William Luis

The Afrocubanista Poetry of Nicols Guilln and ngel Rama's Concept of Transculturation
Author(s): Miguel Arnedo-Gmez
Source: Afro-Hispanic Review, Vol. 26, No. 2 (FALL 2007), pp. 9-25
Published by: William Luis
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23054617
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 ARTICLES

The Afrocubanista Poetry of Nicolas Guillen and

Angel Rama's Concept of Transculturation

Miguel Arnedo Gomez
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

out a renovation in Latin American criticism in order to study the Latin

The Uruguayan scholarin itsAngel
American literary phenomenon Rama
socio-cultural wasIn orderpart
articulations. to of a group of critics who carried
achieve this, these critics resorted to perspectives and concepts from disciplines such
as anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, particularly in the study of Latin
American literatures, that incorporated elements from the popular, rural, indigenous
or African subaltern cultures of the region.1 One of the results of this endeavor was
Rama's 1982 study Transculturacion narrativa en America Latina, in which he defined
the concept of narrative transculturation, based on the creation and definition of the
term "transculturation" by the Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz (Contrapunteo). Rama
applied this concept to his analysis of Latin American authors such as Jose Maria
Arguedas, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Juan Rulfo, and Augusto Roa Bastos. What he
revealed about these authors is that they were producing literary works that opened
the way for a distinctive Latin American modern literature by incorporating
elements of rural popular cultures of their regions as guiding formal principles, whilst
at the same time often employing techniques of the European and U. S. literary
avant-gardes (32-56). In this way, Rama emphasized the capacity of these Latin
American writers to rework "influences" from the dominant cultures and combine
them in innovative ways with elements from the rural popular cultures of their Latin
American regions. In addition, Rama was stressing the active role of rural popular
cultures in Latin American modernization. These cultures, which were often
relegated to the realm of the folkloric, or the primitive, and were often thought to
be becoming extinct, had now become central guiding principles of the modern
literature of Latin America.2 An equally important contribution was the way in
which Rama's analysis brought to light the internal heterogeneity of these literatures;
that is, the simultaneous presence within them of cultural elements from different
socio-cultural sectors of Latin American societies.3
Rama's use of the concept of transculturation and his application to specific
works of literature constitutes an invaluable model for the analysis of Latin
American literatures that incorporate elements from rural, popular, and subaltern
cultures. One of these literatures is the afrocubanista poetry of the mulatto Cuban

Afro-Hispanic Review Volume 26, Number 2 Fall 2007 ~ 9

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Miguel Amedo-Gomez

poet Nicolas Guillen. Guillen was part of the 1930s movement of poetic afrocubanismo,
whose mostly-white participants aimed to promote the idea of unity between Cuban
blacks and whites through poems that represented Afro-Cubans and Afro-Cuban
culture.4 Accordingly, Guillen's afrocubanista poetry in three collections published in
the 1930s (Motives de son, Songoro cosongo, and West Indies, Ltd.) represents some of
the social experiences of lower-class blacks from Havana and incorporates Afro
Cuban cultural elements in a number of ways.
Partly due to the weakness of the methodological apparatus for the study of
multidisciplinary phenomena like transculturation in Cuban literary studies,
the extent to which Guillen used Afro-Cuban culture as a source of formal
innovation in these poems has not been fully explored in criticism. In fact, many
critics actually emphasize the fundamentally Hispanic character of Guillen's
poetry. For example, Roberto Fernandez Retamar places emphasis on the Spanish
components of Guillen's poetry in a recent article entitled "Nicolas Guillen:
hispanidad, vanguardia y compromiso social," despite acknowledging their "fuerte
impronta mulata" (60-63). Even when the African-Spanish hybridity of the
poetry is acknowledged in criticism, it tends to be from the limiting perspective of
the ideology of mestizaje, which reduces the poetry to a unified mixture of black
and white cultural elements.5
Rama's concept of transculturation, thus, offers a much needed methodological
framework for the analysis of Guillen's afrocubanista poetry. Despite this, and despite
the fact that Rama's concept stemmed from the work of a Cuban scholar (Ortiz) who
played a prominent role in afrocubanismo, Rama's approach to literary transculturation
has not been utilized in the study of this Cuban poet.
In this essay, I explore the transculturative processes at work in Guillen's
poetry making use of some of Rama's concepts and on the basis of the three levels
that Rama establishes for literary transculturation: language, worldview, and literary
structure (40-56).6 As will become apparent, Rama's concept of transculturation
allows us to understand better the formal modifications that Guillen was introducing
into his poetry, and the interactions between elements from different origins
within it.
One of the characteristics of Guillen's approach that sets him apart from other
afrocubanistas is his insistence on the importance of formally incorporating Affo
Cuban cultural forms into his poetry. This is patent in his description of
Motivos de son at the time it was published: "He tratado de incorporar a la
literatura cubanano como simple elemento musical, sino como elemento de
verdadera poesfalo que pudiera llamarse poema-son basado en la tecnica de esa
clase de baile tan popular en nuestro pais" (62). All afrocubanista poets were to some
extent trying to produce a formally mulatto poetry that would symbolize the mulatto

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 The Afrocubanista Poetry of Nicolas Guillen

spirit of the Cuban nation (Arnedo-Gomez), but Guillen was the only one who
directly affirmed that this was the central objective of his afrocubanista poetry. The
reasons for Guillen's stronger determination to formally fuse literature and Afro
Cuban cultural forms could be related to some of his personal circumstances.
Unlike most afrocubanista poets, who were white, Guillen experienced racial
discrimination directly throughout his life and this may have created in him a
greater urgency to resolve black and white conflicts through cultural symbols. His
desire to effect this fusion could have also stemmed from a need to resolve his own
racial ambivalence. That Guillen experienced an internal struggle to reconcile his
black and white heritage is evident in poems such as "La balada de los dos abuelos."
Given this line of thought, it seems relevant to quote Antonio Benftez Rojo's
comment that Guillen sees that which is mestizo as a synthesis, and he uses it as a
formula "to transcend the racial conflict inherent in the Plantation and, in passing,
to offer his mulatto ego a way out" (127-28).
In my book Writing Rumba. The Afrocubanista Movement in Poetry, I explain that
because of the prominence of musical, dance and oral forms in Afro-Cuban
culture, afrocubanista poets were faced with the challenge of incorporating into
their poetry the formal characteristics of non-written forms (123-40). As opposed
to most afrocubanista poets' obsession with Afro-Cuban dance forms, and primarily
the rumba, there is a clear tendency in Guillen to focus specifically on verbal Afro
Cuban forms. Firstly, there is an emphasis on the orality of the black lower-class
sectors being represented, and secondly there is an endeavor to incorporate the
formal qualities of the lyrics of son music, a black musical genre that had achieved
nationwide popularity in Cuba by the 1920s (Moore 89).
Guillen's use of the orality of lower-class blacks from Havana as a source of
aesthetic inspiration in his poetry results in a number of formal features that can be
described as transculturative processes at the level of language, based on Rama's
approach. One way in which Afro-Cuban orality affects the language of Guillen's
poems is by introducing into it the oral mechanisms of information transmission
operating within the represented communities. Dolores Aponte-Ramos makes an
important point regarding the fact that in "Mulata" the racist comment that is the
main subject of the poem is introduced through expressions such as "ya yo me entere"
and "ya se que dise": "El comentario en cuestion es recogido en la estructura de
'me dijeron que dijiste' propia de la oralidad historiografica de la comidilla y el
cotilleo: 'Ya yo me entere, mulata, / mulata, ya se que dise / que yo tengo la narise /
como nudo de cobbata'" (74). References to oral codes and mechanisms mark the
language of quite a few of the poems of Motivos de son. In "Hay que tener volunta,"
the speaker refers to visual codes that are only effective in the context of the
physical reality of his oral exchange with his black woman:

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Miguel Amedo-Gomez

Mira si tu me conoce,
Que ya no tengo que hablar
Cuando pongo un ojo asf,
Tampoco hay na. (69)

In the poem "Bucate plata," the speaker expresses her worry about how the
community will judge her orally after leaving her partner for not being able to
provide for her:

Depue diran que soy mala,

Y no me querran tratar,
Pero amor con hambre, viejo,
iQue va! (71)

It is also necessary to bear in mind that similar structures of reported speech are
characteristic of Afro-Cuban oral literatures. This can be appreciated in the
following transcription of the lyrics of the traditional rumba composition "Congo
yambumba" by Jesus Alfonso:

Yo me enterS,
Que tu andas diciendo
Que eres un palo,
Mi amigo Julian
(bis)

Tu debes decir, "si no fuera por papa"

Tu debes decir, "si no fuera por papa"

Y ahora veo
Que todo lo tuyo
Es un vano orgullo
Mi amigo Julian
(bis)

Tu debes decir, "si no fuera por papa"

Tu debes decir, "si no fuera por papa"

Coro:

Congo Yambumba me llamo yo,

Yo soy el terror. ("Cancionero rumbero" 12)

In addition, Guillen incorporates the phonetic peculiarities of black lower-class

dialect by writing his poems in an orthographically modified language. Narciso
Hidalgo mentions Guillen's use of words ending in the letter "a" or words with an
accent on the last syllable, as well as verbs in the infinitive without the final "r,"
like "habla" instead of "hablar," "baila" instead of "bailar," or "come" instead of
"comer" ("El negro" 127). All of the poems of Guillen's first collection Motivos de

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 The Afrocubanista Poetry of Nicolas Guillen

son are written in this way. There has been a tendency in criticism on Guillen to
devalue this early style of poetry as a folkloristic or caricaturesque poetry that
Guillen would move away from and surpass in his later poetry.71 think that one of
the reasons why Motivos de son has been criticized for this is that in Cuban history
there was a strong tradition of ridiculing the phonetic peculiarities of blacks'
speech in popular literature by whites. This is the case of nineteenth-century teatro
bufo plays, as can be appreciated in several studies (Leal, Civantos, Reinstadler).
Although there are indeed interesting parallels between such texts from the teatro
bufo tradition and Guillen's poetry (see Arnedo-Gomez 95), Guillen's use of
modified spelling that reflects Afro-Cuban pronunciation should not be entirely
dismissed on the basis of this antecedent in Cuban cultural history. Angel Rama's
outline of the development of the representation of popular speech from the
regionalist novel to the work of transcultural writers like Arguedas, Roa Bastos,
and Rulfo provides a number of key points that allow us to understand the
broader significance of Guillen's use of Afro-Cuban dialect. As Rama points out,
the phonetic imitation in literature of the dialects of rural characters was a
prominent feature of the Latin American regionalist novel, as well as of many
classic indigenista novels. In this type of literature the dialectal forms of rural or
indigenous characters were represented in the texts in ways that clearly marked their
distance from the learned literary discourse of the author. A relevant example can be
seen in the following extract from Jorge Icaza's novel Huasipungo (1934):

A ratos, al declinar el clamor confusosin novedad que lo alimente, se dejaban oir

los gritos de alguna india que habia olvidado el guagua tierno en el jergon, al perro amarrado,
a la vaca con crfa, a las gallinas, a los cuyes, al abuelo paralitico:

-i Ay ay ay Mi guagua, sha.
-iAyayay Mi taica, sha.
-iAyayay Mi ashco, sha.
-iAyayay Mis choclitos, sha.
-iAyayay Mis cuicitos, sha.
-iAyayay Mis trapitos, sha.
-iAyayay Mi shungooo. (118)

This dual system, as Rama refers to it, reflected the social differences between the
"superior" class of the author and the subordinate status of his characters. It also
implied a condemnation of the represented dialects. Rama writes the following about
the author of such literary works: "Si este se aproxima a los estratos inferiores, no deja
de confirmar lingufsticamente su lugar mas elevado, debido a su education y a su
conocimiento de las normas idiomaticas, que lo distancia del bajo pueblo" (41).
In contrast to this approach, Rama highlights the method used by the Mexican Juan
Rulfo (a writer that Rama describes as being "colocado en trance de transculturacion")
in his "Luvina." At the level of language, in this short story Rama identifies the
following process of neoculturation (which is part of the process of transculturation):

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Miguel Amedo-Gomez

El autor se ha reintegrado a la comunidad Unguis tica y habla desde ella, con desembarazado
uso de sus recursos idiomaticos. Si esa comunidad es, como ocurre frecuentemente, de tipo
rural, o aun colinda con una de tipo indi'gena, es a partir de su sistema linguistico que
trabaja el escritor, quien no procura evitar desde fuera un habla regional, sino elaborarla
desde dentro con una finalidad arrfstica. (4243)

Unlike the regionalist and indigenista writers that Rama describes above, Guillen in
Motivos de son adopts Afro-Cuban dialect as the main language for his discourse,
and not as a secondary dialect that stands apart. Also, like Rulfo, Guillen is using
Afro-Cuban dialect as a source of aesthetic creation. An example that illustrates
this is the way in which these modified terms become the central components of
the rhyme of many of the poems of Motivos de son. In "Negro bembon," the rhyme
in the second stanza would not be possible if the conjugated verb form "eres" were
not spelled according to Afro-Cuban pronunciation. This can be appreciated in
the following extract:

Bemb6n asf como ere

tiene de to;
Caridad te mantiene,
te lo da to. (65-66)

A similar example can be found in the poem "Mulata" with the words "verdad"
and "nada" in the last stanza of the poem:

Si tu supiera, mulata,
la verda,
que yo con mi negra tengo y no te quiero pa na! (67)

The fact that Afro-Cuban pronunciation of Spanish words determines the rhyme
of these poems is significant from the perspective of literary transculturation in two
respects. Firstly, it means that a characteristic of the orality of Afro-Cubans
becomes a guiding formal principle of Guillen's afrocubanista poetry. Secondly, by
doing this the poetry is also incorporating a formal principle that operates in Afro
Cuban oral "literary" forms. As Philip Pasmanick explains in his article "Decima
and 'Rumba': Iberian Formalism in the Heart of Afro-Cuban Song," in rumba lyrics
"rhyme occurs according to Afro-Cuban pronunciation, which, for example,
ignores the word-final's' and the word-final and intervocalic'd' and interchanges
word-final 'r' and T" (252).
Another linguistic influence that Afro-Cuban orality has on Guillen's
poetry is the use of African sounding nonsense syllables. These have been labeled
jitanjaforas, a term that was first used in a poem by the Cuban poet Mariano
Brull and was later defined by the Mexican critic Alfonso Reyes as referring to
meaningless words that simply convey sensations (Ortiz, "Los ultimos versos"
166-69). Many critics, when reviewing this aspect of Guillen's poetry, limit

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 The Afrocubanista Poetry of Nicolas Guillen

themselves to tracing the origins of jitanjdforas to the influence of Brull and Reyes.8
This tendency devalues the contribution of Afro-Cuban culture to this aspect of
Guillen's poetry. The use of non-sense syllables in the poetry of Guillen needs to
be considered in view of a linguistic principle that is a fundamental component of
Afro-Cuban religions and which is described in Kristina Wirtz's article on Santerfa
'"Where Obscurity is a Virtue': The Mystique of Unintelligibility in Santerfa
Ritual." As Wirtz explains, "semantically opaque but full of meaning,
unintelligibility is a striking feature of both sacred songs and orichas' speech" (352).
This author adds the following:

During fieldwork in Santiago de Cuba, I participated in numerous rituals and collected

many examples of both of the genres I describe. I also discussed ritual speech in general
and particular performances and texts with a wide range of people, from initiated priests
to non-initiated participants, to non-participants. I learned that most santeros could not
understand the Lucumi songs, prayers, and other texts they could expertly use in rituals.
However, they believed that other more senior and knowledgeable santeros could
translate the very texts they found largely unintelligible. I did indeed find santeros who
could decode semantic meanings in some texts, but I came to believe that no one, in
fact, speaks Lucumi well enough to actually translate most texts, even when they can
expertly handle them. Nonetheless, santeros regard Lucumi as a fully intelligible divine
language: the "tongue of the orichas." (355)

Of course, the use of unintelligible African languages in Afro-Cuban religion is

different to the use of jitanjdforas in Guillen's poetry in that jitanjdforas are
made-up, African sounding words, whereas the Lucumi songs and prayers that
Wirtz describes above have their basis in real African languages. However, the fact
that jitanjdforas have no semantic meaning does mirror this Afro-Cuban linguistic
phenomenon to some extent. In addition, it is worth considering the argument
that I put forward in Writing Rumba:

The employment of made-up nonsense syllables for purely aesthetic purposes or with the
intention of sounding African was actually a widespread practice in Afro-Cuban culture.
According to Samuel Feijoo, the African-sounding lines of the songs of eighteenth
century cabildos de nation, for example, were merely pretexts for rhythm and song
without any semantic meaning. The use of nonsense syllables for rhythmic purposes can
be heard in classic rumba compositions as well, such as Carlos Embales's "Pim pam pum
y blen blen blen." Furthermore, meaningless syllables have been traditionally used in
rumba in the lalaleo, the melodic fragment by which the lead singer establishes the key
and the harmony at the beginning of a song. Thus, jitanjaforas can be viewed as an
abandonment of the semantic logic of the dominant literature in favor of an Afro-Cuban
verbal art form in which words may have a suggestive or musical function. (130)

As can be seen in the above analysis, Guillen's use of Afro-Cuban dialect in

Motivos de son is an investigation of the possibilities that Afro-Cuban orality offers
for constructing a specific literary language. Like the narrative transculturators
that Rama analyzes in his study, Guillen was using the represented language as a
source of formal experimentation.

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Miguel Arnedo-Gomez

It is important to remember that even if Guillen in his poems attempts to

create or invoke the idea of Afro-Cuban orality through the above outlined linguistic
devices, his poetry was not necessarily conceived specifically for an oral delivery.
Some of the language he used in poems such as "Secuestro de la mujer de Antonio,"
"Balada del giiije," and "Balada de los dos abuelos" is excessively complex in meaning
to be fully appreciated in the immediacy of an oral delivery.9 Guillen's afrocubanista
poetry, therefore, contains elements that stem from written erudite literary forms and
elements that stem from orality.
At the level of literary structure, Guillen's poetry resorts to the structures
present in the lyrics of the son. As the Cuban writer Cintio Vitier wrote in 1958,
"la estructura formal del son guilleniano parece proceder del estribillo o montuno
del son popular.... A partir de estos datos elementales, por eso mismo profundos,
empieza la creation de Guillen" (147-48).10 The poem entitled "Songoro cosongo"
("Si tu supiera" in the fist edition of Songoro cosongo) perfectly illustrates Vitier's
point regarding Guillen's use of structures from son lyrics:

iAy, negra,
si tu supiera!
Anoche te vi pasar
y no quise que me viera
A el tu le hara como a mi,
que cuando no tuve plata
te corrite de bachata
sin acodarte de mi.

Songoro, cosongo,
songo be;
songoro cosongo
de mamey;
songoro la negra
baila bien;
songoro de uno,
songoro de tre.

Ae,
vengan a ver;
ae, vamo pa ver;
i vengan, songoro cosongo,
songoro cosongo de mamey! (67-68)

In the above extract one can easily identify two parts that resemble two different
sections of son lyrics. The first and last parts of the poem correspond to the verse,
which is where the singer introduces the theme of the composition. The second
part is the main chorus, which further into the song turns into a shorter version
that responds to the singer's improvisations. This poem is so akin to son lyrics that
it required no modifications when it was subsequently turned into a son composition

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 The Afrocubanista Poetry of Nicolas Guillen

by Eliseo Grenet (1893-1950).11 Angel Augier has also remarked upon Guillen's
use of the chorus/response structure that forms the basis of the singing style of son
music. As Augier explains, this antiphonal device can be traced back to the oldest
known antecedent of modern son music: the 1580 song "Ma Teodora":

iDonde esta la Ma Teodora?

- Rajando la lena esta.
iCon su palo y su bandola?
- Rajando la lena esta.
iDonde esta que no la veo?
- Rajando la lena esta (ad libitum). (146)

A similar structure is particularly noticeable in the final sentence of Guillen's poem

"Bucate plata":

Depue diran que soy mala,

y no me querran tratar,
pero amor con hambre, viejo,
ique va!
Con tanto relo, compadre,
ique va!
Con tanto lujo, mi negro,
ique va! (71)

At the level of worldview, or perspective, it is important to remember that even

though Guillen feigned to write the poems of Motivos de son from the perspective of
his characters, he did not come from the same socio-cultural stratum as them.
All the characters represented in his poetry come from the lowest social strata of the
black population, where Afro-Cuban traditions were typically practiced.12 By contrast,
Guillen came from the educated black middle classes, in which attachment to
traditions of African origin was not so common. Thus, rather than assuming that
poems from Motivos de son like the ones analyzed above ("Songoro cosongo,"
"Negro bembon," and "Mulata") convey the perspectives of the represented sectors,
it is necessary to stress that they "purport" to express them. But as Rama demonstrates
in his analysis of Jose Maria Arguedas's Los rios profundos, the fact that an author is
not a member of the socio-cultural sectors that he or she is trying to represent does
not mean that he or she cannot assimilate aspects of their worldview and incorporate
them to the literary work. It is worth noting in this respect that the personae of
Guillen's poems criticize and denounce social behaviors of certain members of their
black lower-class community like real-life members of the represented sectors would
have done. Indeed, similar criticisms are found in the lyrics of popular rumba songs
like "La chismosa del solar" and "Hipocresi'a y falsedad" ("Cancionero rumbero"
10, 18). In addition, in Guillen's poem "Negro bembon," the criticism to the black
who refuses to work and lets his wife or girlfriend support him is a classic motif in
many rumba songs (Pasmanick 266).

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Miguel Amedo'Gomez

Another element of these poems that should be considered in relation to

Afro-Cuban oral discursive practices and oral texts is their employment of humor.
In poems like "Negro bembon," the speaker of the poem is using the racial epithet
of "bembon" partly in a humorous manner. This is most noticeable in the opening
stanza, in which the humor derives from the fact that the speaker asks the "negro
bembon" why he gets so angry when they call him "negro bembon," and yet he
addresses him as "negro bembon." But this is not racist humor of the kind that can
be found in the plays of the teatro bufo, for example. The speaker does not use the
epithet to denigrate the black character's physique because he also acknowledges the
aesthetic value of the shape of his lips in the line "si tienes la boca santa"
("you have a pretty mouth"). Thus, Guillen in this case is adopting the point of
view of a black from the black lower-class community who is employing an anti
racist discursive strategy that many such blacks would have used at the time.
Amongst blacks this type of humor could serve as a way of subverting the dominant
racist ideology by bringing excessive attention to these physical features so that
what becomes apparent is the absurdity of racial differences. Guillen's use of this
type of humor, thus, could be seen as the adoption of a discursive strategy that the
represented communities used to challenge dominant racist discourse.
With regard to this type of subversive humor, an interesting parallel can be
established between Guillen's "Negro bembon" and the popular salsa song
"El negro bembon," by the Puerto Rican songwriter Bobby Capo. The lyrics of this
song reflect a similar ambivalence between adoption of racist concepts on the
speaker's part and denunciation of racist discrimination. On the one hand, even
when the song is humorous, it does denounce the racist murder of the black
character. On the other hand, as in Guillen's poem, the speaker does use the
epithet "negro bembon" as if it were an acceptable term. But here, also like in
Guillen's poem, it is the repetition and over reliance on the epithet that actually
renders it ridiculous and pointless.

Mataron al negro bembon

Mataron al negro bembon
Hoy se llora noche y dfa
Porque al negrito bembon
Todo el mundo lo querfa
Porque al negrito bembon
Todo el mundo lo querfa.

Y llego la policia
Y arrestaron al maton
Y a uno de los politias
Que tambien era bembon
Le toc6 la mala suerte
De hacer la investigation.

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 The Afrocubanista Poetry of Nicolas Guillen

Y saben la pregunta
que le hizo al maton
"Porque lo mato
Diga usted la razon"
Y saben la respuesta
que le dio el maton:
"yo lo mate por ser tan
El guardia escondio
la bemba y le dijo:
"Esa no es razon
Para matarle."

At the level of worldview, Rama remarks upon the tendency of some narrative
transculturators to adopt the perspective of someone who believes in the magical or
religious beliefs of the socio-cultural sectors or communities that they are
representing. For example, in relation to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien afios de
soledad, Rama highlights the way in which the Colombian author describes
extraordinary events that defy reason as if they were completely normal, thus
incorporating the superstitious perspective of the rural Colombian communities to
which his characters belonged (45). Guillen's poem "La balada del giiije" constitutes
a similar adoption of the magical-religious perspectives of the represented Afro
Cuban sectors. In this poem, which was included in the 1934 collection West Indies,
Ltd., Guillen adopts the voice and perspective of a black woman who believes that
her child has been killed by a giiije, an evil, river-dwelling creature from Afro-Cuban
folklore. The poem is not written in Afro-Cuban phonetics. It is written in correct
written Spanish and it displays complex rhetorical figures:

Las turbias aguas del no

son hondas y tienen muertos;
carapachos de tortuga,
cabezas de ninos negros.

Bajo el grito de los astros,

bajo una luna de incendio,
ladra el rfo entre las piedras
y con invisibles dedos,
sacude el arco del puente
y estrangula a los viajeros.

iNeque, que se vaya el neque!

iGuije, que se vaya el guije!

Pero Chango no lo quiso.

Salio del agua una mano
para arrastrarlo... Era un guije. (93

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Miguel Amedo'Gomez

As in the poems of Motivos de son, in this poem there is no dual system that brings
attention to the presence of two discourses; that of the author and that of the
represented sectors. The voice that narrates the poem is the black woman's and it
is her belief system that guides the narration, as is the case with the "marvelous"
or "magical" perspectives of the represented communities in Cien anos de soledad.
But in addition to this transculturative feat, Guillen in this poem also abandons
the linguistic device of phonetically reproducing the speech of the represented
sectors, a device that betrays the long disproved assumption that orality can be
recreated through writing. Instead, Guillen adopts a language that does not avoid
the formal sophistication of written, erudite literature but he does not feel that he
has to make clear that this could not be the voice of the black female persona.
This could be seen as a recognition on Guillen's part of the cultural and linguistic
sophistication of the represented sectors; and also as a sign that he did not assume
that lower-class blacks did not make use of some erudite literary elements in their
oral forms.

Up to this point, I have explored some of the ways in which Rama's concept
of transculturation can help us to understand Guillen's incorporation of elements
from the represented culture into his poetry and the subsequent heterogeneity
that results from this. However, Rama's "transculturation" can also help us to
understand the limitations of Guillen's portrayal of the represented sectors.
As many black middle class families, Guillen's tended to follow the dominant
culture of European origins, so the poet did not grow up immersed in Afro-Cuban
traditions (Amedo-Gomez 54-57). Therefore, when Guillen, with the advent of
afrocubanismo in the 1930s started to look upon Afro-Cuban cultural forms as a
possible source of artistic inspiration, he was as much an outsider to Afro-Cuban
culture as the various white writers who took part in this movement, such as
Emilio Ballagas and Ramon Guirao, for example. Guillen's exterior perspective
must have limited his capacity to represent Afro-Cuban culture in some ways. Jose
Maria Arguedas's work provides a useful contrasting model. Arguedas (although
racially more distant from his subjects of representation than Guillen) acquired a
very thorough understanding of Quechua culture through his childhood experiences
growing up amongst Indians and also through extensive anthropological and
ethnographic research (Rowe x). This allowed Arguedas to employ at times a
narrative perspective based on essential cultural principles of Quechua culture.
A case in point are some of the descriptions of the world expressed by Ernesto, the
young protagonist and narrator of Arguedas's semi-autobiographical novel Los rios
profundos, which rely on animist beliefs and notions about the interdependence of
all the natural elements in Quechua culture (Rowe xxv-xxviii; Cornejo Polar,
Los universos narrativos 107). There is no evidence that Guillen ever tried to

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 The Afrocubanista Poetry of Nicolds Guillen

achieve a similar degree of immersion in Afro-Cuban culture. His poetry does not
reflect a deep knowledge of the characteristics of any particular Afro-Cuban
religion or culture.
It is also important to remember the point that Rama makes about Arguedas
regarding this author's own attitude towards the Quechua myths in Los rios profundos.
Rama explains that despite creating a narrator protagonist (Ernesto) who is
culturally Quechua and despite respecting and admiring Quechua culture, Arguedas
did not himself believe in the Quechua myths and magic that he represented and
utilized in his work. There were other ideological impulses that did not come from
Quechua culture at work in Arguedas's mind (Rama mentions the influence of
socialism in Arguedas's perspective, for example) and these were essential guiding
principles in the perspective that structures Los rios profundos (Rama 297-305).
This is a very important point to remember in any critical analysis of Guillen.
Like Arguedas, the Cuban poet did not himself believe in many of the religious or
magical concepts that he referred to or represented in his poetry. In the case of the
poem "La balada del giiije," for instance, one cannot assume that Guillen himself
believed in the existence of the guijes. As in Rama's analysis of Arguedas, thus,
analyzing the perspective that guides Guillen's poems will require examining the
influence of many ideological elements that do not stem from Afro-Cuban culture.
For example, the influence of artistic, political, and ideological movements at the
time, such as socialism, primitivism and afrocubanismo; in other words, ideological
influences that were particularly strong amongst Cuban middle class intellectuals at
the time, rather than amongst the represented Afro-Cuban sectors. As mentioned
earlier, an important ideological element would be Guillen's desire for a future of
black and white unity in Cuba, as well as his wish to express his mulatto identity
or validate it to some extent, as Benitez Rojo has suggested.
In any case, Guillen's poetry cannot be read as being exclusively a pure
Afro-Cuban expression, or as a mulatto or mestizo poetry that reflects the fusion
of the black and the white in Cuba. The conceptual framework provided by
Rama allows us to understand it as a space where elements of different origins
interact in a number of ways. Reading the poems in this way avoids the tendency
to gloss over differences that is part of the mestizaje vision of the poetry, which
tends to reduce all these processes to a single, unified mixture of black and white
cultural elements.
A thorough application of Rama's concept to Guillen's poetry would most
likely reveal that its elements from different origins are sometimes in conflict with
each other, whilst other times they are harmoniously intertwined. As in Rama's
analysis, this would make it possible to read the poetry as reflecting a wide array of
socio-cultural processes, other than just mestizaje. Sometimes the poems can

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Miguel Amedo'Gomez

reflect conflicts in Cuban society, the counter-hegemonic role that Afro-Cuban

culture plays in the development of Cuban culture, instances of cultural fusion, or
even a possible future racial-cultural harmony, which Guillen's poems symbolize.13
In addition, Rama's concept of transculturation allows us to better understand
the importance of Guillen in the wider context of Latin American literature.
The above analysis has shown that like the narrative transculturators, Guillen was
using popular cultural elements and European literary techniques to produce
poems of astounding originality in which Afro-Cuban cultural forms play an active
role, radically transforming a written genre of the dominant European tradition.

Notes

1 For a description and analysis of some of the main characteristics of this intellectual project,
see D'Allemand, Latin American Cultural Criticism.
I Some of the most significant works in the considerable bibliography of studies dealing with Rama's
concept of transculturation include the following: D'Allemand, Latin American Cultural Criticism;
de la Campa "On Border Authors and Transculturation;" Fernandez Retamar, "Comentarios;"
Pacheco, "Transculturaci6n;" Perus; Poupeney-Hart; Schmidt; Sobrevilla; Spitta; and Trigo.
5 There has been a recent tendency to deny this aspect of Rama's work. Critics like Cornejo Polar and
Schmidt have argued that Rama's "transculturation" tends to homogenize the socio-cultural differences
that are reflected in Latin American literary forms (Cornejo Polar, "Mestizaje;" Schmidt). This accusation
distorts one of the most important contributions of Rama's work. For a refutation of Cornejo Polar and
Schmidt's claim and an analysis of the ways in which Rama actually highlights the heterogeneity of
Arguedas's Los rios profundos, see D'Allemand, "La crftica latinoamericana."
4 On the afrocubanista poetic movement, see, for example, Arnedo-Gomez, Kutzinski, and Mullen.
5 The ideology of mestizaje plays a big part in the Cuban imaginary and, as in other parts of Latin
America, it has been used in nationalist discourse to promote ideas of racial harmony that gloss over
conflicts in Cuban race relations. Examples of critics who interpret Guillen's poetry as a reflection of
the harmonious mestizaje that characterizes Cuban reality can be found in Arnedo-Gomez 6-8.
'Carlos Pacheco focuses on three similar levels at which transculturative processes operate in
his analysis of orality in Latin American literary studies: language, themes and conceptual and
ideological level (Pacheco, "La oralidad" 28-30).
7See, for example, Fernandez Retamar, La poesia contempordnea 57-58.
8 See, for example, Fernandez Retamar, "Nicolas Guillen" 62; El son 57.
9 Walter Ong explains that in oral discourse words disappear as soon as they are uttered and
therefore the mind of the audient must move ahead more slowly, trying to keep focused on what
has already been said. This requires oral texts to have a relatively simple and direct style and it
also accounts for such features of oral literatures as redundancy and repetition (3940).
10On Guillen's use of son lyrics, see also Hidalgo, "Arquitectura rftmica."
II Angel Augier mentions other poems by Guillen that were set to music. "Negro bembon" and
"Songoro cosongo" were put to music by Eliseo Grenet, and "Tu no sabe ingle" by his brother Emilio
Grenet (Augier 149). Other examples can be found in Miller. Contemporary Cuban rap artists have
also turned Guillen's poems into rap songs. For an analysis of this phenomenon, see West-Duran.
12 See Arnedo-Gomez 44-54 for an analysis of the socio-cultural composition of the Cuban black
population at the time of Guillen's writing and for an analysis of the reasons why afrocubanista poets

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 The Afrocubanista Poetry of Nicolas Guillen

were specifically interested in representing the lowest sectors of the black population and their Afro
Cuban traditions.
13 The third section of seventh chapter of Rama's Transculturacion narrativa en America Latina, entitled
"Los niveles de las concepciones miticas," offers an analysis of Arguedas's novel as reflecting a number
of different processes of cultural interaction in Peruvian society.

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