In his essay, "The Hour of Poetry," John Berger states that the labor of poetry is "to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart." He goes on to clarify that "Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered." My paper probes Berger's claim through a reading of Juana Goergen's poetry collection, Mar en los huesos (Sea in my bones). The fourth collection in this Puerto Rican poet's rich trajectory, Mar en los huesos bears witness to a shared collective experience, interweaving indigenous, colonial, and African belief systems, languages, and memories in its recovery of the Caribbean's ancestral past and in its imagination of the future. As all memory narratives, Mar en los huesos simultaneously speaks to the broken present. Its cry against injustice rests on the hope that through this labor of memory, "the Zemies might awaken and the Caribbean peoples' origin be remembered." A multilingual tour de force that slips between Spanish, Taino, and Yoruba, Goergen's deployment of the poem as trace, as evidence, results in a cacophony of voices that, indeed, bring together what life has torn apart. At the same time, her work poses questions for memory scholars like me about the role of poetry in communities that have survived collective trauma. In the absence of justice can the poetry of witness serve as a form of restitution? Or does it hold the promise of something else?
