Copyright © 2017 by Victor Hernández Cruz
Cover art © Alena Gallagher
Cover design by Patricia Capaldi
Book design by Rachel Holscher
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Cruz, Victor Hernández, 1949–, author.
Title: Beneath the Spanish / Victor Hernández Cruz.
Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017000412 | ISBN 9781566894890 (paperback) | ISBN 9781566895057 (eBook)
Classification: LCC PS3553.R8 A6 2017 | DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017000412
Special thanks to Felix Cortes in the preparation of this text.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
To Rosalie Roman y Tony Figueroa
To our shared migration
And the many cups of cultura and
History we have drunk together.
Abrazos y amor
“Las épocas viejas nunca desaparecen completamente y todas las heridas, aún las más antiguas, manan sangre todavía.”
—Octavio Paz, El Laberinto de la Soledad, 1950
“Prejudice and partisanship obscure the critical faculty and preclude critical investigation. The results are that falsehoods are accepted and transmitted.”
“When a nation has become the victim of a psychological defeat, then that marks the end of a nation.”
—Ibn Khaldun, Al-Muqaddimah, 1377
“Writing is one of the most ancient forms of prayer. To write is to believe communication is possible . . .”
—Fatima Mernissi, Moroccan social writer and ardent feminist with an Islamic and secular orientation.
She passed away in the days when I was completing this book. Peace be upon her soul.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Proloco
TUMBADORA
Primer Encuentro entre Dos Mundos
Cuban Taino Cacique Meets Spaniard and the Translator
Santo Domingo/Puerto Rico: New Dance Commences
Ay Bandito, Qué Vaina
Atlantis/Mu
Bajo Mundo
Hispano Caribbean/America Latin
Childhood in the Latin Caribbean
San Agustín/Florida
More Nuevo Mundo
What Is the Lower East Side
Lower East Side Red Brick Blues
New Orleans y Todo Ese Jazz
Motion in the Silence
Egypt
Sopdet
Tobacco-Guayaba y Café
Son las Tres del Café
Chocolate
Choco-Arte
San Juan Bautista
Puerto Rico
Borges y Nabokov
Lectura
Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca
Cante Jondo
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha
Reading Japanese in Morocco
Chuchuki
Chess
Ajedrez
Spanish Language
Latin Boogaloo
Sueños
WHO/WHAT/WHERE
The Costumes of Peasant Folk
Future Mountain
Latin American Dance
La Pachanga
Funder Acknowledgments
Proloco
Some of the poems in this volume were discovered in Puerto Rico and others in New York but were elaborated and expanded in the country of Morocco, North Africa, thus below the Gibraltar stretch and the Mediterranean Sea that caresses the coast of Spain, below the pressure of all those flickering Spanish tongues, beside the Arabic and the French sounds—through it all I produce my Americanized English language writings. English settled into my youthful mind below the phonetics of my family Spanish tongue, thus both my languages are stained. Because English is not the local language in my adopted Morocco, my English stands up inside and becomes a private code. I have been outside the continental United States since 1989 when I moved back to Puerto Rico, and now I reside in Morocco with my family. I am saved from or out of the reach of American commercial propaganda. The world is made up of beautiful differences of total inequalities awesome and tormenting. Everything is awkward and beautiful. My mestizo cubist fragmentation floats like a painting through and from the deformity; outside of history, migratory pirates of contraband. I hope my poems are communication between the fragments. In a real sense I am country-less, yet through my mestizo Caribbean culture I become a citizen of the world, through blood and communion I grow identity branches, various, through words, music, and experience, this life is an adventure. I walk with it. Given Puerto Rico’s impossibility to become a politically sovereign nation, my true birth nation has no passport; I remain an American continental on loan, at loose, improvising within Latin jazz. These poems are the wonderings of that spirit. I was born in an area of the planet Earth and now I am in another region of the planet. Earth? It should be called Aguatica; there is more water than soil here. What can we do with the depths and horrors of history ’cept to ride them all out like a wave into creativity and dialogue springing into proliferation?
The prose pieces are in the spirit of notes; they throw light upon the poems and are pregnant with personal biography. These poems and prose interludes are in English with occasional Spanish words, which is how my mind works, bilingually, constantly translating pensive Spanish into English and vice versa.
This makes writing for me an act of translation, of the imagination and its linguas, a desgeografication, crumbling shapes like a cubist work patching up continents; we are still in the age of discovery in the constant search of the connections. Concentration is difficult for many people in this age of electronic gadgetry. Open the books up which are made of tree wood, sit down, and read this gathering of fragments, thinking, and dancing history to make lingual bridges of communication.
Victor Hernández Cruz
Kenitra, Morocco, 2016
TUMBADORA
North Africa/Caribbean Nota Pasafu I
A la memoria de Tata Güines
Listening to Tata Güines
Standing on my Salé balcony
Better I am living Tata
The beats along with my heart
Drinking sound digest shapes
Sparkling thought images
Like a deck of cards
Spinning pressed by a thumb/
Tata self-educated which is
Also my case,
He heard the radio in his
Havana Güines barrio,
Listened to the tumba players
On the street, ask questions
He lived the music.
As I read books and rebelled against
Schools,
Words were in books
What I wanted to feel
Was in books
And the Conversations with elders,
The oral voice.
Music was the ether of youth
The background ocean full of dancing fish,
Rhythm collaborated with my brain
Cells bouncing fast scattered images
perceive it now in Tata Güines’s solos,
City flying the current with
A tropical river that surrendered
At my feet the past
Shrimps holding up pictures
Of blue wooden houses
With zinc rooftops,
Huge sky blue.
Tata hits the skin
His fingerprints mark
Language in the sky,
To blossom in the Congo,
The tumba pitch falls into
Slow drag
When he rubs
Hide scratching out mountain dirt
His nails animal where it roamed
Righteous beating, a whining
Like beg, laborious pain
Birth.
The cabinet is a montage
Of wood-tight animal,
Sealed like leather zapatos
Tata rumbas and I grow shoes
Foot shakes insects off
Goat flesh stretched
Screams colors of tan tinges
How the cow gave milk,
Tata zapatero
Make my zapatillas
Resbalosas upon the loseta
Glittering/
Below on the street two guys Gnawa
Show up
Before vision I had heard
The metal castanets approaching
Dressed Mayan/or Inca
beyond kaleidoscope colors,
They dance the morning
Café to elevate,
Tata’s manos weave
colors merge so many Africas
Meet
Open book of Alejo Carpentier
On Cuban music
Immense rhythmic melodious
Till horizon meets historic cotorra
Scribbling sky danzón
My foot wants to danza South
Sahara down
Tata drumming palms upon
Cowhide
Some drums mule skin
Has been said water buffalo,
Goat tumtu sounds make
A fist garden
Floreos crash into
The Gnawa clank.
Dr. Fernando Ortiz
Researched nkongo Bantu-Congolese:
Conga a dance a circle,
Makuta cows charge into
The rhythm
Listen how distance condenses
Throw step and bop head
I am below the Niger River
Scribble Calligraphy on the Sahara sand
Moving down the wind comes
And away blow designs.
My country is rhythm
The only true legislation,
Political status pales with the cadence.
Dance is
The nature of rolling mountains
Running towards the coast
To jump into the water
Government is the clave,
Adal Maldonado took my
Passport photo out of focus
Similar to the nation
But in tune with Mambo
The secret codes upon document
The camera note:
“Accidental products
Of distraction
And forgetfulness
Will make you Mambo again”
The photographer scribbled in
A note twenty years ago
When we were different images
Both
Trying to enfoco Foco it
Becoming enfoco lens out
Focus out of the blur
Enfoco it Que se Foco,
Photography is a squish
In the darkness of the cave
The silence between
Spaces of limestone
Total obscurity
Snaps/What is in the light.
What is Tata doing
Slow finger-popping
The cowhide
Discussing something
With Chano Pozo
Tata was a kid once
Jumped up on Havana stage
Chano there
Put his hands on the
Tumbadora across from
The composer of:
“Ariñañara”
Started to slap it
Um, kaslap—kaslap.
The elder saw him right away
Saw what he heard, the color
Of the flowers sprouting.
As I listen the air Caribbeans
Now late February
In the depth a motion of Spring
Moisture warm waves of flesh
Skin on skin
Tata Güines maestro classic
Ever to tumba the dora
upon the street of forever
Sun beats. Sabora.
Primer Encuentro entre Dos Mundos
America is a linguistic mistake from its beginning. It comes from Americus Vespucci, but some speculate that it may be the Nicaraguan tribe the “Amerriques,” research Jules Marcou, more recently the Caribbean writer Jan Carew, lots of material still to be cut, food for thought. Did Vespucci change the ortografía of his first name to fit closer to Amerriques? Columbus and Vespucci supposedly visited this part of Nicaragua, which was rich with gold. Air of forgery, fraudulent as most history; you have to grow up to decipher the embroidery of the thieves. The first name Americus is masculine, but Martin Waldseemüller, the mapmaker, in 1507 chose the feminine orthography: America (a trans gender translation) to name the new continent, as all the other continents had female names. And who were these “indios” out of India, the error persists. Cristóbal Colón, Englishly known as Christopher Columbus, was born either somewhere in Spain or, say many, Geneva and made his way to the peninsula, some speculate him Jewish, a good friend of mine, José Sandoval Sanchez, Arabist scholar from Cadiz, Spain, told me once as we walked the streets, callejuelas of the old Medina of Sweka in Rabat, Morocco, that Colón was a Jew from Menorca, that he took off with another Spaniard who was to be his translator who was also Jewish, Luis de Torres, hidden actual name Yosef ben HaLevi HaIvri, born in the somewhere of the Jewish Diaspora that was Spain, perhaps Murcia. The translator spoke Aramaic, Arabic, and Hebrew, Arabic was the intellectual language of medieval Spain, and who knows if elsewhere they would encounter other Arabic-speaking enclaves or one of the lost tribes of Israel. Could the first nonnative words spoken in the New World have been “Salam alaikum” uttered by Luis el traductor as he approached the Taino chief. Columbus had run into King Ferdinand and Isabella la Católica in Granada, Andalucía, when the Arab caliphs were in ceremony with them handing them deeds of the city, they had just been conquered, giving them the keys to the Alhambra palace locale from which the Christians would administer the re-conquest. Into that drama there was el marinero Cristóbal Colón in the crowd, present, scoping the whole of history, mingling with the people, Muslims and Christians. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were cousins, no big thing in the Muslim society of Andalucía in those days where this type of pairing was common, rampant, cultivated by the families throughout the region. Listen, the guitar strings pluck the full moon, the fingernail made of seashells, weaving poetry the troubadours they went singing all the way to the doors of Europe, low Bordeaux, poets dressed like Moros (Moors), Troubadour poesía an approximation towards the lady, praises to the feminine, the gift of Andalucía to the world, serious research tells it influenced the first motions of lyric poetry in Europe. Cordoba biggest city in medieval Europe, did it swing 300,000 inhabitants, streets paved, oil lamp-lit lights with fires under benches, breezes caressing casual readers of books lounge upon benches within park garden walkways, flowers, orange trees citrus fragrance afloat. Public baths where perhaps philosophers Ibn Rushd and Maimonides bathed in the public bathhouses steam sauna heat opening pores elongated drifting conversations through systems of possible ideas. Ibn Hazm perused his intuitions,
researching his text on love and lovers, El collar de la Paloma: Tratado sobre el amor y los amantes, emotions, loves, lives floated the gardens of his thoughts through the city adorned of balcony flowers. Was Colón a lost Cohen-Kohan, all these names covered, hidden through so much obsession with purity of blood spread in a peninsula of turmoil. Did they mean one single Catholic outlook, purity of religion or purity of ethnicity? Blood what means blood. Historian J. H. Elliott hit the nail on the head when he described this mad obsession of Ferdinand and Isabella, a project he described as a “ruthless, ultimately self-destructive quest for an un-attainable purity.” King Ferdinand and Isabella la Católica, kissing cousins, went off the limb now that Granada was back under Christian rule, they were determined to bring all creatures in the peninsula to bow to the Catholic cross, thousands were burned at the stake, public barbecue, the Roman spirit, Latin joy of tribal spectacle, lions chewing people to shreds, Latins what gladiator spectacle put people to fight, Romans, Latin’s what, pelea, let’s go see. People must’ve been hiding in closets, burning family tree records; even if you become Christian, suspect still you were, you had to do the wipeout, people burning letters, birth certificates, private fires late at night in backyards, taking walks through country roads with bundles, bush fires, erasing identity, destroy all identifying documents, hide who you are, who you had been. Camouflage. Spain went from a more or less place of religious tolerance to fanaticism, as King Ferdinand and his cousin went Catholic gung ho. So who was it that came on the voyages of explorations? Those that had to leave, pursued by the Inquisition. We were discovered not by Spain as such, but by two Kingdoms, Aragon and Castile; a unified Spain was not yet formed. The majority of settlers showed up into the Caribbean place of the first settlements in the new old world, first it was Santo Domingo, named also Hispaniola, consequently San Juan Bautista, renamed later Puerto Rico, Havana, Cuba, aligned next. Cruelty piled upon a plate of custom, masses individuals unaware of the pain of others. To perceive the cruelty inflicted upon others you have to have a sense of imagination, ah the hurt of others.
What was that original afternoon of spread blue sky: fluffs of white cloud, brisa, nakedness, initial encounter, flesh standing next to enclose torsos, apparel, strangers stench funk from medieval Europe, initial impact; they were in a village, a yucayeque in Taino land, for the Spaniards’ native hospitality opened up, waving of hands, with tree branches drawing pictures on the dirt earth, more hand waves, an embrace, the strangers were escorted to bohíos, they were well-treated guests for four days and nights, they got back to the mariner Colón waiting back on the ship offshore, pacing back and forth. They spoke nothing of the hospitality but told of observing the gold they beheld shimmering upon bowls of gourds upon a walk to a river. Gold, oro shining, the colonization of America had begun. It was the tip of the Middle Ages, and in those days gold could talk, as today it still does. Oro. Money, pasta, flus. History dances to gold.