Nicolas Guillen and West Indian Ngritude

Author(s): G. R. COULTHARD
Source: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 1 (March 1970), pp. 52-57
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40653134
Accessed: 10-05-2017 18:39 UTC

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52

Nicolas Guillen and West

Indian Negritude
IN THESE DAYS of heavily charged "black" and "African" art
in the United States and the West Indies, it might be useful to take
a closer look at a movement in the arts (literature, music, ballet and
singing and painting) which though technically it may be said to
have started in Puerto Rico, came to full fruition in Cuba in the
1930's and 40's.

^Afro-Cubanism", as the movement was called, used the rhythms,

style of phrasing and the originally African words (whose meanings
had been largely forgotten) of the Afro-Cuban folksongs and folk-
dances. On one hand a considerable amount of this art was what one
might call pure art. Margot Arce wrote of the Puertorican Luis Pales
Matos: "Luis Pales Matos is a cultured, even a refined poet (culterano)
- He draws away from popular poetic forms and interprets the Negro
element as a civilized and sceptical white man). On the other, one
finds protests against racial prejudice and discrimination, and a con-
stant drawing on the manner of the art Of the people. Looking back
with almost thirty years perspective, one figure stands out quite clearly,
not that of Pales Matos, Ramn Guirao, Emilio Ballages but that of
the Cuban mulatto Nicholas Guillen.

A great deal of Guillen's poetry is poetry of protest and revolt,

but Guillen never lost touch with his folk roots.

What distinguishes his attitude, and what is of undeniable signi-

ficance today is his rejection of black racialism. Neither did he find
it necessary to turn to Africa, or attempt to use features of African
writing. Africa, with its transplanted people, its art (a folk art) was
so much woven into the texture of Cuban life that a direct recourse
to Africa did not seem necessary, and, though coloured Cubans had
been treated worse in the present century than their fellows in the
British or French West Indies, the envenomed counter-racialism so
apparent in much West Indian and North American Negro writing is
totally absent from Cuban art, and indeed from Cuban life today.
As Salvador Bueno puts it, Afro-Cubanismo represented a "search for
what was typically Cuban through the Cuban Negro" and not a re-
jection of Western values, such as we find for example in these
passages:

Because we hate you and your reason, and we turn to

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 53

the precosious dementia of flaming madness

of persistent cannibalism.

(Ces ai re, Aim, Cahier d'un retour

au pays natal. Prface d'Andr
Breton, Paris 1947, pp. 50-1.)

An immense fire which my continuous suffering

and your sneers
and your inhumanity
and your scorn
and your disdain
have lighted in the depths of my heart
will swallow you all.
(Bernard, Regnor C., Ngre,
Port-au-Prince, 1931, p. 12.)

One can account for the lack of direct inspiration in Africa by

the vigour of the Afro-Cuban aspects of life in that country. After
all, why go running off to Africa, when a synthesis of Spanish-Cuban
and Afro-Cuban elements already exists? Also the search for African
roots and identity by West Indians can lead to strange aberrations,
due to the lack of full understanding. Indeed the pathetic effort to be
or become African in some mysterious way is a dangerous road leading
to facile exhibitionism and often a basic falsification and distortion
of both African and West Indian culture.

As for aggressive racialism in reverse, i.e. black persecutes white,

this had no appeal^ for Guillen, and indeed makes no sort of sense in
the West Indies. As Guillen writes to his "Son Nmero 6":

We have been together from way back,

old and young,
white and black, all mixed together.

and after saying "Tell the white man he is not going to leave" he winds
up with a coda the meaning of which is quite clear:
look and go on looking
listen and go on listening
drink and go on drinking
eat and go on eating
live and go on living
because the song for everybody will never end.

Counter racialism is not a West Indian phenomenon. Maybe in the

United States it makes some sort of sense, if it leads to a constructive
reappraisal although pushed too far, it could become self -destructive.

It is interesting that Aim Csaire, who coined the word "ngri-

tude", in a recent interview (Casa de las Americanas, July/ August, 1968)
rejects charges of racialism: "Even in the moments of greatest anger,

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54

we continued to be humanists- our particularism always lead to

universality". And he refers to the apparent racialism of some of the
ngritude writers as "an irritated postulation of fraternity," and also
as "aggressive solidarity."

However not only in Cuba, but in all Latin American countries

which have a large coloured population (Brazil, coast of Colombia,
Venezuela, Ecuador) , there has been no stimulation of racial antagonism
and comparatively little interest in Africa.

It should not be imagined however that Guillen ignored or is in-

different to the black man in Cuba or in the world. However, as a
coloured man, he never denies his Cubanism. Again in thle "Son
nmero " he states:

I am a Yoruba, I weep in Yoruba,

lucumi,
As I am a Cuban Yoruba,
I want my Yoruba sorrow to rise up in Cuba,
the happy Yoruba weeping
which rises in me.

(El son entero, 1947) .

and again in one of his best known poems "Ballad of my two grand-
fathers" after evoking the past of oppression and cruelty, he sees the
two figures joined by the bond of basic human anguish:

Both raise
their strong heads;
both the same size,
under the high stars;
both the same size,
black anguish and white anguish,
both the same size,
and they shout and dream and weep and sing,
They dream and weep and sing,
they weep and sing,
they sing.
(West Indies Ltd., 1934) .

The fallowing poem, "My name" (Elegias, 1958), makes quite clear
Guillr/s attitude of awareness of his African past, of the Negro ex-
perience in Cuba and in the world, but as in all his poems he transcends
any narrow racialism.

My name.

Ever since school

and even before - one dawn
when I was only a scrap of sleep and tears
since then
they had given me a name. A saint and a point

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 55

of reference, so I could speak with the stars.

Your name is, will be -
- And then they handed me what you see on my visiting card,
what I write at the end of my poems,
thirteen letters
which I carry around in the street,
and are always with me wherever I go,
But is it my name? Are you sure?
You know all about me.
You already know my navigable blood
my geography full of dark mountains
and deep and bitter valleys
which are not on the map?
Perhaps you have visited my abysses
my underground galleries
with their great wet stones
the islands emerging from the black ponds
where I hear a pure water-fall
of ancient water pouring from my high heart
with a fresh and deep sound in a place full of burning trees,
with tight-ropes walking monkeys
parrots like legislators and snakes?
Does my skin, I should say,
all my skin come from that statue
of Spanish marble? Also my cry of terror
the hard cry in my throat? Do my bones
come from there. The roots
and also the roots of the roots and also
the dark branches stirred by dreams
and these flowers open on my brow
and this sap which turns my bark bitter?
Are you sure?
Is there nothing more than what you have written
than what you have stamped?
with a seal of anger?
(Oh, I should have asked)
But now I do ask you:
Do you not see these drums in my eyes?
Do you not see the tight and beaten drums?
with two dry tears?
Do I not have perchance
a nocturnal grandfather
with a great black mark
(even darker than his skin)
a mark made by a whip?
Do I not have perhaps a Mandinga, Dahomeyan?
a Congolese grandfather.
What is his name? Oh, please, tell me.
Andres. Francisco, Amable?
How do you say Andres in Congolese?
How have you always said Francisco in Dahomeyan.
In Mandinga how do you say Amable?

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56

No? Were they then other names?

Tell me the surname.
Do you know my other name, the one
that came with me from that enormous land,
the bloody, captured name that crossed the sea
in chains,
which came in chains across the sea?
Oh, 10 you cannot remember.
You have dissolved it in immemorial ink..
What you have taken from a poor defenceless Negro,
you hid thinking
that he would lower hie eyes in shame.
Gracias.
I really thank you.
Gentle people, I thank you.
Merci
Merci bien
Merci beaucoup.
But no- can you believe it, No.
I am clean
My voice shines like newly polished metal
Look at my coat of arms, it has
a baobob, a rhinoceros and a spear.
I am also the grand-son, great grand-son, great great
grandson of a slave.
(The shame is the master's)
Am I Yelofe?
Nicholas Yelofe perhaps?
Or Nicolas Baganko?
Perhaps Banguilla?
Or Kumba?
Perhaps Nicolas Kumba?
Or Kongu?
Could I be Nicola Kongu?
Oh, who knows?
What an enigma in the waters of the sea.

I feel the immense night weighing

on deep beasts
on innocent punished souls;
but also on sharp pointed voices
which strip the sky of its suns,
its hardest suns
to decorate the fighting blood.
From some burning suns, perforated
by great equatorial arrow.
I know that remote cousins will come
my own remote anguish shot into the wind,
I know that pieces of my veins will come
my own remote blood
treading the startled grass with hard feet,
I know men of green leaves will come,

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 57

my distant jungle,
with their sorrow open like a cross and their hearts
red with flames,
Without knowing each other, we will recognize each other
in tuberculosis and syphilis,
in sweat bought on the black market
in fragments of chains still sticking to their skins
without knowing each other we will recognize each other
by our eyes loaded with dreams,
and even the} insults like stones, spat at us every day
by the four handed creatures of ink and paper.
Then what will it matter?
(What does it matter now?)
My little name with its 13 letters
Neither the Mandinga, Bantu,
Yoruba, Dahomeyan name
of the sad, grandfather drowned in lawyers ink?
What does it matter, my pure friends?
Yes, pure friends.
Come and see my name,
My endless name made up
of endless names.
my name, alien
free and mine, alien and yours,
alien and free as the air.

(First English translation).

The essencialist poetry of Nicholas Guillen is a signal of man

discovering himself completely in his concrete American reality, and
at the same time transferring through his individuality the ethical
pathos of his people. Like any Afro-American and Indo-American
writers Guillen has found his national, American and universal
identity, his Cuban, American and profoundly humanist values, and
it is in this sense that he is acclaimed as one of the grealtest writers
of America today.

G. R. COULTHARD

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