Yael Valencia Aldana
Age: 54. Residence: San Diego, California. Book: Black Mestiza (University Press of Kentucky, January 2025), a poetry collection that reckons with the nuances of being multiracial, honoring matriarchal lineages and origins while parsing identity and history. Agent: None. Editor: Margaret Kelly.
The route to my debut poetry collection, Black Mestiza, was long, winding, and unexpected. It started with a DNA test when I was forty-four. I was adopted as a child, and my blood origins have always been murky, laced with rumors. The most startling result leapt from my computer screen—Maternal Line: Indigenous, origin Colombia. My life pivoted in that moment.
I dove into a rabbit hole looking for these Colombian relatives and I found one, my maternal grandmother, Carmen Sofia Aldana Valencia. I wrote my first real poem in years as I looked for her. I prayed I would find her before she died, but I was too late. She passed a decade before I knew she existed. But I found other relatives, and their blood was also her blood.
I became obsessed with my grandmother and her life story. At twenty-two she migrated from a small Colombian town to the English-speaking Caribbean. Why? No one knew. But I wanted to know. I wanted to tell her story, so I found myself in an MFA program at forty-eight, starting over. I was very aware I would graduate in my early fifties and have to fight the built-in “has-been” status that society places on individuals past a certain age, but I was determined to share and honor my grandmother’s journey.
In my program I was a struggling nonfiction major. But then there was poetry. I have been writing poems for thirty years, since I worked at the Strand bookstore in New York City, slinking around the stacks with Margaret Atwood’s Two-Headed Poems (Oxford University Press, 1978) in hand. I had notebooks filled with what I thought was bad poetry. I wrote for the secret joy of words undulating against each other. During my MFA, I begged my way into every possible poetry class. Not to become a poet—as I was sure I would never be one—but for the freedom of expression, the freedom from expectations.
While my grandmother continued to find her way into my poems, I was also dealing with my adopted mother’s death. Though my younger classmates didn’t understand why I was writing about old, now dead, women, while doing so I naturally started accumulating poems. Then one of my superstar poetry professors casually said to me, “You know, you should go for Cave Canem’s Derricotte/Eady Chapbook Prize.”
I am sure he immediately forgot what he said, but I tucked that statement in my pocket. I submitted to the Cave Canem contest and didn’t win, but that experience sparked something in me. Stories and moments that I was trying to understand and write about for years finally found a home in golden shovels, abecedarians, ghazals, pantoums. Later, when I thought I had a full-length manuscript, I sent it out. After four months I was shocked and thrilled to find out that my collection was chosen as part of the University Press of Kentucky New Poetry & Prose Series out of nearly six hundred submissions. And I was even more astonished to win a Pushcart Prize shortly thereafter.
Women like my adopted mother and grandmother were wedded to raising children and handling chores. When they passed from this world, many of their stories died with them. I had to make it as a writer to share the wonder of my foremothers, who were just “ordinary women” to most people but to me lived extraordinary lives. Black Mestiza is for them, and for any writer who feels a distinct focus on youth in the industry, and the message that they might already be past their prime, that they might not make it. It’s never too late to tell the story of you and your people.
An excerpt from Black Mestiza
Talisman
I made a new talisman that is both necklace and conjuring.
It is of you, and of them, and of me
Your initials in scrolled shiny silver rests on my neck.
My Mother,
your name means blood, namesake, origins.
We are of the Caribbean
our names mean salt water in the veins,
buried navel strings.
You are recently dead.
And what of them?
Ancestors,
the word means namesakes, origins, blood,
means nothing is lost
means the Western World, means The New World
which was not new,
because people were already there.
They have been dead
dead for centuries
dragged to the bottom of the sea
on the middle passage in chains
dragged to the bottom of the sea
for Gold
for Silver
on the galleon La Nuestra Señora de Atocha
on the Guineamen the Hannibal
dragged out of the green domed
mountains of Santa Marta, Colombia
before it was Santa Marta
before it was Colombia.
I wear their coin around my neck next to your initials
A coin dredged from their island under the sea,
waterlogged graveyard of Colombian Gold
of Caribbean Silver
I wear their coin for ancestors who slipped past conquistador steel
to peer gold rimmed around narrow slopped Santa Marta peaks
for the ones that got caught and broke under Spanish yokes
under British yokes.
I wear their coin for the ones doing the catching
for those that came from Scotland with money
for those that came from Aldana, Spain, for money
for those that came from Valencia, Spain, for money
Their riches dragged down into shipwrecked soaked sodden sands
lost before reaching Spanish coffers
before reaching English coffers
for me to find and put around my neck.
Mother, no men stay in our family
they keep on going leaving beautiful dusky sometimes dark
skinned sometimes half-caste children in their wake.
All of you
curl in my ear,
I will carry you.
Sleep in my Mestiza’s body,
Lay aside the violence that forged this body
my body
Lay inside my shell of soul and flesh
We are all in here together
distilled into this one casing of corpuscles.
Sleep in my husk of flesh and soul
I will carry you.
Amado de mi Alma
Give me this
—Ada Limón
If there was a pill, maybe red, liquid, thin,
rubbered membrane, or maybe orange, oval,
and smooth, or maybe white and chalky
that would sever the nexus between us,
I would throw it down my moist peached
maw. He too, would pinch it between his
potato farmer fingers, muscle it dry across
his tongue, sideways down his throat. Greedily,
take it to be rid of me. We are all eye rolling,
all lip curling, sneering resistance to any,
to all peace. We cannot stand each other.
But we love each other. In this quiet, his dry
warm skin becomes mine. When in proximity
his chest opens, a galaxy. My universe spins
into his. All hot plasma. We are luminous
gas giants winking on and off, moving past
moving into one darkness.
lighted cold fusion.
He purses his lips as if to say no, we cannot
escape this gravity. I point with my chin
as if to say yes, we have lured each other here.
He lifts his dark-dark eyes to mine, as if to say,
No, we cannot escape this singularity.
Aldana, Yael Valencia. “Talisman,” “Amado de mi Alma” in Black Mestiza: Poems. © 2024 The University Press of Kentucky. Used by permission.
