Yaissa Jiménez: Poetry and Rituals of Artistic Creation
Yaissa Jiménez performs. Photo by Bernardo Almonte.
Yaissa Jiménez’s poem “Azabache” declares that centuries of Black ancestors offered her protection by tracing a path of salt for her so that she’d never be “de rodillas ante la mala fe” (on her knees in front of bad faith). Jiménez’s artistic journey pays homage to this protection, the freedom forged by those who came before her—their wisdom scattered on the island every day in the city of Santo Domingo and its diasporas. Through her performance and poetic work, Jiménez creates an aesthetic experience in which people can learn about a Dominicanidad that is expansive and that loves, respects, and protects Blackness. She rewrites this history of belonging from the context of San Lorenzo de los Mina, currently a vibrant and thriving community that 66 Black maroons founded in the late 17th century.
Los Mina is Jiménez’s hometown, a place that brings her joy. With her artistic endeavors, Jiménez imagines belonging to a place beyond the abstraction of Dominican nationalism, honoring her “land, my barrio, and the island” by bringing urban Black Dominican voices to the forefront of performance and the page. This commitment to an aesthetics that reflects Los Mina’s history of Black freedom makes Jiménez a steward of an invaluable Afro-Caribbean cultural heritage for which there are no official structures of remembrance.
Early in her life, Jímenez felt compelled to capture the stories and the lives that bloomed around her but that weren’t part of the canonical works she read at school in the Dominican Republic. An exaltation of Hispanic values and disregard of Afro-diasporic knowledge, histories, and spiritualities familiar to Los Mina. It made it difficult for Jiménez to relate to the quintessential Dominican writer and intellectual—always upper-class, white (ot at least light-skinned), and male. “I had to understand what [I] wanted to write and that this group couldn’t teach me how,” she says. “What was going to teach me how to write was the land, the dirt. I was going to learn how to write from the trees, my yard, and the people around me. Those were the people that taught me how to write. The sounds around me. I am in love with the way people speak in DR. I create through that tension, finding what feeds me.”
Jiménez’s curiosity, love for the spoken word, and the dynamic urban home environment around her became the guideposts of her artistic practice, which she calls rituals of artistic creation. “I needed to write that my mother’s house was like a jungle of cilantro on the days she made sazón,” she adds. “So I decided then and there, at my mother’s house, that instead of establishing specific routines to become a writer, I needed to establish the ritualistic impulse to start writing.” This culminated in her first poetry collection, Ritual Papaya. A constellation of voices, Ritual Papaya draws from Los Mina and combines the local, the personal, and the private with myth-like interventions of the sacred through the ways characters deal with their circumstances.
Yaissa Jiménez. Photo by Bernardo Almonte.
Devotion to the misterios of 21 Divisions, or Dominican Vodou, forms an integral part of the lives of the characters Jiménez conjures to life through her narratives and poems. Yet, Ritual also weaves in the idiosyncrasies of the characters in how they pray and build their altars and offerings, as shown by the title poem. In “Ritual Papaya,” a woman builds a ritual to conceive and prays to La Catrina, who is not a santo of 21 Divisions. This unorthodox approach evinces the artist’s understanding of rituals as a way to mobilize spiritual energies and co-constituting their own process of manifestation. In this way, Jímenez asserts that rituals exist in the everyday and beyond the realm of religion.
“Jímenez asserts that rituals exist in the everyday and beyond the realm of religion. ”
“Rituals help me enter and maintain a state of flow as a writer. Since I was a child, I have noticed that there are very specific rituals everywhere that nobody calls rituals,” Jiménez says. “For example, my mom would make sazón every six months. That was always a ritual. The whole morning was a preparation for this. She’d shower, change, go to the market, and when she returned, the house would be filled with vegetables and herbs to blend. She would then follow concrete steps to get the sazón to smell like it is supposed to. And always remember how it is supposed to smell and taste. This was a whole day dedicated to this practice. Aren’t those rituals of artistic creation?”
Jiménez’s work has traveled across the northeast U.S., where her ensemble multidisciplinary show Blindada: Poemas de Protección moved audiences to tears and dance. Her performances at the Museum of Modern Art, IATI Theater, Casa Capullo, Harvard University, and Wesleyan University have brought her work to wider audiences. Her charisma and the voices of her characters—sometimes insolent; other times sultry or funny, but always proudly Black Caribbean—enchant audiences. What may be less obvious is that Jiménez’s spoken word career started spontaneously when the artist bought a microphone to record herself reading out loud during the COVID-19 shutdowns in 2020. Jiménez’s unique talent and expressive voice quickly won her a loyal Instagram audience, invitations to spoken word competitive circles, and a place as the first continental winner of the Copa América Abya Yala Poetry Slam in Brazil in 2021.
“I was very nervous—between fear and happiness because I was in Copacabana,” she says. “I go for a swim, and a wave hits me hard and throws me into the water. Right there, I hear a voice tell me, ‘You have to enjoy every second of this because life is short.’ So I listened and went back to my rituals.”
The Copa contest started with the burning of incense. That acknowledgment of sacred materiality and interconnectivity with nature moved her to tears. “The whole thing was very emotional because there was even an ASL interpreter,” she says. “I met people who had poetry albums instead of books. I felt that this was a true democratization of poetry.” To the artist, poetry exists outside of books.”
A reverence for life undergirds Jímenez’s Afro-diasporic worlds rescued through the word. As she explains, Los Mina values center beauty and the right to expression, care, and creation of Black Dominicans and other oppressed people. “There’s an irrevocable dignity to Black freedom [that emanates from Los Mina],” she explains.
In her practice, the artist asks her audiences to pay close attention to how people affirm themselves through pleasure despite the weight of injustice. In Blindada, for example, she asks audiences to meditate on agency through the sounds of drums, the scent of agua florida, and the touch of soft satin scarves on their skin as she performs. Jiménez's attention to detail and deep curiosity undeniably inject her work with a sense of what Keving Quashie has termed “Black aliveness,” understanding the Black experiences as more expansive than its interactions with anti-Black violence.
Jiménez’s voice echoes in the second-to-last room of the Free as They Want To Be: Artists Committed to Memory exhibition at Harvard University. Afro-Dominican artistic scholar and curator Yelaine Rodriguez filmed Jiménez reading “Azabache”off-camera for her short Mal de Ojo/Point of the Door of No Return. On-camera, Jiménez poses in one of Rodriguez’s costume creations, a black bodysuit and a halo headpiece featuring waves of white cowrie shells and evil eye charms. In the video, Jiménez sits in front of the doors of La Atarazana Reales (Royal Dockyard) in Santo Domingo. The film is an exploration of the other side of the Door of No Return in Ghana. In the 16th century, the Atarazana port was the first point of entry to the Americas for the kidnapped Africans.
The door works as a container for colonial Santo Domingo, closing off the history of exploitation that built the city and opening to the tourism that showcases Dominicans’ proximity to a white Spanish past. Jiménez and Rodriguez’s collaboration instead reclaims for their people.
As Jiménez’s voice continues—“observa cómo salgo y entro con una libertad que te envenena” (observe how I come and go with a freedom that poisons you)—it’s a reminder that this freedom was not something Black Dominicans were supposed to claim. But liberty is within the marronage of Jiménez’s ancestors and their modes of herbal resistance: Jiménez poisons, but not through herbs nor charms; she poisons though an intact agency that lets her move across the landscape in whichever way she pleases.
Jiménez’s poetics, their creation, and aesthetic sensibilities emerge from the convergence of her deep respect for her ancestors and her amazement at the lives around her and beyond her as well as her community and their infinite potential. “Poetry does that,” she says. “It helps you pay attention to all of the complexity and beauty and all that you are and to understand yourself as a person. For a long time, I was angry because access to this essential tool was not available to everyone. I did not have access to this truth for a long time. Neither did the people who I love, who are where I'm from. There is no access, not only in the sense of buying a book. There is no access language-wise because the poetic language crafted by many loved poets doesn’t reflect the material realities of people, and that creates a distance.”
Yaissa Jiménez. Photo by Bernardo Almonte.
Unfortunately, as a Black creator, Jìmenez had to navigate the contradictions of an industry that both exalts cultural products about Black Caribbean people but looks down on and ousts Black Caribbean artists centering Afro-diasporic lineages, especially those related to 21 Divisions. Navigating academia in the United States as an MFA student at New York University became a laboratory to refine her craft but also to develop new ways to practice her marronage in literary spaces.
She developed an academic tigueraje: “I enjoyed the embodiment, the performance of being the student, and then going home and continuing my rituals, reading out loud, in front of the mirror, embodying characters that would have been frowned upon in the classroom, crafting stories for my people. In many instances, I trusted my body above the approval of my professors. However, being in academia is about constant negotiation, which was not new to me. I understood that academia was about results, and I had to figure out a way to make the result satisfactory to myself and to the professor without working double. I had to trust my intuition above all, and the ritual of reading in front of the mirror always worked for me. I also decided to cultivate a love for creating instead of exhausting my time seeking academic acceptance. Sometimes negotiating exhausts you and your love for your work, so you have to find a way to turn it into a game, something that gives you pleasure.”
For Jimenez, that was leaning into academic fashion with a Caribbean twist.
“I love thrifting, and I would put together whole thrifted outfits that channeled academia,” she says. “Not that I would change my personality or my language or anything; I just enjoyed the performance of being the young woman with the glasses and the books and the questions. The aesthetic aspect gave me courage. It was the intentionality, knowing I was myself and also someone else, a character, that gave me strength in those spaces and kept me strong.”
Playfulness, courage, and creativity are perhaps the three words that best describe Jímenez’s approach to academia. She advises students to create rituals that “resonate with them. A ritual is something that makes sense to you and you alone, as well as your relationship with yourself and whatever you believe about yourself and spirit.”
Nonetheless, her rituals reflect her relationship with the misterios; as for Afro-Dominicans, the misterios are an integral part of how we position ourselves in the world and attend to our materiality and spiritual health. “Misterios have always been very physical for me,” she says. “They intervene physically in our worlds in ways that sometimes we miss. I am inspired by them and their characteristics when I create, but their place in my writing tends to be less marked than in my personal life, although they converge as well.”
“Poetry is how we commemorate life and imagine life.”
In Rodriguez’s film, red and white cowrie shells cover artist Jimenez’s long, black satin gloves. Red, black, and blue—the colors of Vodou water spirit Èzili Dantò—protect Jimenez’s body from the entry of the evil eye. In the “Azabache” poem, she says, “No hay piedras más preciosas que las que escoltan mi sombra” (there are no gems more beautiful than the ones guarding my shadow), signaling that the protection spirits granted her is material. This is sacred work that occurs through the body. In marronage, claiming and protecting territory is of utmost importance, one of the many modalities of its sustainment. Jímenez’s poem is imbued with this knowledge, recognizing nevertheless that this marronage is something that was exercised through many forms in which the body came to be at the center of resistance, and she exclaims, “soy el territorio, la casa, el altar!” (I am the territory, the house, the altar!), turning herself and her body to be the inhabitance of the sacred, and through her corporeality, everything is resignified. She, as a Black woman, becomes the center of the creation of beauty, power, and freedom and the site of powerful ancestral protection and wisdom.
“That is poetry, that impulse to create and recognize beauty,” Jiménez says. “Poetry is how we commemorate life and imagine life.”
