Nature Projects the Struggles of Hurricane Maria

The relationship between humans and nature is not an uncertainty, it is an undeniable connectedness. Poets have always used nature metaphors and archetypes to relate to the human experience. When nature beats its chest and shakes the world, people realize how catastrophic and awesome nature is. Martin Espada writes about the devastation in the wake of Hurricane Maria and details the tragedy in a poem to his father titled “Letter to My Father.” While nature is assumed to be the aggressor, Espada describes a landscape that is victimized in similar ways to the inhabitants. 

Espada describes a mountain’s belly teeming with life like that of a pregnant woman. The animals are communicating and flowers are sprouting on the belly. The hurricane guts the mountain like a helpless pig, pouring blood rivers of mud through the streets. The houses that once contained unassuming occupants now jut out of the mountain’s blood as gravestones from the Puerto Rico of the past. In many ways the mutilation of their home landscapes is a projection of the struggles of the inhabitants. After seeing decapitated trees “beheaded all at once like the soldiers of a beaten army,” a man killed himself. The defeat of the trees reflected a lack of hope that he could not bare.

One of the mountains is called “an unheeded prophet” who shrieks of an apocalypse. For many Puerto Ricans, this was the end of the world. People think of prophets as crazy, simply spouting nonsense, yet so many people lost their homes. People consumed brown water that eased their dying thirst, but made room for disease to slither down their throats. People began to fade into the land around them as “fungus grows on their skin.” In the article by Oliver Milman, Carmen Villanneuva Castro states that the helpers from the US rarely speak Spanish, and "they don't know our reality." To apply for aid "residents must fill out a form online or call a telephone number," yet none of the residents have internet or phone access. Espada points out how the government gives them Skittles and Vienna sausages for dinner. Espada is not solely blaming nature for the misfortunes of the residents, but he pinpoints the injustice of people who are faced with a devastation that was not of their own making.

Ponder the quote "It is like they don't know our reality." How might the struggles specific to this area relate to our class discussions of the term Latindad erasing the experiences of individuals?