Yaknel Elorza is a Venezuelan writer and poet whose work explores themes of identity, queerness, and migration. The following text is a declaration against the unspoken contracts of cultural assimilation—a manifesto woven in resistance to the constraints of external foreign validation and the colonial gaze. Through prose that transcends linguistic boundaries, Yaknel captures the dislocation of diaspora and the labor of self-definition. This work does not wish to invite empathy—rather, it aims to reclaim a voice long submerged by colonial paradigms. Her words remind us that identity is not granted by institutions or confined by translation. It is crafted in the silence of exile, fortified by memory, and defended by a commitment to self-authorship.
An obligation disguised as an invitation, camouflaging old patterns. Cultural reciprocity does not go hand in hand; rather, they are accompanied by shackles, invisible but palpable, as the chains I drag with me rattle, and the echo of your despotism is heard whispering to me with a smile, “Where are you from?”
I am an exotic fetish, el tumbao that removes your mask, the resource that brings light to a world empty of feeling, the tempest that disowns control and with lightning imposes its nature. The roar of my voice is the catharsis of the soil watered with the blood of greed. I am all that I refuse to forget; to find you, I annihilate with my eyes your desires to appease my expansion.
I carry el tumbao that life gave me, life lived, the one that slaps you with aversion or sometimes with urges to move on.
Egal wie viel Deutsch du sprichst, o que tan perfecta la fonètica del català surti de la teva boca, your tone of voice is uncomfortable, the complexion of your skin does not look rotten in color, and the shyness of feeling inferior is nonexistent melodia portuguesa gruda en você.
Who do I invoke but myself, so that with the anger of uprooting, I can endorse the nausea of perpetually questioning my identity?
Every day the dispute of being your true self. Always “the other.”
A jumble of words and meanings was eating away at my essence little by little, quiet as dust resting on the shelf; my speech became cloudy.
I was losing coherence in my sentences, I was unable to make sense of the expression. In the loss of my being, I babbled contradiction, drugged with information. You wear me out like a drop that patiently eats away the stone, and I suck my fingers to clean the guava nectar that moisturizes my skin.
I construct diverse identities, kneading the mud that plugs my holes; the only place I belong is to me. The betrayal of granting validation in the hands of strangers, of that insecure exterior. It takes momentum, discipline, courage and irreverence to accept every grandiose gesture, every latent failure, as the spirit painfully passes away.
You have to go a long way to reach the simplicity of being. Migrate, explore, flee from the naive look, eager to experiment. From the genuine exercise, the ritualistic confrontation.
What I build with these hands embraces my becoming.
Winter scratches me while your ignorant repetitive babbling dies of spirit. Let me pour myself a Santa Teresa, neat, on the rocks, to start at the beginning, where I don’t want to quote anyone else but myself.
I ran out from the pseudo socialism that left me without water,
without light, with an empty supermarket, with a broken heart.
The fragmented souls of friends scattered around the world
left me floating in tears, where I’ve been sailing aimlessly.
I watch her bleed of rootedness, from exile, where the only longing is to return to her; time slips away in the infinitive verb.
Slowly it empties; we all want it to be filled.
I want to lick its entrails to smear myself with its odor. I charge the putrid air of hope as she combs my hair with flashes of lucidity. I embrace her absence, I want to kiss her, but she only whispers to me, “One more day… just one more day.”
I am reborn every day to be irreverently me, the diluted me.
Eu não quero citar ninguém além de mi, the social structure is unhealthily designed to distrust ourselves, our intuition. To acquire knowledge, we have to rigidly walk along the path laid out. Obtaining external validation takes us away from a space of curiosity and exploration, and we enter a normalized prison, beyond limiting life and perspectives. We develop in a limiting terrain the asphyxia of intuition; we develop by disconnecting ourselves from the first reliable guide: ourselves.
Each consultation with the inner wisdom—not only the one that gives you life, but the ancestors, the community, your people—you ignore it, you distrust and question, you bring to judgment what will never ever fail you, what wants and knows what is best for you.
These intrinsic structures, which we no longer even question, support a discriminatory, racist, and privileged system, which like a monster, infects the collective subconscious. One is, when one is validated by an institution; one is accepted when one is approved and by default, normalized. The most worrying aspect of this dynamic is the systematized loss of authenticity, of the individual’s quest for full freedom.
It cannot be explained, nor should it be, when the Yanomamis cut a tree branch that, upon contact with the river water, activates a chemical reaction where it separates the oxygen from the hydrogen, leaving the fish around it suffocated and floating lifeless, available for the Yanomamis to consume. How did they arrive at such a hunting practice, without apparent effort, only using the natural resources available? The answer does not matter; it has no relevance whatsoever.
Perhaps it was information downloaded from the Universe while Rape was snuff,— a time when the bleached world needed explanations for everything—scientific methods, protocols, and paraphernalia that now feel relevant. It is necessary to give light to the indigenous technology, just letting it be, without dissection; let it breathe.
Ich möchte niemanden außer mir selbst zitieren. In the discernment that lives in me, there is already enough. German psychologists will not fall here, nor French philosophers, nor the Nobel prize, lacking referents that represent me as a woman, queer, immigrant, Venezuelan and Caribbean.
Their works deny my existence, oppress my future, repudiate every step towards expansion.
Stepping on a key moment where to build from the strength of the extinction of oppression, tírguete! Dry your tongue that fills you with imperatives.
No vull citar a ningú més que a mi mateixa, the fictitious construction of what they want me to be. I carve my path irreverently, I make time mine—when you trust in you, the energy is attuned to those who resonate with it.
They murdered the nexus with the earth, the flow of the river in bare feet, they cut down the richness of the Amazonian breath.
I am all that cannot be, yet I live.
I cry out for women, Guajiras, Tainas, for the Arahuacas, for my African roots, I cry out because my voice sustains itself with the impetus of my existence—look at me with the courage that María Lionza gave me, repudiating what has already expired.
When I read your name, I curse the opportunity that life gave you to step on fertile soil.
The thorns rise in my legs on this road of Zumaque; the cocoa skin, when bleeding, waters this desert, the vines cross my chest, I only exhale peace.
You don’t have to understand, I don’t have to explain.
We are the Universe concentrated in seed—look inside, naked of prejudices disregarding expectations donde no quiero citar a nadie más que a mí misma.
Yaknel Elorza (she/her) is a queer Venezuelan writer and poet. Her artistic practice considers everyday life activism that seeks to develop and empower creativity and authenticity through individual and collective experiences. Some examples are her recently published book, Bruma, best described as a self-reflexive genre-bending form of auto-fiction where poetry meets fantasy, as well as Da Yaknel Podcast, which focuses on creative authenticity from BIPOC and LGBTI+ communities. Yaknel also collaborates with Becoming Studio through practices of poetic worldbuilding, beginning with Control Wars Laboratorio held in conjunction with Alter-Realities, Porto Design Biennale ‘21.
Title image: Fruit tree by Sweden-based painter and printmaker Sarah von Sydow.
This text was produced as part of the Futuress Coding Resistance fellowship.
