I have readAlejo Carpentier, El siglo de las luces (1962)
Cirilo Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés o la Loma del Ángel (1839) |
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I have written... nothing ...
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blood on sweet colours
It's August; the weather is pleasant; the days are hot, but the air is refreshed at dawn; several torrential rains have refreshed the green; there is still a couple of days for my next travel. I'm reading my old copy of Cecilia Valdés on the balcony of my Cracovian flat, trying to imagine a colonial Havana.
Such were the books of the early 19th century, in Europe and elsewhere. The Romantic culture was expansive, including also the Latin-American colonial societies. And it was the age of violent passions. So here is Cecilia Valdés, opening, in 1812, upon a childbirth, and bringing forth the history of the sin once again, till the final crime. In a sense, the daughter takes the revenge for herself, and for her mother, dead in her puerperium, mentally ill (or visionary) since her child had been taken from her to be christened in an orphanage. The mother was sacrificed in the name of hypocrisy, of social convention. Due to her social class, and more, due to her race. The daughter steps into the same river, but she doesn't die silently, humbly, in her puerperium, with a pious vision of the Virgin Mary in front of her eyes. To the contrary, she invests her passionate nature in hate and vengeance, giving a full-bodied Romantic figure.
I wonder how was the Havana of that time. Was it the city of houses painted in sweet, pastel colours, like in today's touristic imagination? That would form a notable contrast with the splash of blood.
What happened in Cuban literature later on? There had been things that turn around the question of race with more insistence than that early Romantic example. In the early 1930s, there was negrismo, a current in which Black people and black culture simply became trendy. There was Sóngoro cosongo by Nicolás Guillén (1931); later on, there was Lorca in Havana, also interested in Black culture. There was Fernando Ortiz, ethnomusicologist and author of the term transculturation, that was destined to make a career, after several decades, as a keyword of the moving cultural landscape that emerged with the globalization. There was also the negrismo of Lydia Cabrera, keen to fathom the depth of spiritual, religious experience. And to trace, as well, the ways how everything mixes up with everything into an all-encompassing, transcultural outlook, just like Congo and Lucumí (Afro-Cuban terms for Bantu and Yoruba) narrations of the beginning of the world.
And later on, the poetry of Gastón Baquero (1916-1997), his Memorial de un testigo (1966), where there is this chromatic vision again. A Cuban subject is with Raphael decorating the Stanze as a humble assistant preparing the colours; he is also present, by the way, serving food, keeping the candles, all across European history. And the same vision applies to music, as if Africa was the secret origin of everything, even of Beethoven's German dances. There was, in Cuba just like in Brazil, there was solidarity with Africa as a place of origin, etc. But overall, in spite of verses dedicated to Gabriel Okara, the bulk of erudition filling Baquero's poetry is not African. It is that colonial glancing back to Europe, the cumulation of everything.
Kraków, 12.08.2021.
Such were the books of the early 19th century, in Europe and elsewhere. The Romantic culture was expansive, including also the Latin-American colonial societies. And it was the age of violent passions. So here is Cecilia Valdés, opening, in 1812, upon a childbirth, and bringing forth the history of the sin once again, till the final crime. In a sense, the daughter takes the revenge for herself, and for her mother, dead in her puerperium, mentally ill (or visionary) since her child had been taken from her to be christened in an orphanage. The mother was sacrificed in the name of hypocrisy, of social convention. Due to her social class, and more, due to her race. The daughter steps into the same river, but she doesn't die silently, humbly, in her puerperium, with a pious vision of the Virgin Mary in front of her eyes. To the contrary, she invests her passionate nature in hate and vengeance, giving a full-bodied Romantic figure.
I wonder how was the Havana of that time. Was it the city of houses painted in sweet, pastel colours, like in today's touristic imagination? That would form a notable contrast with the splash of blood.
What happened in Cuban literature later on? There had been things that turn around the question of race with more insistence than that early Romantic example. In the early 1930s, there was negrismo, a current in which Black people and black culture simply became trendy. There was Sóngoro cosongo by Nicolás Guillén (1931); later on, there was Lorca in Havana, also interested in Black culture. There was Fernando Ortiz, ethnomusicologist and author of the term transculturation, that was destined to make a career, after several decades, as a keyword of the moving cultural landscape that emerged with the globalization. There was also the negrismo of Lydia Cabrera, keen to fathom the depth of spiritual, religious experience. And to trace, as well, the ways how everything mixes up with everything into an all-encompassing, transcultural outlook, just like Congo and Lucumí (Afro-Cuban terms for Bantu and Yoruba) narrations of the beginning of the world.
And later on, the poetry of Gastón Baquero (1916-1997), his Memorial de un testigo (1966), where there is this chromatic vision again. A Cuban subject is with Raphael decorating the Stanze as a humble assistant preparing the colours; he is also present, by the way, serving food, keeping the candles, all across European history. And the same vision applies to music, as if Africa was the secret origin of everything, even of Beethoven's German dances. There was, in Cuba just like in Brazil, there was solidarity with Africa as a place of origin, etc. But overall, in spite of verses dedicated to Gabriel Okara, the bulk of erudition filling Baquero's poetry is not African. It is that colonial glancing back to Europe, the cumulation of everything.
Kraków, 12.08.2021.
