Whenever I talk about Dominican-Haitian relations
I’m told, you, daughter of Manhattan,
of a multitude of diasporas,
what know you of this island?
What I know is simple:
The island of my people
has twin saltwater lakes,
one on the side of Haiti,
the other, in the Dominican Republic.
They are three miles apart,
and for the last ten years,
they’ve both been rising.
What I know is simple:
This island is a history of tangled tresses
I struggle to comb through.
This island, the first wound in the western world.
This island, the first place to undo its locks.
This island, strips people stateless,
stakes them to the wrong side of a cross,
pushes them to a borderland between lakes.
This island, split discs at the mountain spine.
What I know is simple:
Even when the nations misremember,
the land is older. The water is older.
Lake Enriquillo and Laz Azuei
have both been rising, like twin sisters
unpressing themselves from the mud,
stretching up and out
fingering the fields that
once held yucca, and sugarcane;
drowning crops, embalming them in salt.
What I know is this is an unprecedented event.
These two bodies of water
reaching towards each other
as if they’ve forgotten to whom they owe patriotism.
Or maybe it’s simply that they’ve remembered,
that sometimes the only way to get family to wade in the water,
is to extend to them this unholy baptism.
Elizabeth Acevedo