When Tía Ate the Telegram: Defiance, Solidarity, and Multipoetic Sensorial Listening

This essay applies Ren Ellis Neyra’s concepts of defiance, solidarity, and mulitpoetic sensorial listening from The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics (2020) to the author’s own family story about how her great-aunt ate the telegram announcing her brother’s death in the Korean War. Through interpreting the story with multipoetic sensorial listening as a potential methodology, the author uncovers how this brief act so ingrained in her family lore might serve as a form of defiance against colonialism and militarization in Puerto Rico. The essay also questions what it means to have a productive form of defiance and protest. Overall, the author uses the story of her aunt eating the telegram to demonstrate how Ellis Neyra’s multipoetic sensorial listening could excavate alternative archives and ways of knowing left out of Western modernity.