V. Papa Legba: An Epistle To Lwa
“Jete dlo oui nan lakou a Hey ho
Ha Legba nan lakou a hey
Rassemble oui nan lakou a Hey ho” — Boukman Eksperyans, “Legba”
Legba, I know it’s been several days if not weeks since I’ve last written to you. It’s just that so much has happened since my former roommates displaced me and I started living with my aunt about two weeks ago. My being swamped in this shitty five-days-a-week job with subpar pay — working under dangerously poor ventilation in a basement with no windows — my oblivious 44- year old Bengali coworker who decided to wear a MAGA hat and insist there was nothing wrong, violent about his actions, racist n-word slinging Dominicans and Cubans, middle aged workers who would converse about how much they’d want to beat their own children, to entitled, decrepit crackers was more than enough for me to take my leave.
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I tried to make my commute from upstate New York to Manhattan last for as long as I could, but from the culmination of not having the space to articulate my dejection, my anger — from having been kicked out and left with no alternative but to move back upstate, left me feeling defeated. It’s almost as my being in Brooklyn for half a decade just to come back to the Hudson Valley made me feel like all this shit was for nothing.
I couldn’t tell who or what to be angry at in the moment: my roommates, mad at myself for the fact that I had been navigating financial instability for most of my life, that I didn’t have the community where someone would open up their couch to me in the interim where I was without a plan to figure out a place to live, that even as I was living in Brooklyn in those six years, I was fighting being on the verge of homelessness, that the harm that I’ve done to other people that has come back as a ripple effect and bits and pieces of it are what I have to atone for in some way. I was ambivalent, angry, and dejected about all of these things — flustered that I’ve been spiraling so much that it appears that I’m calm. Most of the the time, I’m never calm. I feel as though I’m always in a state of vertiginousness.
Even if I could be speaking to someone at a slow and steady pace, even if my mouth is matching the words I’m speaking, there is unceasing chaos in my interiority. My grammar of suffering has no teleological bandwidth unlike the Human grammar. It explains why they try to find solutions that serve as thought-terminating cliches, why they try find cutoff points to this vertiginousness. I feel there is a vastly foggy area between me and the Hudson Valley. Much is left to unsightly memories.
There isn’t community here, nor any community I’d hope to find during my stay at my aunt Titine’s. Though the impact of said memories don’t seem to effect me as much now as they did a decade or so ago, I still want to put pen to paper what my relationship to this place is now, even if it’s estranged and temporary. In all honesty, I am woefully lonely, but I will it into existence that I’ll find other Black queer people here whose communities I can be a part of.
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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is a Nyack-born American-Haitian nonbinary writer, music producer, graphic designer, and educator who resides in Brooklyn, New York. His gender pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. He writes poetry, short stories, and essays. He is published in The Library of Unconventional Lives, RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of Perennial: a collection of letters.
