Afro-Hispanic literature poetry - Essay Example

Order 195729 Context always influences in a higher or lower degree, in a way or another, people's lives and actions and it always leaves its mark- a more or less noticeable one - on literary works. Poems, drama, novels, very often reflect ideas of the age, or of a social class, and sometimes they are placed in service of the idea they support. Among the literary genre, poetry expresses the best ideas like the importance of freedom, equal rights, independence of peoples or peace, poems sometimes becoming real manifests. What marks Nancy Morejon's life and poetry is the Cuban revolution. Born in 1944, she becomes the best known of black writers in Cuba "who have an awareness of the world at large, including the United States" (Jackson, 144). Her poetry clearly reflects the issues of the age and of the society she lives in, issues like racism, freedom and the problem of feminism. She is a spokesperson for all those who are underprivileged and a denouncer of social irregularities. Morejon, who writes in Spanish but is also translated into English, has published several volumes of poetry and the volume representative for most of it is entitled Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing. Including four main groups of poems, it is illustrative of the themes Morejon treats in her poetry. If Un patio de la Habana, deals with family, home and community, Donde duerme la Isla como un ala is about the country issue. El sueno de la razon produce monstrous speaks about love and relationships and Mujer Negra deals with the problems of gender and race. Morejon's poetry combines view points. She is a woman but also a representative of black persons. As a consequent her poems dealing with social issues will reflect both views: the feminist and the black person's point of view. The representatives of these two categories appear in her poems as persons that are exploited only because of their color or gender. The title Mujer Negra (Black woman) is illustrative for the themes she treats in the poem. It already conveys a meaning. The adjective "black" and its placing next to the noun "woman" make up a combination that indicates, right from the title, the whole substance of the poem. It's about women but it's also about black. A historical description of slavery presented through the eyes of the black woman taken by force from her land, the poem represents from its very first lines, a denouncement of the horrible injustice that this kind of treating people meant. The use of the plural form of the third person pronoun in the line: " I still smell the foam of the sea they made me cross" (Black Woman, 1) as well as the presence of the verb "to make" accompanied by the object "me" emphasize the idea of an action exercised by force on someone. The woman didn't come because she wanted, she was made to come, she was forced. The line evokes the innumerable similar forced black people captures and their shipping to territories where they became slaves. A lot of references to nature: the ocean and its foam, the sky with its clouds suggest the closeness to nature and stress even more the idea of rupture. Taken from their land, where they were in accord with the forces of nature and they enjoyed a natural freedom, they become slaves of people that didn't have greater natural rights than they had. This fact was, thus, not only unjust, but also against nature. The poet doesn't openly state the fact those who used to capture black people and then trade them were guilty but she uses its antonym, to describe the natural witnesses: "High, the clouds, like innocent eye-witnesses" (Black Woman, 5) If nature is the innocent witness of the injustice, "civilized" men are the opposite. If natural elements are the innocent witness, then there is something bad happening, and there are some not so innocent characters, otherwise there would have been no need for the adjective. The hard work and the difficulties the woman encountered in this world are very well expressed in the comparison "like an animal" (9). It is suggestive both for the burdens she had and for the way she was treated. And the poem doesn't only refer to this woman and her sufferance, but to all those who have been mistreated, to all the slaves that weren't seen as human beings. Past is brought into present throughout the poem, rememorized in a few lines, which gives the impression of continuity. Although happened in the past, their historical relevance makes them present. They are not things that may be forgotten, the same way roots cannot be forgotten. The link between the different ages sublimated in the poem and between past and present is the poetical voice, the first person pronoun "I". It's "I" who, brought here by others, lived here, and who "worked like an animal" but it's also "I" who "rebelled". It's "I" who suffered, who planted seeds and lived in a slave barracks but it's also "I" who became free, rose up and now exist. It's important not to forget what happened in the past but more important than that is the fact that present brought about change. The passage from "I" to "we" when referring to the present may be seen as a reflection of the idea of community. This was possible because of everybody's effort - it wasn't just "I" who contributed. It may also be seen as expressing the fact that only creation and the feeling of belonging and owning can make you exist. And eventually, starting from her biography, and the support she gave to the Cuban revolution, we may see it as a consequence of the revolutionary ideas, connected to sharing and community. We find the same denouncement of slavery and injustice expressed even more prominently in the poem entitled I love my Master. As well as in the case of the first poem analyzed, we understand from the very title the idea of the poem. The title suggests, in fact, the opposite of what it appears to mean. It's definitely not about love, and if in the first part of the poem this idea is only implied, in the second it's openly stated. The meaning was ironically reversed, maybe in order to suggest the disorder that slavery was the result of a reversing of natural meanings, that it was an abnormality developed at the level of society. "I Love my Master" is a title that would have appeared as innocent and not ironical in a poem dedicated to children, where there is an animal at the centre of the story. But in the case where a human being was supposed to say these words, this can't be taken for granted. In the first part of the poem, the woman looks very naive and seems not to understand that having a master and being a slave is not the way things should be. Awareness comes from the contact with her people and it brings about a change in attitude. Her "love" was the result of a life deprived of the knowledge of truth, and the finding out of truth comes as a shock and her so called love turns into hate. In the first part, terms like " plunderous wars", "subjugates" are indicative of the abnormal reality. But in the second part we deal with more than indications. The series of "I love" is replaced by "I curse". And a new "I love" is used only to introduce the scene of the murder. The master is killed. The connection between the two parts of the poem is ensured by the use of a questions fragment. They are questions regarding her own situation, her own life; they are a symbol of her awakening of her new conscience of life. Together with it, a new attitude towards life appears. A new attitude that means rejection of what she thought, she felt and of what she was told by 'her master." The ending of the poem, like the ending of Black Woman, although not in the same way, brings about liberation. Morejon's poems are a denouncement of slavery and at the same time a praise of her ancestors, of family and her country. It's a nostalgic admiration that we find in Mother. Admiration and love for a natural country, where her ancestors enjoyed freedom. Another of Morejons' poem has at his centre a black Cuban family that is trying to imitate the white family, by adopting their values and style. The poem, entitled Richard Trajo su Flauta contains criticism aimed at the United States. Criticism is also in Freedom Now, a poem that deals with the black struggle in the United States. "Morejon's poetry expresses appreciation and gratitude because she feels truly blessed for having inherited strength from her family, pride from her race, and political satisfaction from her country. And Morejon is always aware that the suffering of her predecessors is partly responsible for her good fortune."(Jackson, 149) She understands indeed that her ancestors did great things and fought so that she and her contemporaries could lead a normal, free life, and she feels more than that, she feels all her ancestors within herself. The poet is not only a part of the present, she has in her soul the whole race. She is their spokesperson and she is also their representative. Influences from the past and from contemporaries, together with her uniqueness compose her life. That is why poetry is for her a means of expressing all these aspects of her life: uniqueness, historical background and contemporary influences. Nancy Morejon's poetry is characterized by the same complexity she feels in her own being. She feels in herself all her ancestors and all her contemporary people. And she, as a poet and spokesperson for all those she feels connected to, suffers together with them, and she rejoices when they rejoice in a space that conquered the temporal barriers. The Drum expresses very eloquently this idea. "My body" opens almost all lines of the poem, which creates the feeling of union. The presence of this structure - my body - in antithetical pairs : "My body in shadows, My body in full sun" (The Drum, 17-18) has the role of expressing the idea of complementarity, or a union of opposites in the same person. The ending line of the poem, with the stress on the term "freedom", conveys the ever present search for liberty. Nicomedes Santa Cruz, like Morejon sublimates in his work the tradition of his people and their history which is, in fact, his own history. Black Rhythms of Peru, like Morejon's poems, evokes the times when black people were sold as slaves. Just like Morejon's poetry, Santa Cruz's poem is an accusation brought to an act that is not dignified of the human nature. Although revealing the cruelty of the treatment of black people brought from Africa, the poem, because of the song sonority, seems gentler. You don't feel the cruel reality so much as you feel it in the poems Morejon writes although, they are written in a more direct way. Nicomedes Santa Cruz is a musician too. That's why his poems are similar to songs. "Rhythms" - they are rhythms, they are indeed rhythms of servitude, bitterness and sorrow but they are rhythms. They make us think of a song. The narrative structure makes it resemble a story too, a story that follows the course of a person's life. This is the difference between Morejon's poem, Black Woman and this one. If there the woman was, in fact, the archetypal black woman and what the poem presented through her was not a singular life and not only an age but the lives of a people and its development throughout history, here, the woman is just one woman, she is a representative, she is like many others but she is not an archetype. Both poems describe the difficulties and the mistreatment, both poems bear the mark of the black slavery background. The poets' ancestors died, but their inheritance remained: "The old black man died but among the dry sugar cane he still sings his Zamacueca and the "Panalivio" so faintly And one can still hear the "Festejo" he sang in their youth" (Santa Cruz, 37-42) The cultural inheritance remained, the roots and the memory of their lives remained too and they are made known by their successors' rhymes. The poems written by Nancy Morejon as well as Nicomedez Sanata Cruz's works illustrate Nicolas Guillen's words: "an authentic work always reflects the historic, social and economic conditions in which it was conceived and written." They evoke their people history and tradition and praise the legacy ancestors left for them. Bibliography 1. Jackson, Richard L. Black Writers and Latin America. Washington DC.: Howard University Press, 1998 2. Morejon, Nancy. The drum. The poetry Center.2003 http://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/poets/thedrum.html 3. Morejon, Nancy. Black Woman. Struga Poetry Evenings. 2006 http://www.svp.org.mk/uk_06_goldenwreath_poem.htm 4.Santa Cruz, Nicomedes. Black Rhythms of Peru. Under One Sun. 2005 < http://underonesun.org/poetry.htm> Read More