Layered on top, from another set of speakers, public service announcements wish happy birthday to the Señora Lopez Merino and play Pedro Infante’s mañanitas. Mass has been canceled so the local evangelical church blasts its sermons with the dawn. In between, when I am lucky, there is a momentary stillness, a place to appreciate where I am now, which is not where I have been. This is how I wake up: moving from the cacophony of my subconscious to the cacophony of a dirt road in rural Oaxaca.
There is less respite in the games of disassociation when you know what you’re playing. My insides twist every night with dreams I can hardly bring myself to remember-I was obliviously used to this before I started cultivating self-awareness, but it’s harder to bear now. I had thought that mornings in the country would be blessedly peaceful, but honestly it’s a racket: donkeys braying, roosters crowing, dogs barking in territorial choruses, so many birds singing you feel their raw joy at the miracle of the rising sun in your bones. I wake up early these days, a few minutes after the sun. Everything is change and everything ends, but can old things become new again?Ĭheck out Alaya Dawn Johnson, author of the acclaimed novel Trouble the Saints, and her essay below on publishing a novel for the first time in six years and writing about structural inequality, colorism, judicial and extra-judicial violence.
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