Boomerang/Bumerán

“I and I alone spoke up and cried for insurrection and change,” says the speaker in “Boomerang, After Aimé Césaire,” the opening poem of Boomerang/Bumerán, a bilingual collection by Achy Obejas, in which the boomerang functions as both a thematic and formal motif, with several poems bearing the title “Boomerang,” and the book itself structured as a boomerang of sorts, since positioned one way it opens in English, and positioned another way it opens in Spanish, with the two languages meeting in the middle. Just as the speaker manages to inhabit two languages while resisting the binary of mother tongue versus adopted language, so, too, these poems refuse the male–female binary, adopting, instead, a “gender-free” idiom. As the author notes, this is more difficult to achieve in Spanish, whose grammar is heavily gendered and thus demands rethinking the way our understanding of gender is constructed in and through language.

In addition to their close attention to the subtle nuances of language, and explorations of the poet’s identity as Cuban-American, Jewish, and queer, these poems also consider love, which, for Obejas “runs the gamut of human need, in dark tones and rich hues, occasionally blood red.” As the poet explains, while “not the world’s most reliable sentiment,” love nevertheless “has an enduring appeal as a safe haven, a thing of delicate or substantial beauty.”

One of the collection’s most haunting poems deals with the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh 2017. The poem reads like an instruction manual for a prayer of sorts, interweaving the details of lives cut short—a preference for tea with honey, a throbbing ankle, a sense of confusion—with a set of rituals: 

if they were simply going through the motions 
which now gave them a warm and glowing contentment 
that came to them like breath
             (bow)

The collection ends on a hopeful and pragmatic note, with a prose poem titled “The March” that declares: “What we seek is a new majority rooted in justice for all whose conscience is committed to ceasing wrongs and doing right.” This is political poetry at its finest, reimaging gender through translation, and in pursuit of collective liberation.