Bird of Paradise

by Raquel Cepeda

  The subject of identity in our community is such a complex issue that sometimes the only way to talk about it is through anecdotes. Here’s one of many Jorge will share with me, usually told in one or two long breaths. This one is about a young Dominican-American woman who visited the museum, claiming there were no Taínos left on the island.

  “So, my boss says to her, ‘Oh, really, because one of my employees is Taíno from the Dominican Republic,’ so naturally, she wanted to meet me. The first question she asked was, ‘How did you know that you were Taíno?’ And I replied, ‘Well, let me ask you, how did you know that you were Dominican? Did your parents sit you down one day [and tell you]? You come to your identity because of the cultural icons, the conversation . . . the intimate knowledge of the culture. Nobody has to tell you you’re Dominican, but you kind of realize very young and unconsciously that you’re Dominican, and that’s what you are.’ ”

  Jorge pauses to take a call, and then picks up where he left off without missing a beat. “Taínos themselves were mixed with other nations, the by-products of thousands of years of mixing and absorption,” he says. “If, by magic, you could take the Indian out of all things Dominican—be it language, genes, culture and customs, place-names, etc.—we would not be the same Dominicans. You can mix African and white in any combination, but Taíno is what makes us uniquely Dominican.” Someone could argue that if you take out the African or European, we would not be the same Dominicans, either. “But guess what,” he says. “We would still be indigenous [to the island].” The same could be said for Latinos throughout the Americas.

  “When the DNA studies and results were first divulged, the historians right away claimed, ‘Oh no, this is from Indians that they brought from outside.’ But most of the Indians that were brought to the Caribbean from North and South America and the Bahamas were male. And if you look at most of the logs of the slaves that were being transported . . . the majority of them were male.”

  All of the DNA studies performed in the Dominican Republic and the rest of the Caribbean have been mitochondrial in nature, tracing direct maternal ancestry. “And most of the findings have shown local mutations that don’t exist elsewhere,” Jorge says. “Therefore, the academic arguments are baseless.”

  “How about those people—and there are many—who say that if you recognize your Taíno ancestry or express a connection to it, you’re just denying your Blackness?” I ask.

  Jorge pauses, scanning his mental Rolodex for which personal anecdote to cull from. “I got into a discussion with a self-identified Afro-Dominican woman from New York who said that I was basically saying I was Indian because I didn’t want to be Black, which to me was very funny, because on my mother’s father’s side, we have Haitian ancestry. There is nothing prejudiced about us, but there is a difference between having blood of something and how you connected . . . so for somebody to tell me that, it’s like, ‘You don’t know who I am.’ ”

  Then there are people who don’t find Amerindian or Indigenous DNA, which doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t connected, at least spiritually. For one, they may not have tested the right line yet. “Right, and it’s happening to a lot of people,” Jorge says. “I have always told them that the connection to the Taíno is linguistic, spiritual, cultural, and biological. You could have all four, or you could only have one, but no matter who you are, if you’re from the Caribbean, you’re connected to the Taíno.”

  Jorge, eyeing the tattoos on my arms and wrist, turns the table on the interviewer and asks me a question: “Did you get that ink before or after your father’s mitochondrial results came in?”

  “Way before,” I say, tracing the image of Atabey on my right inner wrist. “I’ve been told all my life that I walked with una india, and I’ve felt her physical presence all these years, so I see these tattoos as my spiritual armor.”

  “Spiritual armor, spiritual armor,” he repeats, smiling. “It makes perfect sense.”

  * * *

  The last results are in from Family Tree DNA, containing the direct maternal ancestry of Dad’s paternal grandmother, Casilda. I want to see Dad’s face when I reveal what I’ve just learned.

  “Dad, meet me and Djali at the restaurant.”

  “Did you find out that I have a kid out there somewhere?”

  “No,” I respond, “I wouldn’t traumatize someone else with that knowledge.”

  When we arrive at the restaurant, I ask him, “Have you ever met Casilda’s mother or anyone else in her family?”

  “I told you, I don’ know too much of that stuff.”

  “Okay, well, her haplogroup is L1c1 and—”

  “What does that mean? Is he Finnish?” Alice asks. “I have a feeling he—”

  “Come on, dah’ling, chill out,” Dad yells. Alice laughs.

  “So Casilda’s direct maternal ancestry is in Central Africa.”

  Dad looks away, smiling. “I knew you wouldn’t stop until you placed me in Matanga,” he says, laughing, “but you know, I find all this berry interesting. I guess it’s true, somos una mescolanza.”

  “What happened to you when I was gone?”

  “Come on, chill out,” he says. When Dad learns a new phrase, he runs miles and miles with it. “Let me live.”

  I say nothing back. Our relationship, as delicate as it is, is better now than it ever was. It’s going to be decisively up to me to keep the eggshell from cracking.

  * * *

  It never fails. Every time I write about Latino-American identity, I receive a flood of emails and comments from folks all over the country who are ripe for introspection and who have wondered about their ancestry. Many have been mistaken for other ethnic groups and are often at odds with their parents and grandparents on the issue of race. Other readers have expressed disbelief about how misinformed mainstream America is on the diversity of Spanish-speaking people, considering how long we’ve been here. Aside from the racism one expects from anonymous postings online, many non-Latinos have expressed a desire to know more about what makes us us.

  One Facebook user wrote that he was born in California and raised in Colombia to Basque parents; his maternal great-grandparents had roots in Germany. When he moved back to the American South, people were amazed that a person of European descent could claim Spanish as a first language. Another first-generation Dominican reader—let’s call him Joselito—was “dumfounded” by the race question when he applied for a marriage license. “Here I am . . . with a lineage around the world,” he wrote, one parent claiming European ancestry and the other Middle Eastern and African. When he checked all the boxes, his application was returned. He could choose only one box, he was told. Jeff from New Jersey often wondered what the words “Latino” and “Hispanic” meant. An Italian-American, he considered himself Latino. Was he wrong?

  Other Latino-Americans around the country have embarked on their own genetic adventures.

  Ken Rodriguez, a New York City–born and Miami-based software trainer, recorded quite a few familial names going back two hundred years. While he knew little about his father’s ancestral origins, there were rumors of Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side. Already a practicing Jew when he took the test, Ken was eager to confirm with science what his soul already knew.

  “Concerning my Jewish ancestry, the rumors were confirmed. My maternal DNA is Semitic, originating in North Africa, with two confirmed Sephardic Jewish matches from two separate Jewish families,” he tells me. “Also exciting were my grandfather’s paternal results. He was a match for the Cohen Modal haplotype, meaning his direct ancestry was certainly Jewish and likely descends from the Jewish high priests who have a tradition of descending from Aaron, Moses’s brother.”

  In addition, Ken found one Amerindian and two Western European ancestral lineages. “In my opinion the biggest misconception is that Hispanic is a race in the first place. Hispanic people are generally a mix of different racial backgrounds. You can be White, Black, Asian, Amerindian, Jewish, and still be Hispa
nic,” he says, echoing a sentiment of many Latino-Americans. “What unites us is the Hispanic culture, not our race.”

  Leo Toro, a Puerto Rican–born and Brooklyn-bred architect, was always curious about his ancestral lineage despite knowing his immediate family history. His spirit compelled him to take an ancestral DNA test. “I always suspected that my lineage traveled through and around the Middle East—difficult to explain something like that, really,” he says. “But even as a child as young as eight, I wanted to go ‘back to Egypt,’ and indeed when I traveled there a few years ago, I joked that I was home.” Leo always knew that Puerto Ricans were racially mixed and culturally diverse. “But now I know that I also have DNA that traveled past Asia over frozen land bridges to North America. It’s a testament to the human condition, simply amazing.” And empowering.

  * * *

  I’m at dinner with a dear friend, a santero from Queens. He sees something I do not.

  “Raquel, you are lighting the path to your ancestors so brightly with this project of yours that one of them—maybe even one of your spiritual guides—may manifest in the form of a baby.”

  “A what?” I ask, shocked. Shortly after I suffered a miscarriage last year, my biological clock ran out of batteries. I started to feel like my baby-making days were pretty much over. The desire to change diapers now that my daughter was almost fifteen wasn’t at the top of my list. Plus, I’d been training every morning at the boxing gym and sparring regularly, hoping to land a fight in the masters’ division. “Yeah, I don’t think so,” I say, ordering another coconut mojito.

  “Some of our spiritual guides are from our previous incarnations,” my friend says, “and family eguns, or ancestors, are supposed to incarnate within the same family. It just may happen for you.”

  Months after that dinner, after being falsely diagnosed with “probable fibroids,” I find out I’m pregnant. In fact, I’m in the second trimester, although I haven’t had a single symptom. Sacha, who’s been at the gym training with me all these months, is initially stupefied, and Djali, slightly disgusted. I’m hopeful that the idea of a new brother or sister will grow on her.

  I wonder who this little person who chose me as a vessel is. I hope he or she won’t be as disappointed as I was with my choice in parents. My pregnancy makes me rethink the Kabbalistic concept of gilgul neshamot, or the cycling of souls, a term Bennett introduced me to earlier this year.

  * * *

  Maybe it’s about time I consult a rabbi.

  Thanks to the juice of a Hasidic hip-hop executive, I find myself sitting across from Rabbi Rav DovBer Pinson in his elegant Brooklyn dining room.

  Rabbi Pinson is like the Rakim of gilgul neshamot; he wrote the book on the subject. He’s a world-renowned spiritual teacher and the head of the Kabbalistic IYYUN Center for Jewish Spirituality in Brooklyn. I feel lucky that he made the time, albeit at midnight on a Sunday, to talk to me. I piqued his curiosity when I explained, via email, my unlikely path to self-discovery, and that something had compelled me to seek him out.

  Rabbi Pinson doesn’t have too much time, so we get right into it. “How exactly does gilgul neshamot work?” I ask.

  “The construct means every life we live is a new manifestation of a new reality. A new spiritual constitution arises and a very particular genetic code. The body that we possess throughout life is a direct reflection of our soul, which means our spiritual type,” the rabbi says. “And there is a consistency between the spiritual self, our soul, and the physical self, which is our manifestation.”

  Part of the process of gilgul neshamot is that every single person has a specific soul purpose consistent with his or her body. The body is the vehicle, or the medium through which we achieve our perfection, our tikkun. “Once we achieve our tikkun,” Rabbi Pinson says, “that part of our soul leaves the body understanding that its next stage is to develop the other areas.”

  Can this reincarnation of the Jewish soul be applied to other cultures and spiritual schools of thought?

  “I believe that it’s true cross-culturally,” Rabbi Pinson says.

  To my surprise, I learn that some Kabbalistic texts speak about the soul choosing to enter into a particular set of parents, family, and environment. We can even come back in clans where our children may have been our parents in a past life, and our parents, our siblings. Even our friends and close associates can reincarnate in subsequent lives to work something out.

  Naturally, I’m happy to claim all the wonderful things I’ve experienced in life as kismet. And naturally, I can’t believe that I intentionally chose Rocío and Dad as parents. Has every misstep and failure in life, the human suffering my eyes have recorded, all the mierda led me to this instant? The short answer is yes, of course. “Therefore, the fact that you were born to Dominican parents means something,” Rabbi Pinson says. “There’s something that you have to contribute to that culture or to articulate in some way—ignoring that would be denying a part of who you are.”

  Even the juncture in history and the zeitgeist we live in is something we choose, setting the scene for the spiritual fodder we need to grow and achieve deeper elevation of our souls. In each cycle, we carry traces of memory, including cultural traits. The things that come to us easily, our propensities, are carried on a deep subconscious level into our next life. There are no coincidences.

  It’s as if he’s reading my mind, anticipating my questions before I ask them. He reiterates something I’ve learned from the Dalai Lama. “And with that said, our adversaries are really our guides,” he says. “It works both ways, we’re always there to teach and to be taught.”

  It’s one o’clock in the morning, and Rabbi Pinson has to get back to work, but I can’t leave without getting his feedback on the marriage of science and mysticism as a road to self-discovery. My transnational identity may have been formed when I was a child growing up in New York City and Santo Domingo, but it was enhanced because of the synthesis between logos and mythos, science and mysticism. The science of ancestral DNA testing, combined with the mostly unsolicited spiritual information I’ve received in North and West Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, South America, and the United States, from all sorts of people from every imaginable walk of life, has been reaffirming.

  “I believe that’s the future,” Rabbi Pinson says. He thinks science will arrive at a place where we can realize there’s one fundamental force in the whole universe regardless of what we, as children of world, may call it. Like many of the seers and mystics I’ve met throughout my life so far, and people who’ve embarked on their own genetic and spiritual explorations, Rabbi Pinson believes that the union of the scientific and the mythos is a messianic vision.

  “It’s imminent,” I say, scanning through the last twelve months. If not for this genetic adventure, I doubt the universe would have rewarded me with the insight, the confirmation, that despite the obstacles, the winding roads, and the bullshit, I’m walking in the right direction and with the right people. This thing I am feeling, I’m almost certain, is the closest I’ll ever come to standing somewhere in between truth and reconciliation.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

  —MARGARET MEAD

  THE GIRLS START TRICKLING IN AFTER SCHOOL, OTHERS FROM home, some with their moms and siblings in tow. They look like me, like my daughter and her friends, like any other kid in our communities. They giggle, talk about boy drama, the latest dance craze and songs, and play the guessing game about the sex of my baby.

  The walls at Life is Precious, a suicide prevention program located in the Boogie Down Bronx, are covered with art. Some of the pieces are brightly colored affirmations like BE YOUR DREAM. Art supplies are strewn about the couch and community table. There are plastic bottles of glitter, markers, letter stickers, and all sorts of things that enable the girls here—all Latina-American teenagers—to express themselves.

  Sabrina, a Honduran and Ecuadorian fifteen-year-old
, places her sketchbook on the table in front of me. It’s the special one she usually keeps at home because of its size and weight. The first several pages feature self-portraits of her sitting under a fat rain cloud. Half of the book features dark drawings, the kind I imagine someone into Goth would sketch. The farther I get through the book, I can see the clouds starting to lift, the mood of the drawings shifting dramatically, evincing a sense of hope. Sabrina tells me that her life changed when she started coming to Life is Precious. She no longer feels alone or, as she says, “like an invisible person.”

  Something about Sabrina’s drawings reminds me of a set I saw on a wall several years ago at a tiny makeshift museum in Freetown, Sierra Leone. In a series of three simple self-portraits, a young boy sketched his life to date. The first drawing was of him and another boy playing in their village before the conflict. The second illustrated his playmate, now presumably a soldier, stabbing him in the head with a machete. His tears are drawn like huge raindrops pouring out of him. In the third and final sketch, the boy—whose brain, I was told, was severely damaged by the attack—shakes hands with the child who permanently injured him. Art was used in Sierra Leone, like it is here at the center, as a vehicle to exorcise the traumas experienced by life’s youngest victims, the children we keep failing over and over again.

  A cool three-dimensional mask superimposed with a Dominican flag is tacked up on a ledge in the office of my friend Beatriz Coronel, the center’s program coordinator. One of the pieces stands out more than the others, but for all the wrong reasons. It’s a self-portrait of a blond and blue-eyed white girl drawn by Priscilla, a Latina with a russet complexion and dark features.