Writers enrolled in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts may choose to attend a winter residency on the island of Puerto Rico. This year, it began on January 2nd. Here is a day-by-day account, courtesy of Graduate Assistant Nickole Brown, MFA-W '03, pictured below right.

 

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Monday, the second day of this new year. 

Our adventure began in cities and towns across the United States—Montpelier, Little Rock, San Francisco, and Las Vegas, to name a few—and there’s even one of us all the way from Australia.  Some of us were already here in Puerto Rico, but most began cozied in their own bed this morning.  

 

We awoke early—myself at 3:00 a.m., miraculously, with the first chime of the alarm—rising with equal parts exhaustion and anticipation. We showered, we double-checked our itineraries, we scraped frost from our cars.  In the dark, we made our way to the airport. We’ve been preparing for this for weeks. In our suitcases are the recommended bug spray and sunscreen and poncho for the rainforest; in our carry-ons are our notebooks and laptops and lucky writing pens.  Each of us has brought our copy of Conquistadora, a novel we’ve read by Puerto Rican writer Esmeralda Santiago, and depending on our various degrees of pragmatism or fashion-consciousness, we’ve also schlepped all sorts of sundries we may (or may not) need.  Either way, we prepared as best we could and have finally arrived. 

 

So what then have we found this first afternoon?  Well, San Juan, of course! After the bumpy cab ride from the airport, we landed at the top of a hill on San Justo Street, where our apartments are.  From the narrow cobblestone streets to the crumbling and gorgeous buildings painted every shade of sorbet, there’s not one of us who could deny the deep history of this place.  Known as “La Ciudad Amurallada” (the walled city), we’re nestled in the oldest part, the very place founded in 1521 by Juan Ponce de León.  The architecture thus is Spanish Colonial (think Zorro meets the tropics), with windowshutters open wide, sans screens.  The apartments also open to a courtyard garden, and the high-ceilinged rooms move with soft, humid air from the sea. 

 

What’s more, we’ve landed smack dab in the middle of a festival week celebrating Christmas and the new year.  Plena music (sounding a lot like Salsa music, but older, with more traditional African drums) played this time of year special for the holiday was piped into the Poet’s Passage this evening when we arrived for our reception, and outside, the square was lit with floral swirls of lights.  We shared a light meal (including a scrumptious little slice of tarte a l’oignon) and introduced ourselves.  There’s no doubt about it, we’re travel frazzled, but we’re glad to be together.  Just think—each of us has flown thousands of miles above the waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean into the Caribbean Sea to get here. . . . and we made it, all sixteen of us, safe and sound.

 

Hopefully, each of us has a good night’s sleep in store.  For me, I’m opening my window to listen to the sweet chirping of the coquís (pronounced KO-QUEE, a tiny frog endemic to the island), and if you’re curious to hear that cuteness, check this out.    Doesn’t it sound like it sings its own name?  Occasionally, I also hear the low, long vowels of ship’s foghorn in the distance or the revel of laughter clattering up from the cobblestone.  To me, it’s such strange, sweet music.

 

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Day two. 

Our second day, a day to be settled in enough to learn that paradise, while still paradise, is imperfect. The pipes in Old San Juan, for example, are delicate, some barely fizzling out enough water to rinse our hair. The humidity is high, the cobblestones slick and uneven, and around the square is a young man cranking bass loud enough to rattle his windows. There are stray cats all along the cars parked along the narrow streets—some sleeping in the tire wells, some crouched under the shade of the bumpers, others sunning themselves on the roofs. One street corner smells faintly of urine, and on another corner a woman sitting on a black plastic garbage bag rattles her cup of change. “I’m sorry,” Ann says, handing the woman some coins. “Sometimes I can’t help it. . . . I can’t.”

 

But isn’t this always the way of paradise? The resorts may offer you a chlorinated version of the island scrubbed spotless by hired hands, but here is Puerto Rico as it is. As we learned this morning from Ann and Rigoberto, it is a place founded in hardship and sorrow. Columbus landed in 1493, and it only took the diseases brought over by the colonialists (not to mention their taste for gold) a hundred years to almost completely wipe out the indigenous Taínos, once a population of eight million. When there weren’t enough workers left and the sugarcane needed to be harvested, the Spaniards brought in African slaves, a practice that didn’t end until 1873. For four centuries a part of the Spanish Empire, the people defended themselves against most every possible invader—the French, the British, the Dutch—who tried their hand at claiming this fertile gateway into the Caribbean. The friendly-appearing Jones Act of 1917, which made the islanders American citizens, also made the people of the island subject to military drafts (but ironically unable to vote).

 

This blog is not a history lesson, don’t worry. I won’t go on except to say that our lecture this morning was followed with a walk up to El Morro Fort, and along the way, we saw a part of this legacy for ourselves, because there, to the right, in a neighborhood set low and close to the sea was a neighborhood that looked like a limping caricature of the one directly up the hill, where we are staying. It is a neighborhood of roofs crumbling and walls long gone, a neighborhood where ferns grow up from gutters and birds nest in the joists of rotting floors. “That’s the slum,” someone said, and sure enough, it was easy to see— the city is split and separated only by a busy road and a jagged stretch of the old fortress wall. There is one narrow walkway up from that neighborhood, and directly across the street was a policeman standing stoic watch.

 

It is not easy, these realities. We feel uncomfortable, but we are here to pay attention, to write it down. Yes, this residency may perhaps be, in part, a call to awareness. So yes, we continued to walk up to the fort, which is, more than anything else, the one undeniable artifact of Puerto Rico’s difficult past. It is gorgeous and crashing next to the sea, and our guide told us that from the air it resembles the skull of a bull. Inside, the thick stone is painted white. The walls felt cool to the touch, and the constantly moving ocean breeze makes it lovely as an old castle, so beautiful it is near impossible to comprehend death here. To me, it is impossible in the same way that it is impossible to imagine the history of the concentration camps in Slovenia. If you go there during the summer residency, you may agree with me. You see, next to the old prison is a graveyard nestled in the high green grass that bends in the valley of the Julian Alps, too beautiful for rot and for bones. I remember seeing the honey placed on the simple markers of those who died there and the amber light slanting through each jar.

 

But I digress. We didn’t end our day here. No, we walked away from El Morro Fort. We took a groupphoto and agreed how hungry we were for lunch and walked away. Some then stole a few moments before workshop to visit the silver shops and the spice shops, and some bought delicious coffee from a man just six doors down that grows and roasts his own beans. We perhaps caught glimpses of nervous chameleons darting behind palms, and perhaps we thought how adorable the Spanish tongue sounds in the mouths of children playing. But before all this, we walked away from the Fort. And for those of us paying attention, we saw those children flying kites across the expanse of green surrounding the fort once known as “the killing grounds.” I stopped and counted the kites. Eleven! Eleven kites, all scissoring the same air, all flying, despite everything, unabashed with joy.

 

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A trifecta of days, the third bringing in the best yet—the privilege of spending time with two local authors.

The first, Mayra Santos-Febres, visited us this morning.  A professor at the University of Puerto Rico and founder of the well-known Festival de la Palabra that brings together writers from over thirty countries each year, this novelist and poet spoke to us about the culture of the island.  “If you’re confused, don’t worry,” she said.  “Welcome to the club.”  Puerto Rico, as she explained it, is a tangle of race and culture, nearly impossible to define, but she embraces the confusion, calling this indeterminacy an opportunity to advance other important issues.  To her, the unique makeup of her homeland is an opportunity to have tough conversations about race, civil rights, and the use of democracy. 

 

The full breadth of our discussion today is too complex to cover here, but safe to say, each of us in the circle leaned in, listening to her every word.  She spoke of how race on the island is not absolutely defined by one’s skin color (as it often is in the states), but can instead be a personal choice.  “Colonialism likes to force a definition on you,” she said.  “But here, we want to be self-determined. . . . Labels can be very scary for people who can be trapped in them.” Similarly, dance, to her, is a way Puerto Ricans reclaim the body as their own.  This is significant, especially for a people who were once not allowed to own their own body.  Finally, she spoke of America as a part of  “The Americas,” meaning all of us, as a continent.  She sees immigration laws as impossible.  “Once you went there you opened the door, and you cannot close it, period,” she said.  She reaches for inclusivity and an idea of culture as wild and organic, a thing to be allowed to grow in all of its strange and exquisite ways.

 

Before leaving, we had the privilege of hearing her read from her best-known novel, Sirena Selena.Here then is a brief excerpt from Chapter 3 as her protagonist, a young drag queen from the streets of Puerto Rico, sends a prayer up from an airplane. On the page, her words are lyrical, but her voice, sweetened with her accent, brought the experience of this passage to another level:

“You, María Piedra de Imán, enchantress and touchstone, who walked with the seven Samaritans and gave them beauty and recognition, bring me luck and fortune, bless your Sirena, so that I can sing, Piedra Imán.  You were magnet and compass: you will be my protector, with me always.  I ask of you that my voice come out filled with needles, dense, that it enter the breasts of those who listen to me and wring longing and applause from them.  I ask for gold as my treasure, silver for my house, and I want you to be the sentinel of my home and my personality as you were the guiding light for the Holy Virgin Mary.  You know, Santísima Piedra Imán, that drinking egg whites helps, gargling with seawater and Listerine helps, practicing the recorded exercises of maestro Charles Monigan that Martha brought me from the television and that I put on videocassette player in her apartment helps; but they don’t assure me of anything.  Your protection is what I seek for my assurance. . . .”

 

Later in the afternoon, we walked a few blocks over to the home of Héctor Feliciano, a journalist whose book The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art has led to the recovery of some 60,000 works of art plundered by the Germans during World War II.  It was fascinating to hear about the determination that went into the seven years of research required for this book.  He relentlessly went after the impossible, seeking out restricted information and archives that were completely uncataloged, and his zeal as an investigator is unparalleled.  He worked (and continues to work) twelve to sixteen hour stretches.  “You have to do it, you have to do it, you have to do it, and that is it,” he said. 

 

He also said how important it was to be naive as an investigator.  “Ask all the stupid questions,” he said, reminding us how to pay attention and get the real story.  In addition, he spoke extensively about the importance of audience.  He wrote his book for a singular reader—an imagined reader—but a reader that was absolutely demanding and insistent on only the highest quality work from him. His next project is on Puerto Rican painter Francisco Oller, and when one of the students asked him how that new topic might weigh against the tremendous success of his last book, he shrugged and said it didn’t matter because again, he’s writing for that small audience, that tough, singular critic, not the world.  Regardless of genre, any writer could take this advice. 

 

After his lecture, Héctor and his wife treated us to some local treats, including queso de país (a dry, white cheese) with slices of guava paste.  This was served with bright red cans of Coca-Cola (a virtual staple around here), and later, we were led up two flights of stairs to his rooftop. With the sun going down, the coquí were in full song, and we were high enough to look down on his mango tree to see the young fruit still small and tight on the branches.  We sipped wine and looked out over the water and over the city, feeling the richness of a day well spent.   

 

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Day four.  

Finally, the city has, for me, stopped spinning.  I know where I am, where the coffee can be found, how long it really takes to fill the bathtub with these slow pipes.  After yesterday’s intense conversations, I am filled with a sense of history and can begin to recognize the precise ingredients of the culture here.  I can understand why the tourist shops are filled with African masks and Catholic icons; I can appreciate the percussion of music in aisle of the grocery store and the man who stopped in front of the detergent to dance.  In the Linen House, a little shop on Fortaleza, I watched Ann purchase a fan, a beautiful, hand-painted fan, the real kind(“not from China but Spain”), and the woman who sold it to her demonstrated exactly how to flick it open and closed.  “I danced flamenco en Sevilla,” she said, snapping the lace.  “Yes, I have my story.” 

 

And yes, now that I’m oriented, I can begin to see so many stories here—stories of people that have left to work or study in New York who have returned to the island, stories of people who straddle the divide between Spanish and English, Puerto Rican and American, agrarian and industrial.  A sense of this history was further deepened by a visit to Museo de Arte today.  From the wooden icons of saints carved by folk artists in the mountains to Carlos Irizarry’s arresting contemporary work “Transculturization of Puerto Ricans,” we saw how artists native to this island have always struggled between the rules and obligations of colonial forces and their desire to serve their own identity.  José Campeche, perhaps the most well-known Puerto Rican artist, felt these pressures as far back as the 18th Century as he painted to both please the king of Spain and himself.  As the guide told us, his simple decision to insert pineapples and maracas and indigenous flowers into his classical portraits was, at the time, somewhat of a revelation, and even his still-life depicting a table of avocados—and not a fruit typical to Europe—was a bold move towards claiming the home he loved best. 

 

Also, for you guys who plan to come on this residency, if you go to this museum, please, don’t forget to explore the garden in the back!  In a lily-filled reflection pool are dozens of coy fish, cat-sized and in every glimmering shade of autumn you can imagine.  I saw, for the first time, an orchid growing naturally, in the crux a tree, and an entire sidewalk was bordered with thick Mother-in-Law’s Tongue (or “Snake Plant,” commonly treated as an easy-to-grow but relatively boring houseplant).  I imagine all of this seemed greener still because of all the stone and stucco in Old San Juan, but who could deny the banyan trees in that garden?  Even though it was raining, it was dry beneath those hanging vines and thick leaves.  I suppose I’m further enchanted because of what’s ahead. . . . early tomorrow, we travel to the rainforest, and even though there’s much reveling to do tonight (our last in San Juan), I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn to say that we’re all looking forward to our adventures there.  Are you packed yet?  Did you put water and grass under your bed?  I hope so, because tonight is the Feast of Epiphany’s Eve, and the folklore of this place says that the three kings will visit during the night.  Their camels will eat the grass, and in return, the kings will leave a gift.  We will wake early to see what Baltazar, Melchor, and Gaspar left us.  Hopefully, it will be a safe passage to El Yunque, and perhaps a spot of sunshine so that we can go straight to the waterfall I keep hearing about and dive in.

 

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Day five.  

We have played it over and over in our minds, trying to figure how it could have been different, how we could have kept it from happening.  You see, this morning we left Old San Juan for El Yunque, and halfway there, things changed.  We were hungry and thirsty, and not knowing where to stop, our three vans pulled into a fast food restaurant in Rio Grande.  We went in, and not more than ten minutes later, we came out to find the blue van—the one I was driving—had been broken into.  Bits of glass were everywhere, and in the driver’s seat was a towel flecked with the blood of whoever had the gall (or the desperation) to punch the window out with his fist.  Four bags were stolen.  We lost computers, passports, books, credit cards. We lost a toothbrush, a checkbook, our writing pens.  We lost backpacks and computer cases; we lost our itineraries and our charger cables.  We lost our sense of safety, our sense of control.

 

I thought about not blogging about this day at all.  Who, thinking of escaping to a tropical paradise, wants to read about this?  Who wants to hear about how long we were all in that parking lot, speaking to the police as best we could in our broken Spanish, how we were frantic on the phone with our banks?  We sat in disbelief on the grass; the cars slowed with concern and curiosity.  We sat in disbelief on the grass; we watched a white egret kite across the sky without any interest in our dilemma at all.  The police came, the police went.  Enterprise brought our replacement van, and eventually, we drove toward our destination with a sad, careful silence, our minds reeling.

 

Do you think we could have picked a better spot to park?  Do you think someone should have stayed with the vans?  Do you think we could have thought to take our bags into the restaurant with us?  Dear reader, the answer to all of these questions is yes.  But then again, perhaps it is no.  Or better yet, it doesn’t matter.  What does matter is this: we have—all sixteen of us—arrived in El Yunque safely.  As of tonight, all sixteen of our hearts rattle out the steady beat of sixty-four chambers, and even though we’re greatly inconvenienced, that is what it is—an inconvenience.