Yael Valencia Aldana’s Debut Poetry Collection Explores Mixed Heritage & the Complexity of Identity

Yael Valencia Aldana is a Caribbean Afro-Latinx poet of Indigenous, Black, and European descent who often writes about grief, heritage, belonging, and identity in her work. In January, she published her debut full-length collection, Black Mestiza. The collection reckons with her multifaceted identities and pays homage to her ancestors’ legacy, resilience, and fortitude. From a poem about how Black people silently yet soulfully acknowledge and see each other, to a poem about the suffering that women of color endure, to works about her Caribbean parents and her longing for connection with her Colombian grandmother, this is a collection encompasses the multitudes of being a mixed-race woman honoring her culture and roots.

“Poetry has always been a physical manifestation of what I feel. It’s easier to understand my feelings to physically see them somewhere,” Aldana tells HipLatina. “It’s like I’m looking at somebody else because I can clearly see my emotions. Like, ‘Okay, that makes sense because you lost your mom. You had a very small child at a moment when you were very conflicted and there were a lot of things going on.’ I understand that process now. So when I write about things, I’m less tense because I know it’s going to be a form of exploration. The emotions are going to come out in and be processed as a write. Not everything gets a tidy bow but it’s helpful to live with difficult things by writing about them.”

Born in Trinidad and Tobago, Aldana moved with her family to the neighboring island of Barbados when she was still young. Later, she moved to Brooklyn as a teenager and attended Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts when she was only sixteen years old. It was there that she first fell in love with poetry, and more specifically with Margaret Atwood’s poetry. It felt “bizarre” and “strange” to her and yet it gave her the courage she needed to be just as unpredictable and “weird” in her own work.

“I was inspired but I did not take it seriously. I would fill up my notebooks and just put it aside. I didn’t even show anybody. I just enjoyed it,” she explains.

Still, though no one knew about it, she continued to write: about her life, what she knew, what she saw of her world in Brooklyn. It wouldn’t be until five years later when she was in grad school that she got the courage to show her work to mentors and ask for advice, as well as validation. To her surprise, she got positive feedback from her mentors about her poem, including one entitled “Small Dark and Moving.” Written over thirty years ago, it’s one of the many older poems to make it into her debut collection, a testament to the power and longevity of her work. To be sure, it is a “strange” piece, where Aldana imagines herself as a fish that never seems to stop swimming: “I move in waves / I am / I am moving rippling / hump my back hump.” There’s a quiet sensuality and urgency in the undercurrent of the piece, where she’s truly embracing herself as a new kind of being that can’t be explained or captured.

However, her career at this point almost ended before it even really began. An established poet that she respected and looked up to, whom she almost considered a mentor of sorts, asked her to send over samples of her work because there was a possibility that this poet would be able to publish it in the journal she worked for. With the help of a mentor and a few friends, she put together a portfolio of some of her best work. The response she received was unlike any other she’d received before.

“She basically trashed my poetry. She said I needed to stop writing these Harlequin romance type of poems,” Aldana says. “I was devastated and I ugly cried for two days. I said, ‘I’m not gonna write poetry anymore.’ But my friends and my community pulled me out of that. Because she could’ve said that she didn’t think my poems were ready yet or that they needed more work. She didn’t have to be like that.”

One of her friends encouraged her to send the poems out, even though her confidence was at an all-time low. But without that support network, she wouldn’t have gone on to send out her poems or had two poems accepted for publication by a journal within two days of her submitting. It became clear then that there was an audience, a desire, and a need for her work.

Interestingly, Black Mestiza was not conceptualized as a collection surrounding a single theme or message. In fact, it wasn’t conceptualized as a collection at all. All she knew when she was writing these poems in undergrad and grad school was that she loved writing poetry. In fact, in grad school, she was enrolled in a nonfiction MFA program. But because they allowed her to take classes in multiple genres, she was able to take poetry classes and became really invested in her poems when she began writing about her mother, who passed away 18 years ago. Suddenly, her work gained new life and urgency, which even her professor noticed.

“For the rest of that class, I wrote poems about her. It helped me to process the unprocessed feelings of grief I had for her passing because she was a very powerful person,” she says. “So I kept writing and I wasn’t aware of of how poems I had that were done and could become something until my mentors suggested I submit to a chapbook contest.”

The manuscript she put together for the contest, which was for emerging writers over 50, was all about about her mom, people she’d known, her experiences being Afro-Latina in the U.S. Even though she knew it wasn’t ready, even though she knew there was a whole section that didn’t blong, she submitted and ended up being recognized as a semi-finalist six months later.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “You do things and on one hand, you think, ‘Oh, I could win.’ But when you know anything could happen, you’re shocked because you also think you won’t. That’s when I knew that was something here because the manuscript wasn’t ready and it still placed.”

One section that she knew didn’t fit into the over collection ended up becoming her first poetry chapbook entitled Alien(s) after her ex-husband whose nickname was Alien (his given name is Alan). Unlike a full-length collection, a chapbook can range anywhere from 20-40 pages and usually focuses on a singular narrative or theme. For Aldana, the 24-page project is in many ways a remembrance of many relationships, including the one with her ex, as well as with a former boyfriend. She wanted to be a time capsule of relationships from her past, romantic, platonic, and everything in between, with her marriage as the centerpiece.

“When I was writing that collection, I knew I wasn’t who I wanted to be in that moment, so a lot of the poems are a backhanded apology to him,” she explains. “I was saying, ‘I wasn’t a great person and I wasn’t great for you, but this is where we were and we did our best at the time.’ But that’s one of the great things about being a writer. When you sit and process, you’re able to acknowledge and preserve the moment for what it was, and move on from it.”

Written and arranged in 2021, it would later be accepted and published in 2023 by Bottlecap Press, setting the stage for Black Mestiza.

For a collection that was more than double the page count of Alien(s), it was obvious that her debut full-length would need a different approach. Because she’d already written and published a chapbook – which was actually taken from one of the sections in her original full-length manuscript – and had taken a class about manuscript structure, she already had a strong understanding of how a collection of work should fit together. She says she learned that “a collection is a whole body,” separate parts that together tell a larger narrative or story arc.

“I knew that those relationship poems did not belong in that other collection. That’s the first step in understanding what what you want your full length collection to look like, knowing what doesn’t belong in there even though they’re great poems. I always say that’s why it was picked up so quickly because I really thought about how everything went together as a whole, not just as individual poems. It has to go together and have a narrative thread with a beginning, middle, and end, something that readers can follow so that they will read it.”

For her, the narrative thread was grounded in explorations about her ethnicity, origins, and family history. As a person of Indigenous Colombian, African, Scottish, and Spanish descent, it can be quite a complicated place to occupy, being made of up so many different bloodlines. Throughout the collection, such as an the titular piece, “Black Mestiza,” she recreates an interaction with “a girl…sure of her black wavy haired Latina cred” who tells her that “Mestizas are not Black” and invalidates her identity despite both women being of Colombian descent. It goes to show how little understanding there is surrounding multi-racial experiences, how much blatant ignorance there continues to be about Latin America’s complex history, including the enslavement of both African and Indigenous communities. How could Black Mestizas not exist? Aldana seems to ask.

Once the manuscript was done, she made intentional decisions about where she sent her work to. She was wary of contests now because there could really only be one winner. With an open reading period, where there is no contest element, she thought there were lower stakes and a greater chance of being selected for publication. Three months after she began to submit the collection out to presses, she ended up being accepted by two and receiving one prize from the University Press of Kentucky for its New Poetry & Prose Series.

In all of her work, Aldana embraces the complexities of her identities, her family history, and her life, almost creating a mythical version of herself in her work where she’s allowed to be strange and knows she would never diminish herself or leave out parts of her past just to make other people comfortable. If anything, writing is where we become truly free. She notes:

 ”It’s okay to be a very unique, unusual person because there are other people like you, and you have every right to be in this world as anybody else. As an Afro-Latina who lost my Spanish, I’m struggling on the Spanglish bus here. I felt like I was an anomaly and there was no one was like me. I had this weird little book that no one would understand. But this book has resonated with so many people, whether it’s people who are also Afro-Latina or someone whose mother’s ill. Mothers, fathers, people in relationships, it’s found such an audience and I’m shocked because I feel like a very specific weirdo. I learned that you’re not alone. We’re all unique. We can all learn from each other. There’s someone out there who’s healing is going to start with your words, so get your words out there.”