By Erika Morillo
At once, on the first page of his beautiful essay collection, Roberto Carlos Garcia immerses us in the racial complexities he’s had to navigate as a Black person in America. As a child of Dominican immigrants, he recounts how the parents of a newfound white friend didn’t allow him to visit Garcia at home due to him being Black. Garcia’s grandmother, in turn, allowed her grandson to visit his friend after deeming him safe due to his blond, blue-eyed appearance.
Later, when Garcia becomes friends with a Black kid at school, the boy’s family doesn’t let him visit Garcia because he is “Puerto Rican,” and Garcia’s grandmother doesn’t let him visit his friend because the boy is Black.
This racial labyrinth is distilled by the author in the following passage:
I’m Black in a country that, by all indications, hates Black people, and I’m descended from people who are Black but pretend not to be Black.
Out now from Curbstone Books, Traveling Freely is divided into two parts, The Diaspora and This is America. In the first essay, black / Maybe, Garcia weaves the complex racial and political history of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, as they transitioned from colonies to independent nations, while elucidating the legacy of colonization on the psyche and body of Dominicans. He dispels long-held myths against Haiti, criticizes the racial and historical ignorance of his parent’s generation, and instructs the reader, point blank, to examine their history, and if they’re white, to put their privilege to work. This first essay introduces some of the most vital information Dominicans should know about their history, and Garcia’s voice conveys that urgency.
This urgency becomes amplified in the following essay, So, You’re Afro-Latinx. Now What?, where the writing becomes instructional, a how-to guide that resists the often commodified idea of wokeness. Instead, the author shares possibilities that can help Afro-Latinx not rely on the gimmicky label and focus on the deep work of knowing their history, and how the ripples of colonialism still reside in their bodies. He is intentional and direct in his instructions that Blacks of Caribbean descent should educate themselves, going as far as including a reader with seminal documentaries and texts that touch upon race.
There is an undercurrent of anger running through this essay, a voice that calls out: it should not be my job to educate you about yourself and your history. Its bluntness also hints at Garcia’s admiration of the late writer Amiri Baraka, to whom he dedicated an essay later in this collection:
I needed the anger I found in Baraka’s poems. I still need anger at racial injustice, economic disparity and willful ignorance.
Garcia shares his outrage against the horrors of a violent, capitalist society by asking us to examine the existential fragile aspects of our lives.
As the essays unfold, parallels emerge about the vulnerable position of Black bodies within the Caribbean and American historical contexts. The powerful juxtaposition of the Black experience of Haitians on the island vs. the Black experience in America. Garcia surveys and condemns the horrors Black bodies have been subjected to, from the Parsley Massacre in 1937 where tens of thousands of Haitians were killed on the island by the Trujillo dictatorship due to their blackness, to what he describes as “The American theater of death porn” in the United States — the destruction of the Black body.
There is a breadth of subjects covered in these essays — racial hostility, religion, state violence, the destruction of neighborhoods due to gentrification — a deconstructing of elements we should examine to resist capitalism and racism, all the suffocating isms that create and perpetuate violence. Garcia is ambitious in his scope and has a wide, well-researched historical lens. But in this book, his writing becomes the most powerful when he gets granular. Some of the most poignant moments in the essay collection are when the author backtracks to his roots, to the neighborhoods of his youth to recall how social and racial landscapes shaped the man he is today.
In one of the most powerful essays in the collection, Home: An Irrevocable Condition, from his home in the suburbs, he reflects on the shortcomings of this new locus. In the suburbs, he is othered, his neighbors pointing out the things about his home’s appearance that threaten the orderly homogeneity of the neighborhood. All the more deafening against his evocative prose describing his old neighborhood:
The housing projects were a never-ending parade of bricks — warm and cozy in the winter, warm and cozy in the summer, and every season in between. Our faces began to resemble bricks…I’d move along the garbage-riddled streets to my hole-in-the-wall, the working man’s jackpot. When the beer ran out, I ran to the bodega. I can still hear merengue, bachata, salsa, and love ballads played over the sound of the deli meat slicer.
However, Garcia isn’t wearing rose-colored glasses. He also candidly describes the violence in the neighborhood that claimed the lives of countless people, including one of his friends, which complicates the disdain he feels for the sterile predictability of his new surroundings:
This is the violence nobody was used to, but we learned to expect it. I never lived there. I survived there.
The line that follows this, “I live in the suburbs now,” is repeated four times in the short essay, which feels like a mantra. An acceptance of the inevitability of change that gives room for the contradictions in his life:
I live in the suburbs now, myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from myself.
So, what does he propose we do to address our most intimate contradictions? He explores Audre Lorde’s notion of the erotic, understood as a possible avenue for connecting with a vulnerability attuned to our creative impulses. He examines toxic masculinity in society and in his own life, and also encourages an exploration of how fatherhood holds a mirror. With compelling honesty, he examines how his upbringing and culture — so centered in the image of the stoic powerful male — created certain struggles in his parenting of his son, and how it took time and practice to let him be vulnerable, an opportunity Garcia never had as a child.
As the book progresses, it becomes increasingly existential. It ponders on the different selves the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa created in his literature, a plurality of voices and experiences he embraced. Similarly, Garcia encourages us to integrate all the fragments left after the brutality of history and the demands of a capitalist society soften their grip.
This short collection of essays packs a punch, leaving no stone unturned about what is killing us. In the last essay of the book, a devastating and moving piece on Anthony Bourdain and the topic of suicide, the ethos of the book is clarified. Bourdain, who battled with depression and committed suicide in 2018, is best known for his travels exploring the underbelly —communities often misunderstood or faced with economic and social disadvantages.
As Garcia describes some of the most compelling episodes in Bourdain’s beloved show, Parts Unknown, the author depicts both a man alone against breathtaking landscapes and within vivid moments with locals over shared meals and unrushed walks. True presence and human connection emerge like the powerful antidote to our most intimate maladies, a way to free ourselves from the grip of savage capitalism.
But Garcia also understands that this is not enough. “Nothing exists in Freedom but the emptiness of your essential nature, that empty stage,” he writes, pointing out that true liberation from oppressive forces — outside and inside ourselves — can only come when we sit with the darkest corners of our experience.
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Visit our shop to purchase a copy of Traveling Freely: Essays.
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About the Author: Roberto Carlos Garcia is the author of several books, including What Can I Tell You? Selected Poems, as well as the founder of Get Fresh Books Publishing, a literary nonprofit. The recipient of a 2023 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, he writes about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-diasporic experience. His work has been published in Poetry Magazine, NACLA, The Root, Poets & Writers, and the anthology BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, among others.
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Erika Morillo is a photographer and writer born in the Dominican Republic. She lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.
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