure this novel and look forward to gifting it to my loved ones, teaching it in a course one day, and otherwise uplifting it.

4 out of 5. 

My Top 10 Albums of 2024

1) The Past is Still Alive / Hurray for the Riff Raff / 2024

Because I grew up around a lot of rich, racist country-loving folks, I’ve had a lot of trouble sinking into good folk and country my whole life. I never thought 2024 would be the year folk and country albums would dominate my listening for long stretches. Hurray for the Riff Raff is the culmination of this new turn for me. A queer boricua cowgirl crooning about fentanyl, love, and highways, Hurray for the Riff Raff frequently pushed my despair into the sublime, transforming my grief into nostalgia. The first song “Alibi” reminds me of the worst times of my life, but not the terror and sickness, but the love of friends like Gionni Ponce during those times. These songs convince me to love, to dream, to try against the odds.      

Favorite Lyric: I used to think I was born into the wrong generation. But now I know I made it right on time to watch the world burn with a tear in my eye to watch the world burn I’m right on time. 

2) I DREAMT I FOUND A RED RUBY - Francesca Wexler - 2024

Francesca Wexler’s music makes me feel like my most beautiful, intelligent, and heavy self. Top-notch pen game with a complex range of queer emotions on lush beats. The music feels like the best sort of edible high in the summer sun. I literally feel warmer when I listen to it. This was my soundtrack for the entire summer, including my trip to Guatemala and El Salvador where I fulfilled my lifelong dream of reading the book I wrote on my mother’s life in the homeland surrounded by loved ones and comrades. 

Favorite Lyric: All my angels work the night shift. 

3) GNX - Kendrick Lamar - 2024 

It’s painful to watch so much of hip-hop culture be saturated with rappers’ lowest vibrations, completely self-abandoned to gluttony, amorality, egoism, and horrifyingly bad politics. Kendrick’s presence in the culture this year felt like a rare voice of authority trying to carve out a pocket in the culture where bangers and reason could co-exist. I was surprised by how much the fury and hatred he unleashed during the beef spoke to my own frustrations with the US at large and how much I needed that release valve. As ugly as the beef got, it was incredibly impressive to watch Kendrick remain grounded and emerge a fuller artist. GNX is some of my favorite Kendrick for its playfulness and groundedness. 

Favorite Lyric: Starting to see spaceships on Rosecrans. I see the aliens hold hands. They wanna see me do my dance.     

4) Lonestar Luchador - That Mexican OT - 2023

That Mexican OT feels like the first true heir of Big Pun’s legacy. That Mexican OT combines mariachi chillidos with Pun-level wordplay in a classic Texas country lean. Lonestar Luchador is brilliantly crafted with hilarious Ralph Barbosa skits and conceptually tight-knit songs that dive between bravado, trauma-dumping, and just pure fun.   

Favorite Lyric: I had to congratulate her parents cuz they made em a bad bitch. 

5) DEIRA - Saint Levant - 2024 

Rapping and singing in English, French, and Arabic, Saint Levant is the Palestinian lover boy you didn’t know you needed in your life. Because who said surviving and resisting a genocide can’t be sexy af. These dreamy tunes made my Chicago summer days magic, without asking me to stick my head in the sand either. Thank you to Lin Flores for turning me onto this. 

Favorite lyric: I hear the sounds of the bombs in our sleep, but I never in my life heard the sound of defeat. 

6) Dark Times - Vince Staples - 2024

Vince Staples deserves just as much love as Kendrick.  I think he is who people think J. Cole is. This is spiritual psychedelic rap, the album ending with a woman’s vision of the universe’s slow struggle to the perfection of our souls. I love Vince because he has a way of holding the agony of living and making it bearable, his calm steady voice slowly sinking into your subconscious. I don’t typically find his songs catchy, but after a few listens, I get hooked by the feeling and the space it opens in me to feel peace. This album traverses all sorts of heartbreak with ten toes planted in the concrete.

Favorite lyric: I don’t need your flowers, I’m living. The first time I saw a million dollars I squinted.  

7) Few Good Things - Saba - 2022

Saba taught me how to move through a Chicago winter with this album. The soundscape couldn’t fit the city better. The project dropped in 2022 when I was distracted by JID, Pusha T, and Amindi. I’m glad I returned to it though because this album is every bit as worthy and incredible as those three. Dominated by blue-gray soundscapes and gritty lyrics about how weird it is to survive and thrive in a burning world, Saba’s growth in this project is incredible. 

Favorite Lyric: I got everything I could ever need / and i try to keep that in mind / whenever i meet a man trying to sell a dream

8) Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying - Labi Siffre - 1972

December 2023 I crash land in India full of PTSD symptoms and the shock of the move to Chicago still fresh on my nervous system. Labi was a crucial part of my healing as I cherished the unimaginably cool moments with my new family, ate delectable food, and fell deeper in love with Anushka. I listened to Labi while practicing a difficult set of new qi gong movements and breathing through the pain. The opening song allowed me to enter a space of reverence with my loves and losses, and the rest splayed playfully out, setting me up for my year of exploring folksier sounds. Shoutout to the student who turned me onto the project. 

Favorite Lyric: I am free man and my father he was a slave. I have been broken but my children will be saved. Saved for the fire of man’s desire. Saved for tomorrow with today’s sorrow. Saved for a Jesus who does not need us. Saved for the lovers I pray they will discover.  

9) Chromokopia - Tyler, the Creator - 2024

Tyler’s paranoia-packed album came just in time to shake me out of my fear of the ever-rising tide of fascism with lyrics that are equal parts soulful and mischievous. It’s great to hear Tyler be his whole queer self on such energetic production.

Favorite lyric: give a fuck bout pronouns, I’m that n**** and that bitch. 

10) Hells Welles - Jesse Welles - 2024 

I found Jesse Welles through his song about the assassination of the UnitedHealth CEO, and his politically sharp folk with biting satiric lyrics has won me over so powerfully, he slid into this last spot in the final minute. He’s equally capable of making me seethe, laugh, and cry with croons that are equally soulful and goofy. He has a whole album on nature, giving odes to bugs, trees, and whales and two others making political commentary on everything from the genocide, cancer, modern-day slavery, and more. I’m just happy to have found someone as angry and silly as I feel most days. 

Favorite lyric: the dead don’t feel honor, they don’t feel that brave. They don’t feel avenged. They’re lucky if they got graves. 

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order)

La Isla - Rels B 

Mind Blade - Malev da Shinobi 

Antitesis - YoungShiva

Cowboy Carter - Beyonce

Please Don’t Cry - Rapsody

If My Wife New, I’d be Dead - CMAT

Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going - Shaboozey

Alligator Bites Never Heal - Doechii 

Javelin - Sufjan Stevens 

The Long Game - Marlon Craft 

Gangs of Zion / Ron Stallworth / 2024

Gangs of Zion / Ron Stallworth / 2024

I read this book at the recommendation of a former colleague for a Utah-related project of mine. From the author and subject of Black Klansmen, the book and the film, we have a follow-up project fleshing out his career as a gang unit police investigator and the so-called hip-hop cop in (drumroll) Utah of all places.

Stallworth begins this memoir with a hamfisted rebuttal of Boots Riley. For those unaware, when the BlackKklansmen rollout began, Riley released a forceful critique of BlackKklansmen as revisionist history, copaganda, and pointed out Stallworth’s history of infiltrating radical Black organizations, including the one Riley’s father was a part of, as part of COINTELPRO. Stallworth fixates one aspect of Riley’s blistering and effective critique: turns out, Stallworth was too young to have participated in COINTELPRO. He definitely DID take part in infiltrating radical Black organizations, just not under the behest of the FBI. Stallworth lambasts Riley for this factual inaccuracy, completely missing the thrust of Riley’s critique. Everyone I love and care about would consider this a minor hiccup in Riley’s critique, since Stallworth did in fact break up radical Black orgs. 

For his part, Stallworth justifies infiltrating these organizations using explicitly anti-communist rhetoric and claiming they were a threat to national security. To the surprise of no one, a cop is a cop. What was mildly surprising and thoroughly entertaining was Stallworth’s confession to physically assaulting Riley at a dinner, where he boasts of squeezing his hand too hard and holding him hostage by squeezing a pressure point on his neck. Later on, he describes patting Riley’s back and telling him he just used the bathroom and didn’t wash his hands. He literally brags about making Riley “my bitch.” The moments reveal just how disgusting, insecure, and brute Stallworth’s masculinity is. What a weird little clown! 

The first bit of Stallworth’s memoir details his rise in the police department and the emergence of his “Black consciousness.” We see Stallworth refuse to tokenize himself in moments and opportunistically tokenize himself in other moments. He’s clearly a bullheaded person with a high tolerance for external criticism and disapproval as both his Black community and the officers on the force didn’t really like him much, it seems. He relates to Malcolm X, but never bothered learning the history of policing or thinking critically about solving societal problems, so he’s completely bought into the prison industrial complex as our best option it seems. 

There are two worthwhile histories described in this book. The first is the history of the JobCorps in Utah. Stallworth focuses in on this federal program, which took low-income, high-risk youth from major cities like LA and brought them to suburban Utah for job skills training, because JobCorps brought gang culture to Utah. Utah officials were in denial of this, because JobCorps stimulated their economies with fat federal checks to administer the program. In my opinion, the JobCorps also likely increased the racism of Utahns by making some of the few people of color visible in their communities, some of the poorest and in need in the country. Of course, their presence brought social problems that proliferate among any historically oppressed working class and racialized youth. For his part, Stallworth provides a sturdy critique of how the program was administered that actually shows a deep concern for these youth. It’s hilarious to learn more about white, Mormon gangsters of Utah committing petty crimes and aggravating to learn about the Pacific Islander Mormons swept up into gang culture as a reprieve from a racist society. Stallworth rebuts criticisms of his profiling of youth of color by providing anecdotes of families crying racism when they had proven gang ties and never by describing actual data and letting us know what his profile looked like. Overall, this is socially complicated territory, where actual racism is certainly at play, as well as actual violent criminal activity in some communities of color at the time. Stallworth’s voice and bias here is useful, even if I disagree with him, in painting the larger picture of what was happening in Utah’s lower income community at times. For his part, Stallworth genuinely went out of his way to do what he thought was right in revealing the way JobCorps was failing both youth  of color and the communities these youth were brought to. 

The second history tied into this one is the rise of gangster rap and its influence on youth. During the hysterical pearl-clutching of the Ice T, NWA, and Tupac era, Stallworth gained a reputation as a so-called “hip-hop cop,” where he would rap and breakdown rap lyrics in universities and serve as an expert witness in the “Gangster Rap Made Me Do It” cases. I listened with troubled curiosity about how Stallworth claims to have learned the “G-code” by listening to gangster rap. He became a fan of 90s gangsta rap, falling hard to Tupac’s consciousness in songs like “Dear Mama’ and “Brenda’s got a baby.” During this era, Stallworth became a N-word-whisperer for scared white people and elites. His representations of hip-hop culture were sympathetic, as he saw gangster rappers as expressing the genuine concerns of an oppressed community. He defended hip-hop culture in courtrooms and warned politicians against culture wars that simply made gangster rap cooler. While I agree that Stallworth’s experience as a cop, a Black man, and a fan of hip-hop, who self-studied sociology and ethnic studies to better understand the culture, give him some insight in the gang culture and communities of color, I believe these experiences gave him too much confidence. He acts as if hip-hop culture can substitute actually getting to know people. His relationship with community remains antagonistic, even in his somewhat believable anecdotes about former gang members saying he was the only positive male role model in their life. Even if these anecdotes were true, a handful of anecdotes hardly compare to the many other lives he likely ruined and made much more difficult in his role.  

Even when Stallworth is dead wrong, he still manages to be entertaining. 3 out of 5.

[...] / Fady Joudah / 2024

[...] / Fady Joudah / 2024

I would highly recommend reading […] in a book club or group. Being a Palestinian writer in 2024 means the genocide and your familiar struggles being thrust into the spotlight like never before, alongside all the political baggage and expectations that come with such a moment. Here, Joudah resists becoming a sole spokesperson, someone who sentimentalizes or serves as a catalyst for catharsis. Inevitably, this has created a collection that can be hard to parse on your own at times. There’s a resistance in the silences here, in the naming of so many poems as […] in a way that makes some of the poems harder to remember, much in the same way the onslaught of death and the faces and the dismembered body parts on our screen become lost to actual memory. It was reading these poems in conversation with peers that really made their brilliance shine through for me. i had the blessing of having a Palestinian woman in the room during my book club who could speak to how certain poems evoke a specific set of war memories for her. I particularly adored the maqams in this collection. I recommend folks to listen to Joudah read “Dedication”—what I would argue is the most “accessible” poem in the collection and the sort of poem people expected and wanted from Palestinian poets this year. Joudah reads it with a rhythm and energy practically foreign to the loud, slammy US circuit for poems like these. 4.5/5

Bluff / Danez Smith / 2024

Bluff / Danez Smith / 2024

Danez Smith been one of my favorite poets. In Bluff, they reflect on their meteoric rise and the tokenism that they tried and feels they failed to resist. In some of their best poems yet, they criticize the “hope industrial complex” and feel embarrassed about having written poems for presidents. I laughed out loud at the line “they untapped my phone / found no threat, the shame i felt.” Despite this, Electric Literature still insists Smith “Sculpts Pessimism into Hope”, which isn’t exactly wrong but feels like it misses the critique, as if readers can’t stomach the Afropessimism intrinsic in the project. I can’t say I’m well-read in Afro-pessimism, but as a neophyte to Marxism, I did feel disappointed in Smith’s inability to articulate much of a vision throughout the collection. The poem “principles” is particularly underwhelming: it argues against “all lives matter” as if Smith is trapped in some racist white woman’s facebook page; it puts its most radical position--a desire for a stateless society--into parentheticals, not giving it much space to breathe and develop meaningfully. No doubt Smith’s life as a poz nonbinary Black artist has not been an easy one, but still, Smith has been granted lots of money and time and connections to develop their ideas and be heard, so it’s a bit disappointing to read poems from a dude in their 30s still writing about “three soulmates” that they lost. The essay “My End of the World” about BIPOC relationships to nature, for example, merely seemed to catalog introductory talking points of Black and brown environmental thought. The highs in Bluff are great, but Danez sets a high bar for themself and at times I feel like they gets lost in the sauce, flinching when they could choose to grow into new territory.    

Coz / Marco Valerio Reyes Cisfuentes / 2023

Coz / Marco Valerio Reyes Cisfuentes / 2023

Marco and I traded books during the Trinacional festival de poesia in Chiquimula, where he wore #BlackLivesMatter and Pride shirts in even the most conservative settings, where he was told not to read the poem about the war criminal who funded one of the private schools. Most poetry collections I have read primarily about death sink into the sentimental. You can read the minor scale in the writing, the moaning grief. Coz writes about death with a punk’s stoicism and probing eye. In “Oda al Arbol” or “Ode to the Tree,” he laments the “cowardly act of writing,” wrestling with the fear of expression in the aftermath of a dictatorship. In “Ultima Voluntad” or “Last Will,” he reflects upon the visions of his dying father. Coz is a chapbook for those unafraid of looking the world in the eye, of noticing the cadavers they prefer we ignore. 5/5 

The American Gun / Jessica Femiani / 2024

The American Gun / Jessica Femiani / 2024

I traded books with Jessica when I visited Oneonta in October. The American Gun is a cutting chapbook about gun violence in the United States. I can’t say the collection taught me anything new. We have lived through and remember each of the mass shootings and massacres described in this collection. The collection doesn’t make me look at them in a new light. Femiani doesn’t aestheticize the loss. Rather, reading them altogether, spoken so plainly, really hammers in the incomprehensible amount of violence we have allowed to become normal. Femiani’s chapbook attempts to un-numb the US soul. I read it by a pond reflecting the red and yellow autumn leaves, after having a challenging conversation with a guilt-ridden Zionist who thanked me for teaching a poem by Black Jewish poet Aaron Samuels during a workshop. I, like Femiani’s book, don’t have clear answers to how to defeat the newest wave of fascist-terrorist violence. I struggled with my numbness as I read the collection. I thank Femiani for making me struggle against it. 3 out of 5.