Mayra Santos-Febres (born 1966 in Carolina) is a Puerto Rican author, poet, novelist, literature professor, essayist, literary critic and author of children's books. Her work focuses on issues of race, diasporic identity, dissident sexualities, gender fluidity, desire and power. She is a cultural activist who helps bring books to young readers. Her works have been translated into French, English, German and Italian, among other languages.

I take this opportunity to make a confession. It took me 20 years to develop the inner strength to be able to share it. I am afraid to be a black woman who writes. No, I stand corrected. I was afraid. I was afraid for many years of being this woman, in this historical moment and with this terrible vocation for the written word. Today the fear is diminishing. But that fear marked my literary practice and my public practice for many years, too many.

The reasons are multiple. One day, I was discussing the systematic absence of a literary discourse of Afro-descendants in the Spanish language with my confidant and literary colleague, the winner of the King of Spain Journalism Award, José Manuel Fajardo. We were in the Dominican Republic, at the 2014 Book Fair. We were walking along Calle Conde, by the Cathedral and the Alcazar de Colon, and stopped for a beer at the legendary Café del Conde.

-Faji, -I was telling him- in France, there was the Negritude and in the United States the Harlem Reinassance. Both were international literary movements that brought together a way of speaking and thinking about the world. It gave authors and thinkers from Martinique, Senegal, Paris, Togo and Algeria a place in which to think about their identity. It was the same in the United States, Kenya, Nigeria, St. Lucia, Trinidad and Jamaica. Poets, novelists, Afro-diasporic philosophers and activists emerged everywhere, articulating another way of conceiving the rhythms of the word and of narrating reality. Nobel Prizes were awarded. Entire departments of Diasporic Studies, Africana Studies, were created. But in the Spanish language we remain mute. What is going on?

Fajardo is a man very critical of his own country and of the historical place it occupies in the world: formerly as a colonising empire, now as a neoliberal pickaxe under the cover of an Ibero-American brotherhood. After thinking about it for a while, he answered me:

-What is going on, my sister, is that in Spain we have been terrible and could not give our colonised countries the metropolis they deserved to enter Modernism. Paris was a conglomerative centre for the Caribbean and African diasporas. Likewise New York or London. France, England and the U.S. were late colonial empires. But in Spain and Portugal it was a different story.

- I interrupted him, -that "entering Modernism" is a very questionable aspiration, especially now that we know that Modernism is nothing more than an extension of colonisation.

-True, my dear, and also of sustained underdevelopment and European cultural supremacies.

-In Brazil and in the Portuguese language there was a whole aesthetic movement based on Afro-descent.

-Yes, but that was in Brazil. Portugal was lagging behind, plagued by border wars and internal dictators. The same in Spain; the Moorish queen. Madrid was never a mecca for the best thinkers in Latin America. Note that, during the boom, Paris was the main hub. And before that, with Rubén Darío too.

- Darío migrated to Argentina.

-That is true. But at the beginning of the 20th century, Spain was a nation preparing for a Civil War and then, like the good Latin American country that we are at heart, we lived through Franco's dictatorship. We could never have been an intellectual meeting point, neither for Latin American thought, nor for the emergence of an intellectual movement of Afro-descendants.

This conversation in the sister Republic took place in the face of my anxiety caused by the usual overview. Men, many male writers, have remained the protagonists of the intellectual debate in Ibero-America. They seem to be cut from the same cloth. White or mulatto, straight, between forty and fifty years old. Occasionally, though too rarely, there is someone who breaks the mould. But the epic discourses of war or violence, the treatment and description of countries submerged in corruption and primitivism continue to follow, novel after novel after novel. It is the discourse on the fall of "civilised" national utopias, the internal or external criticism of the libertarian projects of the guerrilla left, now in collusion with multinational capitalism or drug trafficking. The same novel, over and over again.

Perhaps it is because the reality of our countries has not changed much since the last century or because the pacification processes of an eternal revolution are just beginning to take place. Or it could be because the national discourses were founded in Our America by fathers of the fatherland; that is, by Creole patriarchs, heirs/reproducers of the colonial model, who inevitably refer to Eurocentric discourses that ignore other knowledge, other stories, other ways of using language to create what we call "literature."

 But the same question remains,  and with the same terrifying effect. What can a black Spanish-speaking writer do against this world? Or rather, what can a literate black woman do in the world? Where does she stand? What does she do with the rage that eats away at her when she is once again sidelined or used as a "literary" circus freak? What does she do with the shame she feels when the institutions of the countries that claim to be her nation of origin reproduce, award and export derivative novels that continue to revolve around the same axis, that of the definition of the racialised populations of Abya Yala as centres of crime, poverty, primitivism, witchcraft or underdevelopment? How can we consider writing without the support of cultural institutions or international literary critics who review the works of "Caribbean" or "Latin American" authors (all white-mixed race) who do not talk about race, who completely omit the subject, especially when they see how French or English-speaking cultural institutions do discuss and gradually integrate authors, readings, festivals, events and discussions of Afro-descendant authors?

They say that the flip side of rage is fear. Fear. That was my response to these questions. I was afraid. I saw myself alone in the landscape, insisting that I had things to say. I wrote novel after novel, anthology after anthology, book after book of short stories and poems. I was afraid, too, of being silent. In 20 years I published 27 books yet still felt that my place in the literary world was fragile, that it was easy to fall between the cracks of invisibility and that my voice would be silenced. I was very afraid. First and foremost, as a woman. I don't need to describe that fear. All women writers know that the Spanish-language publishing world is dominated by men and their idea of what "high literature" is. Secondly, because I was black, almost the only black woman at every fair, congress, meeting of women writers or literary festivals I visited. I found many allies, men and women of the most diverse nationalities and ethnicities who believed in my work, helping me find agents, international publishers, translators and further invitations to festivals. I have won ALL the awards and grants for intellectuals in the United States - my colonial metropolis and that of many new Afro/indo diasporic intellectuals in Latin America: the Ford, Mellon, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation - all of them! I recently won an award in France. But I am unable to overcome a siege that keeps Latin America as a satellite of the European metropolis and insists on lowering the volume or "exoticizing" the voice of Afro-descendant Native American women, that is, "racialised" women. We all know that race does not exist, that gender is, according to Butler, more choreography than nature. And yet these stories/ideologies/habits of thought remain the most effective narratives for exclusion on the planet.

It stands to reason that the response was, and remains, fear. I was afraid of becoming a "freak" specimen, similar to Saatje Bartman, the Hottentot Venus, a circus freak. Saatje spoke 7 languages, Dutch, French, English, Afrikaans, Portuguese, Xhosa, Zulu. Self-taught and a great reader, she lived in many countries where she was known; ah,the fame! Thousands of people came to admire her, to discover her mystery: her gigantic obsidian-colored buttocks. It was the nudity with which she was displayed that was the spectacle. Saatje Bartman was reduced to the spectacle of her body. What she might have thought, discussed and known went under the radar. When she died, her body was donated to the Musée de l'Homme in Paris -  the Musée de l'Homme, what an irony! There, they performed an autopsy and discovered something even more surprising about his body. Hidden deep in the folds of her flesh was a beautiful flowering vulva, with the external labia enlarged by the bondage system typical of her people, the Xhosa. A huge mouth that could not speak either. In 1992, after centuries of struggle led by Madiba, the great Mandela, Saatje's remains were returned to her native South Africa. At last she could rest in peace and cease to be a spectacle.
For years, the ghost of Saat-jee haunted me. It still haunts me. It creeps into my nightmares. Sometimes it takes the form of "Little Flower," the protagonist of Clarice Lispector's luminous short story. I have always thought that Clarice was inspired by Saatje to write it. Other times, my nightmare is in the form of Julia de Burgos, an ancestor of mine, one of the first Puerto Rican and Caribbean writers who assumed the identity of a black griffin. But Julia was split in two, on the one hand, she sang of the pain of being black, on the other, she assaulted African-Americans when she went to live in New York and called them savages.

The painful madness that was her life warned me that the path I had chosen was mined, full of traps that could destroy me. Julia, poor, peasant, mulatto, published a first book Poem of twenty furrows that she sold door to door all over the island to earn money for her mother's cancer medicine. Historians and critics have often narrated her story as a tragic love story. They told how Julia succumbed to alcoholism because she fell in love with a man who didn't value her. Value her?  She who was awarded the Instituto de Literatura  prize twice, once for essays and once for poetry. Chronicler, interviewer, nationalist leader, she ended up dying of pneumonia and without papers on 106th Street in Harlem. One of the most enlightened brains of Our America and, at the same time, one of the most dichotomous, confused and contradictory brains when trying to think of herself as a "literate black woman". Poor, peasant, mulatto, drunkard and with multiple lovers. I know the story by heart and in 2014 I wrote her biography, a book that caused a small scandal among the feminist and nationalist Caribbean elite. I received angry messages: "Why do you insist on narrating the  scandalous episodes of her life and contradictory thinking instead of focusing on the study of her poetry? You have done immense damage to your country," some said. I wrote that book and now I am in the process of writing another because Julia was always my model and my nightmare. There was no other woman in the whole Caribbean region during the first half of the 20th century who dared to be poor, black and a writer. And, for that reason, no one ever realized that Julia's great love was knowledge, the written word, and that she did not die of love, but of never having found her place in the world.

After Julia came the others: Virginia Brindis de Salas (Uruguay), Victoria Santa Cruz (Peru), Eulalia Berhard (Costa Rica), Concepcão Evaristo (Brazil), Georgina Herrera (Cuba), Chiqui Vicioso (Dominican Republic), Adelaida Fernández (Colombia), Mary Grueso (Colombia), Angelamaría Dávila (Puerto Rico), who died at the age of 63 of Alzheimer's disease. A collection had to be made to enable her to spend her last days in a nursing home. For those of us who were born at the end of the last century, the situation has been changing. Perhaps this new breed of black female intellectuals and writers, these impossible creature that are springing up everywhere in the contemporary panorama of Caribbean and Latin American letters, are beginning to mark the arrival of a new era . History will tell.

The only thing I know is that I am no longer so afraid to stand up and assume what I am, a black Caribbean and Latin American writer. No, that's not who I am. I am a "literate black woman", a woman who writes in the world, who rescues knowledge, narrates fissures in time, creates alliances with other thinkers in order to imagine a different world together. And today, I assume this vulnerability with courage. I dare more and more to give thanks for having the opportunity to walk this uncertain path, knowing it contains the of seeds of the future.