Négritude and national identity in the poetry of Nicolás Guillén

It is clear that national iden­tity and négritude (“the affirm­a­tion or con­scious­ness of the value of black culture;…the cul­tural and polit­ical move­ment based on this.”) are a fre­quent pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of Guillén’s poetry, espe­cially his earlier works. How­ever, I will demon­strate in this essay through a close read­ing of poems from sev­eral of Guillén’s pub­lished col­lec­tions, along with an exam­in­a­tion of social, his­tor­ical, and crit­ical con­text, that the poet’s ideo­logy evolved over the course of his poetic career into a much broader social con­cern, encom­passing many types of inequal­ity through­out the world, and  often not focussed on race. Fur­ther­more, I will argue that Guillén’s sense of national iden­tity often seems incom­pat­ible with con­ven­tional négritude in its accept­ance of His­panic cul­ture in Cuba, and the rejec­tion of ‘Pan-African’ cul­ture that is so import­ant to other poets con­sidered to be part of the négritude movement.

In Guillén’s poetry, ‘négritude’ sig­ni­fies the need to recog­nise the role that African cul­ture plays in Cuban national iden­tity. Whilst he does not strive for a shared black iden­tity in the same way as many con­tem­por­ary négritude poets such as Aimé Césaire, he high­lights the import­ance of African cul­ture within Cuba, but without deny­ing the import­ance of His­panic influ­ence. He is, because of this, deemed by some crit­ics not to be a true pro­ponent of négritude. How­ever, in his first three col­lec­tions, Guillén repeatedly affirms an equal place in soci­ety for black Cubans, com­ment­ing not only on their cul­tural influ­ence, but also on their phys­ical beauty. He seems to share, at times, Lang­ston Hughes’s con­cern that black people are “ashamed of it [beauty] when it is not accord­ing to Caucasian pat­terns”, or that “The whis­per of ‘I want to be white’ runs silently through their minds.” In response to this, a num­ber of Guillén’s poems not only high­light ‘negro’ beauty (“la fuerte gra­cia negra”) but even go as far as to chas­tise those who don’t recog­nise that beauty in them­selves or oth­ers (“¿Por qué te pone tan bravo, / cuando te dicen negro bem­bón / si tiene la boca santa / negro bembón?”).

Guillén emphas­ises the import­ance of not judging beauty by Caucasian stand­ards in his use of pro­voc­at­ively sen­sual lan­guage, and in his ref­er­ences to the African con­tin­ent. This is never more obvi­ous than in his poem Mad­rigal, from the col­lec­tion Són­goro Con­songo. Guillén starts by describ­ing the phys­ical and more sexual beauty of the woman in the first two lines: “Tu vientre sabe más que tu cabeza / y tanto como tus muslos”, and con­tin­ues to praise her sen­sual form with the words “la fuerte gra­cia negra / de tu cuerpo des­nudo.” The lat­ter lines, though, belie a move­ment towards the less phys­ical side of her beauty, which cul­min­ates in the fin­ish­ing couplet: “y ese caimán oscuro / nadando en el Zam­beze de tus ojos.” The final couplet is dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent to the rest of the poem in that it is the first and only imagery employed. This new com­plex­ity of lan­guage in the final lines sug­gests that “la fuerte gra­cia negra” extends bey­ond the phys­ical, espe­cially as the eyes are tra­di­tion­ally sym­bolic of the soul, whilst the ref­er­ence to the Zam­beze draws the reader’s atten­tion back to the African ori­gin of the subject’s beauty. 

Another fea­ture of Guillén’s poetry which is char­ac­ter­istic of négritude is his use of lan­guage to sug­gest the rhythmic, African music. This has been termed jit­an­já­fora by crit­ics, and adds an obvi­ously African ele­ment to his poetry. He uses this tech­nique to great effect in his more folk­loric poetry such as ‘Sensemayá’ and ‘Canto Negro’, which (overtly at least) describe afro-cuban ritual, music and dance. In using jit­an­já­fora to trans­late African musical rhythm (for example with the words “Mayombe – Bombe – Mayombé” into a His­panic tra­di­tion and idiom, Guillén con­veys the sense of the mes­itzaje between African and His­panic cul­ture that is his vis­ion of Cuban national identity.

Guillén’s poetry, espe­cially in his earlier work, is hugely con­cerned with the cre­ation of a Cuban national iden­tity, tak­ing influ­ence from its African and His­panic roots, but at the same time dis­tinct and sep­ar­ate from these ori­gins. This iden­tity, which Guillén called Cubanía, is epi­tom­ised in the poem ‘La Can­ción del Bongó’, from Són­goro Con­songo: 

“En este tierra mulata
de africano y español
(Santa Bárbara de un lado
del otro lado, Changó)
siempre falta un abuelo
cuando no sobra algún Don
y hay títu­los de Castillla
con pareientes en Bondó.”

 Guillén refers to familial ties to emphas­ise the intim­acy of the rela­tion­ship between “africano y español” in Cuba, and uses the humour in the lines “siempre falta un abuelo / cuando no sobra algún Don” to pur­vey the ridicu­lous­ness of racial pre­ju­dice within the con­text of Cuban soci­ety, which is already so mixed. The care­ful pos­i­tion­ing of the sym­bols of Africa and Spain (“Santa Bárbara de un lado / del otro lado, Changó”) at the begin­ning and end of a couplet sug­gests that the essence of Cubanía lies some­where between the Span­ish and the African.

Per­haps the most strik­ing example of Cubanía in Guillén’s poetry is in his first col­lec­tion, Motivos de Son. Guillén employs two clear, styl­istic devices to give a sense of ‘Cuban­ness’: firstly, he imit­ates the rhythm of the Son, a tra­di­tional Cuban musical form, des­cen­ded from African music, which there­fore also stresses the import­ance of African cul­ture; secondly, his poems are writ­ten in the patois of the Cuban work­ing class, for example fea­tur­ing apo­cope, using slang (such as “plata” to mean money, or “santa” to mean sexu­ally allur­ing) and often repla­cing the let­ter ‘v’ with the let­ter ‘b’ in earlier edi­tions. This serves not only to lend a sense of social real­ism to Guillén’s poems by cre­at­ing a very spe­cific­ally Cuban con­text, but also to legit­im­ise and elev­ate the lit­er­ary voice of the work­ing class within Cuban culture.

It would be impossible to exam­ine Guillén’s ideo­logy (or that of any carib­bean poet) without broach­ing the sub­jects of colo­ni­al­ism and post­co­lo­ni­al­ism. Guillén’s most obvi­ous explor­a­tion of the effects of colo­ni­al­ism and post­co­lo­ni­al­ism is in his col­lec­tion of poems entitled West Indies Ltd. Indeed, the title itself points to the cap­it­al­ist indus­tri­al­isa­tion of devel­op­ing nations that is the hall­mark of a neo-colonial soci­ety, by pla­cing the suf­fix “Ltd.” after “West Indies”, sug­gest­ing that many people view this coun­try as no more than a busi­ness to be profited from. Guillén emphas­ises the fact that black people remain oppressed des­pite the abol­i­tion of slavery in many of the poems in this col­lec­tion, for example in the title poem, ‘West Indies Ltd.’ he describes the sub­ser­vi­ent syco­phancy of the dock work­ers: “Puer­tos que hab­lan un inglés / que empieza en yes y acaba en yes. / (Inglés de cicer­ones en cuatro pies.)” The par­en­thet­ical line makes spe­cific that which the two pre­ced­ing lines imply, by describ­ing the lan­guage spoken by the people as the port as being “en cuatro pies”, sug­gest­ing almost bes­tial sub­ser­vi­ence, and imply­ing that the lower classes are treated like anim­als by the Eng­lish speak­ing mas­ters. The sib­il­ant repe­ti­tion of the ‘yes’ sound in “Inglés…yes…yes…Inglés…pies” serves to fur­ther emphas­ise and imit­ate the fawn­ing beha­viour of the dock work­ers. Other poems con­tain strong images of slavery, such as ‘Bal­ada del Güije’: “Salió del agua un mano… / e hizo un nudo con las piernas / y otro nudo con los brazos”, obvi­ously refer­ring  to the ‘mon­ster’ of slavery, and the impris­on­ment and bond­age which it implied. 

Whilst Guillén’s poetry runs on a par­al­lel track to con­ven­tional négritude, his por­trayal of Cuban national iden­tity seems to clash with négritude on a cru­cial issue: the rejec­tion of colo­nial European cul­ture (in Guillén’s case Span­ish, but just as eas­ily French or Brit­ish) which is so crit­ical to the négritude put for­ward by the likes of Aimé Césaire and Leo­pold Sen­g­hor, is incom­pat­ible with Guillén’s afro-Hispanic Cubanía. Guillén him­self addressed this in vari­ous inter­views, say­ing that to pur­sue an agenda of négritude in post-revolutionary com­mun­ist Cuba was “a kind of racism”. Guillén’s brand of négritude strives to tran­scend race bar­ri­ers, cre­at­ing a single cul­ture of equal­ity, whereas con­ven­tional négritude cre­ates two equally valid but sep­ar­ate black and white cul­tures. The former is what Guillén and other Hispanic-american the­or­ists refer to as mes­tizaje, and in Guillén’s poetry it is plain to see this ideal­ised view of the com­plete destruc­tion of racial bound­ar­ies in poems such as ‘Bal­ada de los Dos Abuelos’. This poem, from the col­lec­tion West Indies Ltd. begins with a series of con­tra­puntal com­par­is­ons between the black and white abuelos: 

“Lanza con punto de hueso,
tam­bor de cuero y madera :
mi abuelo negro.
Gorguerra en el cuello ancho,
gris armadura guer­rera :
mi abuelo blanco.”

The second stanza ini­tially con­tin­ues this sep­ar­a­tion of the two abuelos, giv­ing each their own voice, speak­ing in altern­at­ing ter­cets. How­ever, half way through this stanza Guillén inter­rupts these voices and unites with “Qué de bar­cos, qué de bar­cos…”, the repe­ti­tion of this line and the fol­low­ing show­ing his exas­per­a­tion at the emphasis on sep­ar­a­tion between blacks and whites in Cuban soci­ety. He finally states “Yo los junto”, affirm­ing that in Guillén’s mind, noth­ing sep­ar­ates the abuelos. By describ­ing them (repeatedly) as “del mismo tamaño” in the final stanza, Guillén stresses once more that there is no dif­fer­ence phys­ic­ally between these men besides their skin col­our, and implies that there should be no social or eco­nomic dif­fer­ence either.

Guillén’s expan­sion to con­sider imper­i­al­ism in West Indies Ltd. was the begin­ning of a broad­en­ing of scope in his poetry to encom­pass not only Cuba, but also the Carib­bean, and even­tu­ally to address  issues of inequal­ity and human suf­fer­ing through­out the world; his poetry evolved from the national to the uni­ver­sal. This accom­pan­ied a shift in Guillén’s ideo­logy to emphas­ise dis­crim­in­a­tion on the basis of class rather than of race. In ‘’Mi Pat­ria es Dulce por Fuera”, from El Son Entero, the sub­ject has shif­ted from the “negro” or “mulata” of Motivos de Son to “hombre de tierra” and “por­di­osero”; fur­ther­more, Guillén recog­nises the renewed threat of neo­co­lo­ni­al­ism from the USA, and embeds it into the idiom of class divi­sions: “Hoy yan­qui, ayer española”. In jux­ta­pos­ing the two imper­i­al­istic powers which have dom­in­ated Cuba, Guillén also under­lines the fact that it doesn’t mat­ter who the rul­ing class is, be they Span­ish or Amer­ican; the divide is not primar­ily racial, but socio-economic. The idea that people are united by social stand­ing, rather than by race, is explored in ‘Dos Niños’, in which a black child and a white child are described as “ramas de un mismo árbol de miseria”.

This broad­en­ing of scope con­tin­ued, and was to an extent forced by his exile, which led Guillén to travel widely – an exper­i­ence that had clear reflec­tions in his sub­ject mat­ter. In his later works such as Elegías Guillén’s poetry not only has global scope, but even takes for­eign affairs as sub­ject mat­ter in poems such as ‘Tres Can­ciones Chi­nas’, and España. Poema en cuatro anguistas y una esper­anza, These later poems are often almost pre­script­ive of revolu­tion­ary polit­ics. This emphasis on polit­ics is the begin­ning of an increas­ingly com­mun­ist rhet­oric which per­vades Guillén’s later work, cul­min­at­ing in the col­lec­tion entitled Tengo, which was pub­lished five years after the Cuban com­mun­ist revolu­tion, and almost seems to verge on pro­pa­ganda. The poem ‘Cre­cen Altas Las Flores’ expli­citly men­tions McCarthy­ism, and Guillén describes the new liber­ties and free­dom that he asso­ci­ates with com­mun­ism, and the absence of mater­ial wealth in the title poem ‘Tengo’: 

“no coun­try,
no high-life,
no ten­nis y no yacht,
sino de playa en playa y ola en ola,
gigante azul abierto democrático”

The lan­guage and length of the final two lines sug­gests a more ful­filling exist­ence under com­mun­ism: the first three lines quoted, with their abrupt­ness and use of Eng­lish words, imply a sup­pres­sion of Cuban cul­ture, indeed a lack of art or cul­ture alto­gether; the fol­low­ing lines, which describe Cuba under com­mun­ism, are much more evoc­at­ive and lyr­ical, sug­gest­ing the sup­posedly expan­ded pos­sib­il­it­ies offered under the new gov­ern­ment, and emphas­ise this with the lan­guage used, such as the words “gigante”, “abierto” and “democrático”. 

An often neg­lected aspect of Guillén’s poetry is its use of very mundane and quo­tidian sub­ject mat­ter. Crit­ics rush to define Guillén as a polit­ical poet, or a poet of négritude, without refer­ring to his fre­quent treat­ment of the every­day in his poetry. The major­ity of Guillén’s poems use this set­ting to explore issues such as dis­crim­in­a­tion and poverty, for example in ‘Búc­ate Plata’, which describes the strains which poverty can put on rela­tion­ships (“pero amor con hambre, viejo, / ¡qué va!”), how­ever in poems such as ‘Bares’, Guillén it is the very sim­pli­city of the set­ting, it’s com­plete lack of polit­ical implic­a­tions, which Guillén praises: “una amistad de pueblo, sin rét­or­ica, / un ola de ¡hola! y ¿cómo estás?” It is unfair to cat­egor­ise Guillén so defin­it­ively as polit­ical, negrista or com­mun­ist when his poetry is not only quint­es­sen­tially Cuban, but ulti­mately universal.

From his begin­nings as an uncon­ven­tional pro­ponent of négritude, through his devel­op­ment of a mes­tizo Cuban national iden­tity, to his final satir­ical polit­ical poems, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Guillén’s poems, whilst often polit­ical, are deeply rooted in human emo­tion and exper­i­ence. To clas­sify Guillén as so many crit­ics have tried to do does dis­ser­vice to his broad appeal and wide cul­tural rel­ev­ance. I have not had oppor­tun­ity in this essay to cri­tique many of Guillén’s later poems, not­ably omit­ting El Gran Zoo, which demon­strates a fur­ther evol­u­tion of Guillén’s poetry into sharp, witty polit­ical satire. To describe négritude as a cent­ral theme in Guillén’s poetry is mis­lead­ing: He essen­tially rejects con­ven­tional négritude in favour of his own brand of Cubanía. This pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with national iden­tity is strong, but even this is not an immut­able fea­ture of Guillén’s work: the cent­ral under­ly­ing theme of Guillén’s poetry is social injustice, and its causes. It is the fight against social injustice which leads Guillén to exam­ine the pos­i­tion of black Cubans within their soci­ety, but also to con­tinue to exam­ine the issues which affect the work­ing and lower classes through­out the Carib­bean in West Indies Ltd., and finally through­out the world in his later works. What truly defines Guillén’s style is his abil­ity to use lan­guage and imagery to trans­late work­ing class, Cuban, or African exper­i­ence and cul­ture into the uni­ver­sal cul­tural idiom of poetry.

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