A Mixtape of Grief, Blackness, and Love: On Roberto Carlos García’s [Elegies]
Roberto Carlos García opens his third poetry collection, [Elegies], with “Mixtape for City Kids from Dysfunctional but Happy Families, Kids like Me (a new form)” which reads as a letter to both his younger selves and younger Black folks. Brief lines, sharp enough to cut butter, exalt elders gone and grieved, especially his grandmother, “...Mami still/ works hard. The last 23 years of her life have been / spent teaching a poet & killing generations /of cockroaches with sky-blue plastic slippers.” García is a maverick at not only line breaks, but of linking profound reverence with the mundane. Even the cockroaches have a seat at García’s table as they await death by slippers he tenderly describes as the color of sky. But it is “Mami,” a necessary balm in the poet’s life amidst familial trauma, who is at the core of this poem, and [Elegies] writ large. García ends with a loud proclamation of love in a powerful play of words where he speaks in two different registers of English, one accented and the other non-accented, “…Lo is fo e ri bari /…love is for everybody”. Grief may take centerstage in [Elegies], but it is love as it intersects with a lived Afro-Latinx experience that is the light and backdrop to it all. García’s new mixtape functions much like the cento, borrowing lines from other poets. His new poetic form, however, converses with other forms of art spanning from fiction to rap lyrics to movies to non-fiction. With the invention of his beloved mixtape, García serves up a meditation on grief and love as felt in the body of an Afro-Latinx man who finds joy amid the messy progression of grief and borrows from literary ancestors and contemporaries alike who inform his work.
Founder of the cooperative press Get Fresh Books Publishing, García (who is also an essayist) describes himself as a “sancocho” of a writer whose work is deeply informed by many literary traditions: the Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts Movement, and the Nuyorican School to name a few. In a recent interview for the Rumpus with Boricua poet and essayist, Elisabet Velásquez, García elaborated on the many forms grief and memory take in writing. In the times of collective despair, society usually likes to designate the task of “bearing witness” to artists, for there seems to be a thinly veiled truth at the precipice of exposure. But beyond witness is the act of remembering. For García, remembering is more than a passive endeavor experienced after the loss of a loved one. It is an intentional act one takes to keep the deceased alive through memory—documented and archived for time immemorial. It’s no surprise that García draws inspiration from poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor who wrote Mama Phife Represents, in honor of her son Malik Taylor (aka Phife Dawg from A Tribe Called Quest) who said that part of the reason she wrote the book stemmed from fear of forgetting her deceased son. García’s mixtape is rooted in the same New York City hip-hop tradition that Boyce-Taylor’s son helped build. In fact, A Tribe Called Quest’s 1991 song “Jazz (We’ve Got),” addresses the living saying, “‘Cause the job of the resurrectors is to wake up the dead.” Through his mixtape form, García is a bit of a resurrector himself. He talks to other artists, writers, and his readers about the heaviness of his grief after losing his grandmother, bringing her and the lineage she helped forge to the ethereal light.
García’s grief goes beyond lamenting the physical loss of his grandmother and embraces grief’s complex non-linearity allowing him to explore painful pasts that are part of his lineage. “Tempest” is an 11-page poem where García unpacks his generational trauma where love takes abrasive swerves in life. García’s “Tempest” is arguably a powerful example of Audre Lorde’s “biomythography” which combines history, biography, and mythmaking. García drew from Aimé Césaire who also did a mixtape of his own by inserting the Haitian Revolution, which birthed the world’s first free Black republic, in his re-writing of Shakespeare’s Tempest. Written in eight parts, “Tempest” centers García’s parents and their tumultuous relationship as “sea” (his father) and “sky” (his mother). The poem ends with García’s birth after the “terrible loving” between his parents and his father who “never returned to the sidewalks, the tenements / His ruin was forever.” García demonstrates a layered grief in “Tempest” where the loss of his maternal grandmother comes with the grief of what his mother, a being “born in sky & reigned over earth & sea, but alone...”, endured.
Grief takes on a larger-than-life persona in [Elegies] and “Elegy in the Key of Life- a bop for e.l.” makes it crystal clear, “...my grief/ a beast center stage—you are dead”, but love prevails as it encourages the bereaved to lean into joy in spite of grief’s pangs of pain, “Be Happy, you would say—Be Happy, with an exclamation mark.” Grief may take centerstage in [Elegies], but it is love as it intersects with a lived Afro-Latinx experience that is the light and backdrop to it all.
This call to joy amidst the messy non-linear progression of grief continues with the “B side” of the mixtape García opened with. In “Mixtape for City Kids from Dysfunctional but Happy Families, Kids Like Me (B side),” García marries lines from Natalie Díaz, Raquel Salas Rivera, Ross Gay, Denice Frohman, Patrick Rosal, Ta-Nehisi Coates & James Baldwin with his own to write to future generations that performing stoicism in the face of grief is a fool’s errand. He writes, “When are we not grieving? Not to be all suffering/& pain define me...when a girl pronounces her name there is glory when/ a woman tells her own story she lives forever.” García is speaking on a type of legacy here by way of storytelling. If it’s true that the body expires, stories are the winds that carry lives beyond death. The last line of the poem reads, “Dread stalks our streets & our faces. Time is not money. Time is time,” which is García ending with the urgency and preciousness of Black breath. There is enough devastation to go around, but let’s make sure Black lives are never forgotten—a theme that is especially present in “Elegy for all of it” where García lists all the names of Black lives fallen to state-sanctioned violence.
García’s last mixtape of this collection is a “bonus cut” where this time hip-hop is more present with lines borrowed from Kendrick Lamar and Q-Tip, which, in turn, speak to Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Willie Perdomo, and other poets. “Mixtape for City Kids from Dysfunctional but Happy Families, Kids Like Me (Bonus Cut)” says so much in such little space. Carrying the rapid energy of rapping off the dome in a cipher, this poem also feels like a call to prayer, a call to rise (“But still I rise. I rise I rise I rise”), and most importantly reminding the present generation that they too “...come from a people who remember such things who tell stories inside the stories we are told.” As always, García ends with love, “And that’s word, word to everything I love.”
[Elegies] isn’t so much a love story as it is a story of love: love for García’s beloved grandmother, love for himself as he continues to be transformed by this grief, and above all, love for Black life. This loud and gentle book is of a Black man grieving in living color while also calling us to tap into grief. Pain demands to be felt, after all, and [Elegies] is García’s urgent reminder to do so.
Mariana Goycoechea is Guatemalan-American writer and teacher based in New York City. Her work has been published in NYSAI Press, The Rumpus, The Acentos Review, Harvard’s PALABRITAS, Fourth River, The Selkie Lit Mag, and most recently in the BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. She is a former alumnus of Tin House and VONA workshops with received fellowships to the Watering Hole, Kenyon Review, and Juniper Summer Writing Institute. She is a first year student in poetry at Ashland University’s MFA program.