My great-grandfather, Buenaventura Roig, was the
mayor of Utuado, a town in the mountains of Puerto Rico. When he died
in 1941, thousands of mourners flocked to his funeral. Almost fifty
years later, my father and I searched for the grave of Buenaventura
Roig.
We never found it. Instead, we wandered into a
remote cemetery, high up in the mountains, with row after row of stones
dated between 1950 and 1953. These were men killed in a faraway place
called Korea, among the 756 Puerto Ricans who died fighting for the
United States in the Korean War.
My father, Francisco Luis (Frank) Espada, was also
a Korean War-era veteran. He fought another war, on a different front,
refused service at a segregated diner in San Antonio, Texas, jailed in
Biloxi, Mississippi for refusing to sit at the back of the bus,
subjected to apartheid in the same country he was sworn to defend.
What the dead in that Utuado cemetery and my
father had in common is that they were born in a colony of the United
States, where the inhabitants cannot vote for President and have no
voting representation in Congress, yet can be drafted to fight and die
in the wars of the U.S. Puerto Rico is the oldest colony in the world:
four centuries under Spain and more than a century under the United
States. In five hundred and twenty-two years, Puerto Rico has not
determined its own destiny for five minutes.
In the early years of U.S. occupation, poet and
political leader José de Diego wrote, “Puerto Ricans do
not know how to say no.” And yet, he pointed out, “the
‘no’ of the oppressed has been the word, the genesis of the
liberation of peoples.” De Diego warned: “We must learn how
to say no.” He set the tone for a century of Puerto Rican poets
to come.
The poets of Puerto Rico have often articulated
the vision of independence, creating an alternative to the official
history of the kind propagated by occupiers everywhere. They have been
imprisoned for their words and ideas, despite the rhetoric of free
expression favored by the United States. These poets have taught the
next generation the arts of resistance, so that even poets living in
the United States and writing in English continue to clamor for the
island’s independence.
Puerto Rico is a political anachronism, a
throwback to the days of gunboat diplomacy and the handlebar mustache.
On July 25th, 1898, U.S. troops landed at Guánica and seized the
island as a prize of the Spanish-American War. General Nelson Miles, a
decade removed from the Indian Wars and the capture of Geronimo,
promised Puerto Rico “the blessings of the liberal institutions
of our government.” That government turned the economy over to
four North American sugar companies, brutally exploiting the labor
force; imposed a series of North American governors appointed by the
President; established a military occupation; forced English on the
public schools and the court system; and repressed the
independentistas, or pro-independence citizens of the island.
In the 1930s, the world sugar market collapsed,
and the economy of Puerto Rico collapsed with it. There was, as
historian Kal Wagenheim put it, “virtual starvation.” Julia
de Burgos, who would become Puerto Rico’s most beloved poet,
articulated the rage and bewilderment of the population when she wrote
(in the translation by Jack Agüeros):
Where is the little one who in rickets
unleafed his life?
Where is the wife who died of anemia?
Where is the vegetable patch she helped
plant, she dead today?
Where is the cow?
Where is the mare?
Where is the land?
The reference to “the little one” is
not a coincidence. Julia de Burgos was the eldest of thirteen children
in rural Carolina, Puerto Rico; she watched six of them die. The poet
proposed a revolutionary solution:
Sharpen
your hoe
whet
your machete
and
temper your soul.
Descend from the cliffs
and cross the fields drunk with cane.
Come
close!
(…)
Look at the sugar mills:
There is
your dead wife!
Contemplate the savage banquet of the
machines
grip your hoe
and proceed
and say: “Til I return!”
Come
close!
The movement for independence reached its peak in the mid-1930s with
the rise of the Nationalist Party, spearheaded by a fiercely brilliant
Harvard lawyer, Pedro Albizu Campos. Albizu led a cane-cutters’
strike in 1934, “a machete march/ of calloused hands and
feet,” in the words of committed Nationalist Julia de Burgos. Two
years later, Albizu and seven other leaders were rounded up by the U.S.
government and charged with seditious conspiracy. In fact, the U.S. law
of seditious conspiracy has been applied almost exclusively to Puerto
Ricans.
There were two trials in 1936. The first resulted
in a hung jury. The second resulted in conviction, but only after the
prosecutor hand-picked a jury of ten North Americans and two Puerto
Ricans. (The prosecutor, Cecil Snyder, flashed his list of jurors at a
cocktail party to none other than Rockwell Kent, the renowned North
American artist, who made this information public.) The defendants were
sentenced to terms ranging from six to ten years for, in essence,
conspiring to overthrow the government of the United States on a
Spanish-speaking Caribbean island. Albizu, the most dangerous man in
Puerto Rico, would spend most of the next three decades incarcerated.
The protests continued into the following year. In
Ponce, on Palm Sunday, 1937, police fired on a Nationalist Party march,
killing twenty-one people and wounding more than a hundred and fifty.
One independentista recalled: “My mother left in a white dress
and came home in a red dress.”
The uses and misuses of language are critical in
such a situation. The bloodletting was characterized on the front page
of The New York Times as a Nationalist “Riot.” However, an
American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, Arthur Garfield Hayes, conducted
his own investigation: the police, in fact, were the ones who rioted.
Hayes published his report in The Nation magazine, exposing the
incident that came be known as “La Masacre de Ponce,” or
the Ponce Massacre.
The collective memory of such events, repressed in
the interest of the colonial power, must be perpetuated by word of
mouth, by song, and by poetry. When Bolivar Márquez, a
Nationalist shot down and dying in Ponce, wrote in his own blood on the
sidewalk, Long Live the Republic! Down with the Assassins!, Julia de
Burgos recorded his dramatic gesture in a poem of the same name,
assuring him that, “Your blood is planted in a thousand living
signs.”
Not by coincidence, two of the eight defendants in
the 1936 trials were major poets: Clemente Soto Vélez and Juan
Antonio Corretjer.
The orphaned son of landless peasants, Clemente
Soto Vélez was born in the mountain town of Lares in 1905. Lares
was the site of a historic 1868 revolt against the Spanish, an
insurrection still celebrated today on the island every September 23rd
as the Grito de Lares, or Battlecry of Lares. Though the revolt failed,
the symbolism of Lares is deeply embedded in the national psyche,
“alive, “ as Julia de Burgos puts it, “in the great
and ferocious Puerto Rican lament/ that drips through the lips of the
crazy palm trees.” (This did not prevent the United States from
making the 4th of July an official holiday in Puerto Rico.) Soto
Vélez become the living link between 19th century resistance to
Spanish colonialism and 20th century resistance to North American
colonialism.
Soto Vélez co-founded a surrealist literary
movement called La Atalaya de los Dioses, or The Watchtower of the
Gods, in 1928. They made common cause with the Nationalist Party,
resulting in a fusion of the literary and political vanguards on the
island. As Soto Vélez expressed it, these poets committed
themselves to “making revolution from the podium.”
Clemente Soto Vélez was a visionary in
every sense. He was not only an independentista, but a socialist; not
only a socialist, but a surrealist who invented his own phonetic
alphabet, so no one lacking an education could misspell a word. Soto
Vélez was also the editor of the Nationalist Party newspaper,
called Armas, or Weapons. The slogan on the masthead read:
“Puerto Rican, the independence of Puerto Rico depends on the
number of bullets in your belt.” This statement, by itself, was
enough to earn Soto Vélez a six-year sentence.
His first book, Escalio, or Fallow Land, was
published in 1937, the same year the poet was shipped to a federal
prison in Atlanta, chained to fellow poet Corretjer for the voyage.
Escalio ends with a poem called “Solitude.” (I
co-translated this and the next three poems with Camilo
Pérez-Bustillo.)
To fly, alone, to fly
through the skies
of the most incendiary
imagination,
and so, alone, to create,
create the infinite
flight of life.
To think, alone, to think
as all the gathering armies
of creation think,
and so, alone, alone,
alone, to listen
for the original cause
trembling in the light.
To sing, alone, to sing,
as the atoms sing
the will into action,
and so, alone, to sing
as the true awareness
of energy tells it.
Solitude, solitude!
Nimbus of magnetism
balancing all things
within the life-force
that repels it—
solitude, solitude,
heart of life!
Indeed, Soto Vélez must have experienced
this sense of solitude at the Atlanta penitentiary. Forbidden to
correspond in any language but English, the poet—who was actually
fluent in English—refused on principle to correspond with anyone
at all. This spirit of defiance characterized him. When he was released
from Atlanta in 1940, on the condition that he not make any more
speeches demanding independence, Soto Vélez returned to Puerto
Rico and did exactly that. He was immediately re-arrested and served
two more years in prison at the penitentiary in Lewisburg,
Pennsylvania.
Soto Vélez was a master of paradox. He
addresses one such paradox in the next poem: the fact that he lost his
freedom for the love of freedom, that he was walled off from his island
for the sake of his island. The poet speaks of himself in the third
person, and visualizes himself as a letter of the alphabet, sitting in
isolation. This is poem #3 from The Wooden Horse.
I met him
living like an h incarcerated in the honey
of his bees,
but the bars of honey were bittersweet,
and because
he lost himself
in love with liberation,
and because he did not abandon
his love nor she her lover,
the earth for him is a hurricane of
persecuted stars,
since liberation cannot
love anyone
except whoever loves
the earth, with its sun and sky.
Upon his release in 1942, Soto Vélez
migrated to New York, where he edited and wrote for the weekly
publication Pueblos Hispanos, joined by fellow poets Juan Antonio
Corretjer and Julia de Burgos. Soto Vélez also served as an
organizer for radical Congressman Vito Marcantonio and the American
Labor Party. He was, above all, a teacher in a community denied any
access to its own history. Over the years, he mentored countless
writers, artists and activists, myself included.
He became the bridge between the independence
movement in Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican community on the U.S.
mainland. Far from being a Hispanophile—a charge sometimes
leveled at the Nationalists--the poet connected resistance to North
American colonialism in the present with resistance to Spanish
colonialism in the past, drawing parallels between the independence
movement and the battle of the indigenous Taínos to expel the
conquistadores from their island.
One such poem retells the fable of Urayoán
and Diego Salcedo. By the early 1500s, the Spanish in Puerto Rico had
acquired the reputation of being immortal. One cacqiue, or chieftain,
by the name of Urayoán decided to test this belief. When a
Spanish noble, Diego Salcedo, passed through Urayoán’s
village and demanded bearers to carry him across a nearby river, the
cacique instructed the bearers to dump Sr. Salcedo into the river and
hold his head under the water to see if he drowned. The bearers
conducted their experiment, and returned with their report: the Spanish
die too. This news triggered a revolt of the Taínos against
their Spanish overlords.
Though the uprising was crushed—the Spanish
were fond of hanging and burning Taínos in groups of thirteen,
in honor of Christ and the twelve Apostles—centuries later
Clemente Soto Vélez would cite Urayoán’s rebellion
as an example for the independence movement of his time. The poem is
#14 from The Wooden Horse, and again the poet refers to himself in the
third person.
I met him
offering
an island’s tribute to the dare,
shimmering
underwater, that puts the immortal
to the test, to death
by drowning, and the water washes up
this soaked discovery
like an expired flower;
blunders like claws of contempt drain blood
from the aboriginal tranquility
at the edge of gunpowder and the smoke of
humiliation,
but still the longing gleams
and moans in the meditation that drinks
the waters,
so the heart goes on
like an Indian harvesting
stars.
Soto Vélez understood that independence for
Puerto Rico was not the last step, but the first. In 1976, he published
an epic work called La Tierra Prometida, or The Promised Land. For the
poet, the promised land was not only an independent Puerto Rico, but a
socialist society. His passionately utopian vision saw Fanon’s
“wretched of the earth” as the very source of liberation,
even as life-force. This is an excerpt from poem #35, where he
expresses this vision through the simple and delicate use of anaphora:
the promised land
becomes
one
with the hands of the shunned peon…
with the hands of the peon
that
thunder in the cartilage of the future
with the hands
of the peon
that
push away
the goldsmiths of plunder
so that
the savored taste of knowledge
is not stolen…
with the hands
of the peon
that
are
rainshowers of uncommon poetry
with a fresh breeze of frenzy
perfect
like the violent disturbance of spirit
that
opens
doors wide
to the most
insubordinate sunrises
with the hands
of the peon
that
snatch
the future away
from what it would become…
with the hands of the peon
that
plant
sensations of sun
to
become
the nightingale
that does not
sleep
singing
to his existence…
with the hands of the peon
that
unionize
gerunds of flurrying verbs…
with the hands of the peon
that tame
the two-headed clouds
with the hands of the thinking peon
that
are
the backbones of the word
peon of the word
may the word
become
your servant
By poem’s end, the vision is clear: for
those who work with their hands, the key to liberation is literacy.
This is a revolution of and by the word. Perhaps Soto Vélez had
in mind the tabaqueros of his island, who listened to readers as they
rolled cigars in the factories and therefore made up the most radical
sector of the working class.
Clemente Soto Vélez was not only mentor,
but friend. My wife and I named our son after him. The poet died in
April 1993, and was buried in Lares, the town of his birth. When we
visited his grave the following year, we found it unmarked and
untended, an apt metaphor for the interment of the independence
movement to which he had dedicated his life.
He was the first of many fathers I would lose. I
wrote an elegy for Clemente Soto Vélez called, “Hands
Without Irons Become Dragonflies.” This is the final section:
Klemente, today we visit your island grave.
We light a candle for you in chapel
beneath a Christ executed with beggar's ribs
and knees lacerated red.
He is a Puerto Rican Christ.
In San Juan Bay, a tanker from New Jersey
bursts a black artery bubbling to the
surface,
so troops along the beach
in sanitary metallic suits
scoop the oil clotted into countless bags
while helicopters scavenge from above.
Lares now is the property of the state:
the tamarindo tree
planted for independence
in the plaza
blotched and gray, a rag
tied around one branch
like a tourniquet.
At the Lares cemetery nearly a year ago,
your box sank into a hole
brimming with rainwater.
Today the grave we find is desolate clay,
parched and cracking, a plank marked M75.
He is here: burial mound 75, says the
gravedigger.
So the poet who named us
suffocates in the anonymity of dirt.
This is how the bodies of dissenters
disappear,
beneath oceans coated with tanker's blood,
down to the caves where their voices still
drip,
as the authorities guarantee
that this stripped and starving earth is
not a grave,
and no one pays the man who carves the
stone.
We bury a book with you, pry red flowers
from the trees to embroider the ground,
negotiate the price and labor for a
gravestone
as the child with your name races between
the tombs.
Klemente, you must be more
than the fragile web of handkerchief
you left behind.
You claimed your true age
was ten thousand light years,
promised that you would someday explode
in atoms, showering down
on us in particles beyond the spectrum
of our sight, visible only to the deities
carved into the boulders by original people
slaughtered five centuries ago.
Now a dragonfly drifts to the forehead
of a vagabond declaiming groggy rebellion
in the plaza, insect-intoxicated,
protesting his own days blindfolded with
bars,
his faith louder than an infected mouth.
He says that he remembers you.
On the road to Lares, a horse without a rope
stands before the cars in glowering
silence,
infuriating traffic, refusing to turn away
his enormous head. We know
what the drivers must do to pass:
shout Viva
Puerto Rico Libre.
Hands without
irons become dragonflies,
red flowers
rain on our hats,
subversive
angels flutter like pigeons from a rooftop,
this stripped
and starving earth is not a grave.
Equally important was Juan Antonio Corretjer, the
other major poet imprisoned with Clemente Soto Vélez in 1936.
Corretjer came from Ciales, another mountain town with a revolutionary
history; his father and uncle took part in the Levantamiento, or
Uprising, of Ciales in 1898.
Corretjer envisioned a movement for a
“liberated homeland” that was not only working class, but
multi-racial, based on a shared history of labor and exploitation. This
was expressed in his epic ode, “Obao-Moin.” The translation
is my own:
Glory to those native hands because they
worked.
Glory to those black hands because they
worked.
Glory to those white hands because they
worked.
(…)
Glory to the hands that dug the mine.
Glory to the hands that fed the cattle.
Glory to the hands that sowed the tobacco,
the sugarcane, the coffee.
Glory to the hands that cut the grasses.
Glory to the hands that cleared the forests.
Glory to the hands that rowed the rivers
and the channels.
Glory to the hands that built the roads.
Glory to the hands that raised the houses.
Glory to the hands that turned the wheels.
Glory to the hands that drove the wagons
and the cars.
Glory to the hands that saddled and
unsaddled the mules and the horses.
(…)
For them and for their country, Praise!
Praise!
Corretjer served as secretary general of the
Nationalist Party, and like his compañero Soto Vélez,
wrote about the experience of incarceration, finding his voice in the
attempt to deprive him of it. This is from “Jail Cell,”
translated by Roberto Márquez:
Here is my foot, so small it cannot walk.
Here, without shadow, is my hand.
Here are my lips that neither kiss nor talk.
Here is my voice that dreams but lacks
command.
(…)
Here is a face gone pale for lack of sun,
A heart that beats but beats without a
pulse,
Slack, skinless vein, where life’s
lifeless contained.
Triumph of thought that will not be
detained:
Uplifted in your hand, your heart catapults,
Flowers over the wall, beyond where walls
can run.
Corretjer saw the North American occupation of
Puerto Rico in the larger context of empire, an empire that consumed
everything in its path and would eventually consume itself. From his
colonized island and his tiny jail cell, he visualized the eventual
self-immolation of U.S. militarism. This is from a later poem called
“The Convoy,” addressed to his wife Consuelo and translated
by Márquez:
Silence reigns inside the house.
But on the road
the military convoy roars its inferno.
Don’t wake, my love.
Let your breathing remain tranquil.
And your eyes, in the dark,
blue pursue their sleep.
Don’t wake.
Along the road the convoy’s
thunder. And inside
my fists the rage.
Don’t move.
Let your hand lie next to my heart.
The tyrant convoy
loaded down with guns and worms
is already heading into the darkness.
And the darkness has names:
Jungles, Vietminh, Andes,
Guevaras…
The convoy will collide against that
darkness.
Don’t wake.
This is a pause
for love. Just
A brief pause.
Corretjer returned to Puerto Rico after his
release from prison, and found himself embroiled in another insurgency.
In October 1950, there was an armed Nationalist revolt on the island,
called the Grito de Jayuya after the town where the uprising began. The
U.S. Air Force bombed Jayuya, and the rebellion was suppressed within a
week. Thousands were rounded up and jailed, including Corretjer and
another poet by the name of Francisco Matos Paoli.
Like Clemente Soto Vélez, Francisco Matos
Paoli was born in Lares and absorbed the insurgent spirit of that
mountain town, rising to a position of leadership in the Nationalist
Party. Like Soto Vélez, he would struggle against isolation and
silence in prison; unlike his fellow poet, he would lose the struggle.
Matos Paoli went mad in solitary confinement, scribbling on the walls.
He was ultimately pardoned five years later.
A Christian mystic, Matos Paoli would publish his
dreamlike Song of Madness in 1962. Here is an excerpt from that long
poem, translated by Frances Aparicio:
Now my
feet become dust in the foam.
And the obscure night
erases Spring,
robs me of the full moon of Lares,
urges the orphan in me
to abandon the golden bread
of all constellations.
It so happens that I am mad.
I return to my mother, the mystic,
crowned with the poor
in that sealed, spreading
penumbra of my village.
(…)
If you want to call me madman,
I will not oppose the affront.
I know I
am the small prisoner,
the unforgettable vileness of the shadows,
the conquered yet calm man,
the slave who forgives the light.
I trust those simple men
who drift toward
the iridescent sea.
I sell
my skin,
and who will buy me?
(…)
If you
want to dent my sword,
go ahead.
If you
want to steal my poems,
go ahead.
If you
want to mistake me for
a crazy John Doe,
go ahead.
(…)
But you cannot take from me
the delirious feeling that draws me to
the fallen dahlias…
There were other forms of punishment. Whenever
Juan Antonio Corretjer was not incarcerated, he was pursued
relentlessly by the FBI. They would have one final confrontation in
February, 1984. The poet was invited to Boston by a coalition of Latino
groups. (I was one of the organizers.) He was slated to speak at a
church in the Puerto Rican community, and on the campus of Harvard
University.
On the morning of his first scheduled appearance,
nine FBI agents, guns drawn, surrounded the house where the poet was
staying. They arrested his host, a young musician by the name of
Mariano Viera, and accused him of being somebody else: Julio Rosado, a
fugitive and member of the FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación
Nacional), an underground group charged with numerous bombings in the
U.S., including one that resulted in several deaths. We were
emphatically not FALN, but no matter: our office phones were
wiretapped. The authorities made no distinction between bard and
bomb-thrower.
The FBI established that Viera was not Rosado, but
insisted on holding him anyway, moving their prisoner from one jail to
the next as his lawyers scrambled to find him. Viera turned out to be
claustrophobic, and suffered a breakdown in jail, an eerie echo of
Matos Paoli’s breakdown years before.
Corretjer was seventy-six years old, with serious
coronary problems. He was shaken by the chaos swirling around him, yet
insisted on speaking at the church and on campus. The poet’s
health collapsed in Boston. He returned home to Puerto Rico, and died
less than a year later. His daughter Consuelito always maintained that
the FBI hounded him to death. Mariano Viera returned to the island,
where he was institutionalized. The organizations that brought
Corretjer to Boston, plagued by rumors of an informer in their midst,
never worked together again.
If this seems like a description of
McCarthyism—decades after Joe McCarthy disappeared from the
political landscape—then it must be understood that McCarthyism
got a head start in Puerto Rico, at least for the advocates of
independence. In 1948, two years before McCarthy’s notorious
claim that the State Department was “infested with
communists,” “La Ley de la Mordaza”—the Law of
the Muzzle—criminalized dissent, making it a felony to
“foment, advocate, advise or preach, voluntarily or knowingly,
the necessity, desirability or suitability of overthrowing, destroying,
or paralyzing the Insular government.” Over the years,
independentistas were jailed, beaten, blacklisted, fired, slandered,
spied upon or simply driven mad. Some felt they had no alternative but
to take up arms.
This next poem of mine was written about an
artist-friend on the island, and a case of guilt by association:
The Lover of a
Subversive is Also a Subversive
For Vilma Maldonado Reyes
The lover of a subversive
is also a subversive.
The painter's compañero was a
conspirator,
revolutionary convicted
to haunt the catacombs of federal prison
for the next half century.
When she painted her canvas
on the beach, the FBI man
squatted behind her
on the sand, muddying his dark gray suit
and kissing his walkie-talkie,
a pallbearer who missed
the funeral train.
The painter who paints a subversive
is also a subversive.
In her portrait of him, she imagines
his long black twist of hair. In her
portraits
of herself, she wears a mask
or has no mouth. She must sell the canvases,
for the FBI man lectured solemnly
to the principal at the school
where she once taught.
The woman who grieves for a subversive
is also a subversive.
The FBI man is a pale-skinned apparition
staring in the market.
She could reach for him
and only touch a pillar of ash
where the dark gray suit had been.
If she hungers to touch her lover,
she must brush her fingers
on moist canvas.
The lover of a subversive
is also a subversive.
When the beach chilled cold,
and the bright stumble of tourists
deserted, she and the FBI man
were left alone with their spying glances,
as he waited calmly
for the sobbing to begin,
and she refused to sob.
In Puerto Rico, as in any colony, there is change without change. In
1952, the island became a US Commonwealth or “Free Associated
State,” with its own constitution, which was identical in every
respect to the United States constitution, and subject to the approval
of the US Congress. Puerto Ricans could now exercise a limited form of
self-government, including the election of their own governor. The
island would be represented in Congress by a non-voting Resident
Commissioner, which is still the case.
However, in every way that
mattered—politically, militarily, and economically--the U.S.
continued to hold the reins. The status of Puerto Rico had not
fundamentally changed. Puerto Ricans kept paying the “Blood
Tax,” as the draft was called, loading the graves of Utuado with
Korean War dead. Nationalists kept going to jail; their last desperate
act came in 1954, when four Nationalists opened fire on the U.S. House
of Representatives, wounding five Congressmen. By the time Puerto
Ricans were allowed to vote on their status, in 1967, the independence
movement was no longer a threat to the status quo.
Repression continued even after the Nationalists
were neutralized. In July 1978, two young independentista activists
were lured to a government radio tower at Cerro Maravilla and executed
by a police firing squad. This incident, and the coverup that followed,
provoked outrage on the island across the political spectrum. In 2005,
Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, founder of the clandestine militant
organization known as the “Macheteros” (or Cane-Cutters),
was shot to death by the FBI, again triggering outrage, in no small
part because the killing took place on September 23rd: the Grito de
Lares.
In the United States, many still cling to the
illusion that the U.S. is not, and has never been, an imperial power.
Therefore, by definition, Puerto Rico is not a colony. North Americans
have internalized the mythology that Puerto Ricans do not desire or
deserve self-government. Somewhere beneath lurks the assumption of
racial and cultural inferiority.
This is true even on the left. Perhaps the cause
of Puerto Rican independence is not sufficiently romantic. To
paraphrase Earl Shorris: it’s like having dinner with the
janitor. There are no peasant armies in the hills, no coffee beans at
the café on the corner. There is only the ugliness of poverty,
and the colonialism that spawned it.
The same mentality assumes that the Puerto Rican
economy must benefit from U.S. control. Yet the per capita income is
less than half that of Mississippi, the poorest state in the U.S., and
the official unemployment rate is in double digits. Puerto Rico is
still a colony, not because of North American benevolence, but because
the island remains a captive market for U.S. goods, a source of cheap
labor for U.S. corporations, and a haven for U.S. military bases.
There is still an independence movement, and there
is still protest. In May 2003, a campaign of civil disobedience forced
the U.S. Navy to cease war games and live target practice on the
inhabited offshore island of Vieques, which the independence movement
had condemned since 1941.
The poets, being poets, still won’t shut up.
The compulsion to tell this story transcends the borders of geography
and language. Jack Agüeros was a Puerto Rican born in East Harlem,
who wrote in English; nevertheless, he would sum up five centuries of
Caribbean history, the frustration of being the world’s oldest
colony, and the failure to rebel in “Sonnet After Columbus,
II.” Note the metaphor of paper, representing dollars, contracts,
and laws. The reference to the Boston Tea Party and the American
Revolution in the last line brings the historical argument full circle.
We watched the stiff starched sails, the
cotton and wood
On the scale of little boy boats blow onto
our shore:
Our burned out tree canoes were larger and
sleeker.
The Caribbean was quiet, tranquil as
ourselves, but
These men were all more hellish than any hurricane,
And nothing good came after, government
after government,
English, Dutch, Spanish, Yankee, twisting
the tongue,
Jail some, buy some, scare some, dope some,
kill plenty.
Do you know the names of the ones in jail or why?
Sailed in our bays and put paper feet on our throats,
Paper hands in our pockets, papered the
trees and land,
Papered our eyes, and we still wait
wondering when.
As for the names of the incarcerated? You
and me.
Charge? Not throwing tea in the bay.
In another sonnet, Agüeros re-imagines the
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to reflect the reality of Puerto Rican
colonialism in “Sonnet for Ambiguous Captivity:”
Captivity, I have taken your white horse.
Punctilious
Death rides it better. Dubious, I try to
look you in
your eye. Are you something like old-time
slavery, or
are you like its clever cousin,
colonialism? Are you
the same as “occupied,” like
when a bigger bird takes
over your nest, shits, and you still have
to sweep? Or
when you struggle like the bottom fish
snouting in the
deep cold water and the suck fish goes by
scaled in his
neon colors, living off dividends, thinking
banking is
work? Captivity, you look like Ireland and
Puerto Rico!
Four horsemen of the apocalypse, why should anyone fear
your arrival, when you have already grown
gray among us
too familiar and so contemptible? And you,
Captivity, you
remind me of a working man who has to be
his own horse.
The new generation continues to write in this
tradition. Aracelis Girmay—among the most talented of these
younger poets—picks up the motifs of imprisonment, survival and
resistance in her poem, “Then Sing:”
Now what do you do now
with a chain around your foot
or the doors all shut & the phone-wires
cut?
Make
music with the chain,
make raw
the ankle.
Locked, locked, locked & thrown away.
Fall asleep, fall asleep, Houdini, they say,
we’ve knocked down all your trees
& Albizus.
(…)
It’s prison,
I know they tell you.
You will not be anything, you will not even
grow.
Grow anyway.
They will have you believe
that your body is sick.
Tell it Live.
When they take away the sunlight,
even the sunlight, be
the sunlight.
Let them tell you
you cannot sing in hell, good man.
Then sing.
Five hundred and twenty-two years of colonialism
would be enough to discourage even the most ardent poet, prophet or
visionary. Yet, there is reason to hope that Puerto Rico will one day
be an independent and truly democratic nation.
Words have wings. They fly, across time and space,
across oceans and centuries. Sometimes they fly from the dead to the
living. Some years ago in San Juan, I came across a festival organized
by Claridad, the island’s socialist newspaper. Roy Brown, a
singer and guitarist long associated with the cause of independence,
was singing the words to a poem by Juan Antonio Corretjer, and
thousands were singing along from memory, some in tears, verse after
verse that somehow slipped through the keyhole in the jailhouse door
and took wing.
Ultimately, for independence to happen, Puerto
Ricans must reject the empire’s definition of Puerto Ricans and
do battle with the colonized self. The poets will be there. Julia de
Burgos addressed both the empire and the colonized self when she wrote
(in this translation by Agüeros):
When the multitudes shall run rioting
Leaving behind ashes of burned injustices,
And with the torch of the seven virtues,
The multitude will run after the seven sins,
Against you and against everything unjust
and inhuman,
I will be in their midst with the torch in
my hand.