Toward a poetics of the Caribbean. (Currents).

Morejon, Nancy ; West-Duran, Alan

HOW DOES ONE DESCRIBE that indefinable substance that is poetry? Aristotle refers to "poetry for the possessed, of being multiform, its plasticity, its potential for ecstasy." Lorca speaks of the essence of poetry as a kind of fire. Lezama Lima responded, "Poetry? It's a nocturnal shell in a rectangle of water." But poetry, more than being a form, is a state of being through which humanity has expressed ideals and sentiments of differing order.

How does race affect this poetics? Race has relevance for scientific thought and thinking done through images. Poets bring everything to their poetry, their culture, their language, their race. "Race in the Caribbean has been a fountain of events, a catalyst, an incentive, an act of faith, and more often than not a narcotic." But if closed in on itself, racial attitudes, such as negritude, can become a dead end. Nicolas Guillen addressed this admirably when he wrote, "It's like trying to find a black cat in a dark room." Or Wole Soyinka who, with a certain irony, speaks of tigers defending their "tigertude." But despite all of this, many subaltern subjects of postliterature assume a discourse of identity that underlines their race, like Rigoberta Menchu or Carolina Maria de Jesus.

Poetry in the Caribbean has been sensitive to ethnic tension and made it a paramount concern. But given its burning urgency, it has not always been the only concern, nor has it always been dealt with fruitfully. Our poetic universe in the Caribbean goes from Walcott to Lezama, from Brathwaite to Eliseo Diego; it must deal with Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and Virgilio Pinera's "La Isla en peso" (Island in the Balance).

Guillen and Cesaire represent two emblematic positions. For Guillen, the issue of the nation is a ruling or governing concern; for Cesaire, it is not. What predominates in his Cahier, despite its affirmation of negritude, is an uprootedness and a search for nationhood in Africa, not his native Martinique. His vocation is for the whole American continent, particularly its African areas (like Brazil, the southern United States, the coasts of Central America, and so on). Guillen assumes that Cuba will achieve universal transcendence through the Cuban nation's vindication of its black population. His optimism compared to Cesaire's pessimism might be explained by the fact that in the 1930s Cuba was a republic (even if dependent on and exploited by the United States) and Martinique was still a colony.

Cesaire has said, "I'm in the conjunction of two traditions: American by way of geography, African by way of history." While this implies cultural hybridity, it is not the kind of mestizaje that Guillen talks about. When we speak of America, we speak of indigenous culture, which is not to be opposed to the ethnic mestizaje of our African heritages. Cesaire's vision of Africa is mythical, Guillen's is not. There is nothing wrong with incorporating mythologies (of any kind, from Greek to Hindu) into your writing, so long as you know they are a literary device.

Myth, of course, is essential to the poetic esthetic of the Caribbean. There is no culture that has been able to prosper without a rich mythological subsoil. It entails a reinvention of the imago and metaphor, organically nurtured by the nature of the region, and the arsenal of wisdom of popular culture. Caribbean poetry is a force that comes out from books and breathes in our plains, our jungles, our mountains in a unique fashion.

But I'd like to talk about myths in the plural. The vast scope of the myths derive from many places. From Europe--that is, Spain, France, Portugal, Great Britain, and Holland. From Africa. And from the remains of indigenous cultures, wiped out by one of the most pathetic ethnocides in history. They are buttressed by the incredible telluric force of our nature and the constant collision of cultures and myths that are born of Galicians, Mayas, Catalans, Tainos, Andalusians, Bretons, Celts, Germans, Gauls, Iberians, Yorubas, Congos, Araras, Chinese, and Hindus.

Can we speak of transculturation in the Caribbean without mentioning Yoruba myths? Or of our new culture without music and dance forms from the coasts of Guinea? The black presence is as obvious as the ocean in the Caribbean. When I say black it is not to scare, blame, or victimize. I say it in the spirit of George Lamming's words: "When we say black, it is not meant in the biological sense, nor is it for racial applause. When I say black, it is the name of a profound and unique historical experience."

Linguistic concerns are of vital importance. They form part of the transculturation experience, and Creole, both in the anglophone and francophone Caribbean, forms part of that mythic zone of which I've spoken. Myths elaborated by women writers have opened up previously unexplored zones in our literature. Much of this is close to Glissant's cross-cultural poetics (poetique de la relation).

The mountains, the sea, become an integral part of mythic poetry. In the Caribbean, there is always a voyage, there is always a boat. Our poetry has been sensitive to that, without forgetting that the sea is the scenario of the Middle Passage. Ecology and history merge in our myths.

Caribbean popular poetry is based on an infinite oral tradition, which is rich in myths, of characters like Mackandal in Haiti, Anancy in Jamaica, the taitas of the Cuban countryside, or Juan Bobo in Puerto Rico. They wind up in different cultural expressions: painting, music, literature. Mythology in the Caribbean is a poetics transplanted from one genre to another. The poetry of the Caribbean or, better yet, its poetics, multilingual and plural, multiple and one, challenges us by being faithful to the origins that created it.

From a talk given at the Caribbean Women Writers Conference at Wellesley College, April z 997. Translation and summary by Alan West-Duran.

For a biographical note on NANCY MOREJON, see "For Roberto, on Turning Seventy?" earlier in this issue.

ALAN WEST-DURAN, Assistant Professor of Modern Languages at Northeastern University, has translated Alejo Carpentier's Music in Cuba (2001) and Rosario Ferre's Language Duel / Duelo de Lenguaje (2002). A poet and essayist, he is the author of Tropics of History: Cuba Imagined (1997), and his reference guide, African-Caribbeans, is forthcoming from Greenwood Press in 2003.