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If I say 'I love you', this is what I mean...

  • Writer: yannick-robin eike mirko
    yannick-robin eike mirko
  • Feb 15, 2025
  • 5 min read

Love, for me, isn’t just about fluttery feelings and poetic text messages (though, let’s be real, I do appreciate a well-timed compliment). It’s something older than me, older than any single culture, older than even the colonization that tried to redefine it. My love—how I love, why I love, and what it means for me to want someone—is a living artifact of my Afro-Taino ancestry. To understand how I love, you have to understand the roots: the love of the Taíno, the love of my African ancestors, and how these histories merged to create something uniquely mine.






Taíno Love: A Soft Power


The Taíno people of Borikén (now Puerto Rico) had a different understanding of love than the rigid romantic ideals people carry today. Love wasn’t just about romantic partnerships; it was about kinship, responsibility, and spiritual connection. Relationships were often polygamous, not in a transactional way but in a way that reflected the fluidity of bonds. Marriage was flexible, and women had autonomy in choosing and leaving partners (Alegría 1997). The idea of "ownership" in relationships? A foreign concept. Love was expansive, a force that wove communities together.


Sex and intimacy weren’t laced with guilt or restriction; they were natural, celebrated, and connected to the cycles of the earth. A partner wasn’t just a person to possess but a spirit to cherish, to nurture, to honor. Love could be playful, communal, deeply emotional, or purely physical—sometimes all at once.


If I had been alive then, you’d find me sitting in a batey, watching the stars with someone I adored, running my fingers through their hair, painting them in annatto just because I liked the way the red looked against their skin. Love would have been about presence, about sharing breath under the ceiba tree, about whispering things that didn’t need permanence to matter.


African Love: An Unbreakable Bond


When my family was stolen from Africa and brought to the Caribbean, they carried their own definitions of love—resilient, unbreakable, fiercely protected. I am made up of regions with beautifully intricate understandings of love. The Wolof of Senegal, for example, placed deep importance on "sutura"—discretion and quiet dignity in love (Sarr 2001). Love wasn’t loud; it was steady, a whispered promise that carried weight.


In many West and Central African traditions, love was also communal. Marriage wasn’t just about two people but about families, alliances, and continuity. Romantic and sexual relationships were woven into the spiritual fabric of life, linked to ancestor veneration and the divine (Diouf 2003). In the Yoruba tradition, partners were believed to have soul ties that extended beyond this life into the next.


If I had been alive then, maybe I’d be the type to slip a charm into my beloved’s hand before they went to the marketplace, something small but heavy with meaning. I’d write love into music, into dance, into the steady way I showed up, always, even when I wasn’t seen.


Colonization and Catholicism: The War Against Our Love


Colonization didn’t just steal land and lives; it rewrote the rules of love. The Spanish imposed Catholicism, branding Taíno and African relationship structures as "savage" and "sinful." The Taíno resisted Catholicism at first, rejecting its patriarchal constraints and fighting to preserve their autonomy (Sued Badillo 1995). Yet over centuries, forced conversions and systemic oppression led to widespread acceptance of Catholic doctrine.


Today, many in Puerto Rico embrace Catholicism, often at the cost of honoring the love of our ancestors. The stigmatization of Indigenous and African expressions of love isn’t just personal bias—it’s colonial programming. Where the Taíno once celebrated love in its many forms, and African ancestors cherished bonds beyond European marriage constructs, modern Puerto Rican culture has largely internalized the Catholic obsession with rigid gender roles and monogamy as the only "pure" form of love (Guerra 1998). The stigma against natural expressions of intimacy is a colonial ghost that still lingers....only some of us can see it. I'm trying to get everyone a chance to, even if it's just a glimpse. But it's hard. I'm concerned some may never be able to see it before they're gone, a ghost among it.


If I had been alive in that era, I’d be one of the ones whispering the old ways in secret, finding ways to keep them alive despite the Spanish trying to beat them out of us. I’d be loving the way my ancestors taught me, even when the world said it was wrong.


Afro-Taíno Love: Post-Colonial Resistance


When these two worlds collided under colonial rule, Afro-Taino love became something even deeper: a form of rebellion. Love became a means of survival. My ancestors weren’t allowed to marry, weren’t allowed autonomy over their own bodies, weren’t allowed the kind of soft love they had known before—but they loved anyway. They built secret families, created new languages of affection, turned music into coded messages. Love became an act of resistance, a refusal to let colonialism strip them of their right to feel, to connect, to be whole.


Even after slavery was abolished, Afro-Taino love remained different from Western ideals. Marriage rates among Afro-Caribbean communities were lower—not because love didn’t exist, but because love wasn’t defined by a legal contract (Mintz & Price 1992). Relationships were about bonds, about partnership, about raising each other up in a world that tried to keep them down.


If I had been alive then, you’d find me in the mountains of Puerto Rico, slipping between Spanish and Yoruba in my declarations of love. Maybe I wouldn’t be allowed to marry the person I wanted, but that wouldn’t matter. My love wouldn’t need permission. It would exist, fierce and undeniable, like the rhythm of a bomba drum.



Modern Afro-Taíno Love: What it Means for Us


And now? Now my love is all of this history and more. It is Taíno softness, African resilience, post-colonial defiance. It is something that doesn’t always fit neatly into modern expectations. It is fluid, deep, and free. It is knowing that love is not possession but presence. It is knowing that sex is sacred but also joyful, that it can be both a whisper and a roar. It is knowing that I do not love in halves—I love with the weight of my ancestors behind me, with their wisdom in my hands, with their laughter in my touch.


So when I tell you I want you, I do not mean it lightly. I mean that I want to know the way your voice sounds at dawn and the way your skin tastes after the rain. I mean that I want to build something with you that echoes. I mean that I want my love for you to be another act of resistance, another proof that we survived, that we are still here, still loving, still choosing each other against all odds.


And maybe—just maybe—that is worth something more than just a fleeting feeling.




Alegría, Ricardo E. "Ball Courts and Ceremonial Plazas in the West Indies." Yale University Publications in Anthropology, no. 79, 1997.


Diouf, Sylviane A. Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. NYU Press, 2003.


Guerra, Lillian. Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico. University Press of Florida, 1998.


Mintz, Sidney W., and Richard Price. The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Beacon Press, 1992.


Sarr, Assane. "The Role of Sutura in Senegalese Social Relations." Journal of African Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, 2001, pp. 125-140.


Sued Badillo, Jalil. Los Tainos y el Encuentro. Ediciones Doce Calles, 1995.

Comments

yannick-robin eike mirko [who communicates in Spanish, English, + ASL] is a Manhattan-based Biawaisa/Yamoká-hu/Maorocoti multidisciplinary artist, choreographer, writer, doula and disability justice activist with a rare disease. His work sits at the intersection of movement, access, queer and indigenous survival, death care, and institutional accountability, using the body as archive, protest, and living evidence.

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Her relationship with dance and movement has never been linear or purely technical. From Off-Broadway to online, their work has been shaped by access, interruption, advocacy, and forced stillness. Movement and progress, for yannick-robin, is not simply choreography or activism; it is testimony, how a marginalized body speaks when institutions fail to listen. 
 

In 2021, yannick-robin participated in Drawing Breath, a visual and embodied project by Risa Puno that centered marginalized voices during COVID, with yannick-robin representing disabled people. The work focused on breath, endurance, and visibility at a time when disabled lives were being openly treated as expendable. This project cemented their understanding of movement as political: presence itself became resistance.
 

In 2022, disability justice became inseparable from his professional life. He was the first physically disabled actor/musician [acoustic and electric guitar, accordion, glockenspiel, xylophone, tambourine] to play a physically disabled role written through an ableist lens and publicly fought the theatre and writers for accountability. This work was documented in his blog and a documentary, a social media movement, and ultimately led to his inclusion in the University of Minnesota’s Tretter Transgender Oral History Project, archiving his contributions to disability, gender, and labor justice in theatre (the most recent edition/collection of years awaiting entering the public access archive due to funding and completion of editing. Help fund the preservation of non-cis history here).
 

That same year, he worked on Mr. Holland’s Opus at Ogunquit Playhouse as an actor/musician [bugle, trumpet, drum kit], a fully captioned production where his lived experience as a non-cis deaf and physically disabled artist directly informed their performance rhythm, physical storytelling, and musicality. Also in 2022, she performed in the inaugural Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival on Theatre Row under the direction of L Morgan Lee, delivering work as an actor involving monologuing about wheelchair use, access failure, and systemic injustice, using their body not as metaphor, but as evidence. 
 

In 2024 after a year and some change prioritizing deathcare work, they returned to theatre at New York Stage and Film (NYSAF), contributing to the work of disabled choreographer Jerron Herman as an actor/dancer. They also released their multi-genre EP passing that year, which catalogs their multi-instrumental writing and use of music for processing as they fall deeper into grief, hearing loss and deafness, and a world of being misunderstood for not being cis.

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In 2025, yannick-robin worked on the developmental process for Jay Alan Zimmerman’s upcoming show Songs for Hands on a Thursday, following Jerron Herman’s recommendation. The project included a residency at New York Theatre Barn’s Choreography Lab and a music workshop premiere, where yannick-robin served as both choreographer and dancer. The piece centered a Deaf father’s death and a CODA grappling with silence; yannick-robin’s role was to integrate sign language into choreography and bridge gaps between sound, access, and movement for d/Deaf performers.
 

Alongside his performance work, yannick-robin has been active in nonprofit and advocacy spaces since 2020. She worked for Imara Jones of TransLash Media, one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2023, where they were nominated for a Webby Award as an associate and digital producer for The TransLash Podcast, contributed to The Anti-Trans Hate Machine series, and wrote obituaries for TGNC siblings lost to violence. He has written for TalkDeath on racial disparities and discrimination in death care and other deathcare and injustice related topics and now offers obituary writing, death doulaship, and bereavement counseling for TGNC decedents and their families, people with rare diseases, and disabled communities.


for commissions, death care, speaking engagements and more, press the contact button.
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yannick-robin eike mirko is represented by Arise Artists Agency

© 2026 yannick-robin eike mirko

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