edited by Sean Enfield
Today’s featured poet knows how to get an audience on their feet. During her first Spiderweb set, at this year’s Winter Formal, Anjelica Fraga had the crowd cheering with a timely poem for the #metoo era. Recently, she brought a similar intensity to our Radio Poets Live showcase, which also served as a fundraiser for RAICES at Paschall Bar. We’re excited to bring you that poem, “Brown Girl,” today.
“Brown Girl” is reflective of a poet who is herself very active in her community. Anjelica volunteers and works with a number of local organizations. From 2014-2018, she served as a monologist and eventually a producer for Denton’s Vagina Monologues, and is currently serving on the steering committee for OUTReach Denton and as a copy editor for The Dentonite. When asked why she wrote the poem, Anjelica said,
The idea for this piece came to me while I was working on something else in preparation to record for KUZU at the beginning of May. That day I wrote a small amount, maybe 12 lines. With Central Americans being so visible in the mainstream media right now, everything about my identity feels vulnerable and exposed because my family emigrated here from Guatemala, and the stories of those children stirred up a lot of emotions that I needed to unpack.
Indeed, the poem crafts a strong, hopeful, and even inspiring identity for the so-called “marginalized.” It’s just the right poem these trying times. You can read it below! Spiderweb also recorded the piece for KUZU’s Brains of Paradise, and you can listen to it as well as the others in our On the Air series.
Anjelica also views “Brown Girl” as something of a call-to-action as well. “My piece touches on the hope that people will vote and not just share images on Facebook,” she writes, “but I want to remind people that direct action is what matters right now. Donate money, your time, or your labor to organizations involved in reuniting families.” If you’re so inspired, join Anjelica as she volunteers at Denton Votes! with The Dentonite to register voters later this month.
Brown Girl
Brown girl, today you are exhausted
Weighed down by the trauma of resistance
Today you are forgetting what you have to offer the world
The burden your ancestors carried to ensure you matter
Today you must remember that our success does not have to be measured
By how gracefully you endure being told you do not belong
Being told to get out of the country you call home
Being made to feel like “other”
Because resilience is your birthright
Brown girl Indigenous
Brown girl European
Brown girl African
Brown girl everything
Brown girl nothing?
Brown girl always in the middle of an identity crisis
Brown girl always worrying that she isn’t Brown enough
Brown girl just trying to keep her head above water in a sea of whiteness
Brown girl unafraid to correct people’s pronunciation of her name
Brown girl, you are on the precipice of a genocide against your people
And a choice between a tradition that taught you obedience, and respect, and subservience
Or becoming the loudest most taking up the most space radical in the name of survival
Brown girl activist
Brown girl revolutionary
Brown girl senator
Brown girl President
Brown girl knowing that they will not stop at those they deem “illegal”
And hoping Facebook activists who share images of caged girls who look like her but don’t vote or call their senators realize how harmful their inaction could be for my community
Brown girl today you are exhausted
Weighed down by the knowledge of what is to come
Brown girl, today I remind you that you owe no one civility
Because no oppressed group in history has been handed liberation or equality by simply saying “Please”
Today you must remember that our success does not have to be measured
By how gracefully you endure being told you do not belong
Being told to get out of the country you call home
Being made to feel like “other”
Because resilience is your birthright
Brown girl, today I remind you that your sun soaked skin
Is Divine
Anjelica Fraga graduated from Texas Woman's University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English with a minor in Women Studies and is now employed by the university. She is a poet, copy edits for The Dentonite, and is on the steering committee for OUTReach Denton. She moved from Dallas, TX to Denton in 2012, and currently lives with her fiance, their two cats, Ollivander and Suki, and their dog, Bing Crosby.
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Anjelica Fraga at the Spiderweb Salon 2018 Winter Formal | photo by Leah Jones