Si Solo Tu Supiera’

From my twelfth-floor apartment in the Manhattanville Projects, I look down at the valley that constitutes the 125th Street Fault and the trestle that supports the 1 Train. The fault line and the trestle symbolize a fracture in the continuity of Harlem on the y-axis of Broadway separating the newly constructed Columbia University Manhattanville Campus from the Manhattanville Projects and the General Grant Houses. This fracture is exacerbated by the physical geographic feature of the fault, the man-made trestle, as well as a division that was drawn by Columbia University and its disruption of the justice system that had existed in the neighborhood beforehand. The carceral justice system put in place by Columbia University precipitated the largest “gang-raid” in New York City history resulting in the indictment of 103 people. The retaliatory justice system that had existed previously created a second division on the x-axis of 125th Street—shutting me off from my friends in the General Grant Houses eventually creating animosity between us. Untitled (Manhattanville Projects from 1 Train Platform) shows us the austere facade of my building and the other buildings in the development stripping away any allusions to the magic, poverty, or violence, experienced there.

***

Forty-Five Minutes from my grandma’s house in Aminilla, Santiago Rodriguez, Dominican Republic is Rio Dajabon (also known as Rio Masacre) which constitutes the northernmost part of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The same river that Amabelle’s parents died trying to cross in Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones. The same river where the ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of Haitian migrants occurred between October 2nd-October 8th 1937. This physical geographic feature has as much blood on its hands as the sidewalk below the trestle of the 1 train platform on 125th. The day I mentioned to my uncle that I wanted to travel to Rio Dajabon,Jovenel Moïse was murdered in his home in cold blood. That night the news broke, a family friend, Ely, and I set out and had a 45 minute recorded conversation—that has since been lost from an inexplicable liquid that dissolved the conversations into purely memory—culminating in Ely momentarily convincing me Jovenel Moïse’s security was in on it. However, the portrait I made of Ely, Untitled (Ely Fenelus), will immortalize that conversation serving as an allusion of him in his “power stance” as President Moïse and the shadow, cast from the flash, creeping upon him from the depths of the land filled with sugarcane as his murderer.