Bomba for Breonna Taylor: #NiUnaMas, #SayHerName, and Endurance
Sarah Bruno
If you can, please click the video while you read.
Nov 2019 in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
After the ruling in the wake of Breonna Taylor, I went to bomba dance class exhausted. My teacher from La Escuelita Bombera de Corazón said we were going to “dance for Breonna tonight,” and played a yubá. A yubá is a rhythm of depth--pain, veneration, rage, courage and war. It is a complicated rhythm representative of the complications of colonialism, antiblackness, and transnational identities most Afro-Puerto Ricans broker daily. Us dancing a yubá for Breonna with my bomba teacher in Chicago affirmed what I have known since I sought out to craft a temporally enduring cartography of feminine affect of Black Puerto Rican women; the embodied historical tradition of feeling and navigating colonial subjecthood lies in the traditions that act as a salve to a destierro, or a pain that aches beyond the geopolitical boundaries.
Puerto Rico is no stranger to the unjust murder of women at the hands of men drunk off state-sanctioned power guaranteed to them by a white supremacist and patriarchal system. #NiUnaMas is a hashtag call to declare a state of emergency in Puerto Rico. There, women are assaulted and murdered so often that local activists are calling it a state-sanctioned femicide. After the murder of Rosimar Rodriguez, protestors in Puerto Rico took to Old San Juan streets again. Meanwhile in the diaspora, the Summer ‘20 uprisings were occurring as people took to the streets in response to the murdering of Black Americans by the hands of the police at a rate of egregious normalcy.
That night in bomba I felt defeated and numb for Breonna. Of course, the justice system fails Black women. We live in a country where people in power refuse to renounce white supremacy. But, in that virtual batey, I saw Zoom squares flicker as my classmates and I readied ourselves with clenched jaws and determination to allow ourselves to feel, deal, and honor Breonna.
Nov. 2019 in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
Nothing was solved at the end of the yubá that night; I am not romanticizing or arguing bomba or music as a magical elixir that can solve white supremacy. But, I am arguing it is a balm that attends to the cost of an enduring and insufferable history of coloniality. The traditions that survived the plantation and exist in its wake are simultaneously the haunting and the blessing. These deeply emotional and affective practices are ones passed down through oral traditions and protected fiercely.
Some people might write dance off as “cute” or “just for fun,” but the last time Puerto Ricans from the island and diaspora came together to dance in front of the governor’s mansion, a governor was ousted. Bomba is the dance that helped enslaved people burn it to the ground and escape. This is the dance that stands amongst other Black dances that helped Black women, who endured unfathomable violence, make a home in an unwelcoming nation.
Bomba has a rich historical significance and holds narratives and places of a Black Puerto Rico that canonical Puerto Rican historical texts ignore. Nevertheless, bomba is still in the business of liberating, resisting, and uprising. This summer, I saw Chicago bomberxs answer a call to action during a moment where tensions in Chicago ran high and anger was being misplaced. As Black and Brown communities turned against each other, practitioners of Black Puerto Rican music used bomba to remind Chicagoans who the real perpetrators of violence in the city have been.
In the batey, virtual or not, we honor, we grieve, we heal. We honored Breonna that night. We honored ourselves by actively refusing numbness and allowing ourselves to feel. As we promenaded or did our paseo basico, we inevitably imagined our next steps. Therein lies why antiquated colonial powers policed bomba and practices like it. The creativity and bravery required to feel liberated enough to improvise from a vocabulary of figures and movements to the rhythm being played and feeling saturating the space is the same creativity that can imagine a solution. “To sing bomba you have to be a time traveler” is what one of my bomba teachers says, but if we can time travel as Lovecraft Country showed in episode 7, can’t we travel to the future we want? For me, pairing Lovecraft Country and Michelle Wright’s The Physics of Blackness together points to the batey as a site that disarticulates linear time. Similarly to Hippolyta and the machine she uses to travel across worlds and time, in the batey you can name and find yourself through movement and sound. Whereas Wright uses the concept of epiphenomenal time in the search for a model dexterious enough for blackness from a global perspective, I see bomba as a space where epiphenomenal time is not only enacted, but the batey and participants within it are dependent upon on it. So then, through the act of bombeando, can’t we name ourselves and our ancestors?
All around the imperial States, Black and Brown women are protesting, whether in the streets or not, our existence is the site of protest. But many people forget that protesting is also care work. That self care might be a return to art for art is a care that we can extend beyond ourselves and project to one another.
Most recently, the group, Plena Combativa dropped an album and I joked that I can’t listen to it too much or I might behave too radically. But, isn't that their point? Why does their anger and disavowal of corruption in the Puerto Rican government and reverence of Lolita Lebron ignite my soul? Or my friends’ souls? The transferral of emotions to a listener or observer, particularly “deviant” emotions, from the perspective of colonial authorities is exactly why musical practices like bomba were policed and stigmatized. In current discourses of letting institutions burn, perhaps music, dance, and bomba is where the proverbial fire starts, and it is in its spreading that makes room for a collective imagination to take place.
It is the daily practices, the old practices that have often been discarded or discounted as modern, that kept colonized subjects alive and helped them endure when only some subjects survive. Music is the fire that defends and honors who we could not protect, but now protect us. So, we bombear for Breonna.
