1DQF\0RUHMRQ7UDQVFXOWXUDWLRQ7UDQVODWLRQDQGWKH3RHWLFVRIWKH&DULEEHDQ

$ODQ:HVW

&DOODORR9ROXPH1XPEHU)DOOSS$UWLFOH

3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
'2, KWWSVGRLRUJFDO

)RUDGGLWLRQDOLQIRUPDWLRQDERXWWKLVDUWLFOH
KWWSVPXVHMKXHGXDUWLFOH

Access provided by Latin American Studies Association (21 Oct 2016 15:08 GMT)
 CALLALOO

NANCY MOREJÓN
Transculturation, Translation, and
the Poetics of the Caribbean

by Alan West-Durán

In an essay published several years ago I described Nancy Morejón as the “human
and poetic embodiment of the word transculturation” (West 13). Whereas most
criticism on Morejón’s work understandably focuses on her poetry, this article will
explore Morejón as an essayist and thinker on transculturation, as seen in her book on
Nicolás Guillén and other works (Morejón 1982, 2002). Morejón’s knowledge and
translation of Francophone Caribbean writers (Depestre, Glissant, Césaire, Laraque,
Roumain) is a central but often overlooked element in understanding Caribbean
transculturations.1 In addition, as a translator of Morejón, I emphasize the link
between translation, transculturation, and a philosophy of listening.
Transculturation is a form of historical and cultural translation that ingeniously
fashions a poetics of historical understanding. Transculturation, often under histor-
ical circumstances of brutal adversity, is a practice of cultural creativity, a performa-
tive philosophical reasoning, and an act of social resistance. Through transcultura-
tion, the Caribbean, and more specifically Cuba, have created plural, sometimes
contradictory, identities, and new ways of knowing. Before examining and substan-
tiating these claims both through and beyond Morejón’s work, I will supply a brief
definition of transculturation.
“Transculturation signifies constant interaction, transmutation between two or
more cultural components, whose unconscious end is the creation of a third cultural
whole—that is, culture—new and independent, although its roots rest on preceding
elements. The reciprocal influence here is determining. No element is superimposed
on the other; on the contrary, each one becomes a third entity. None remains
immutable. All change and grow in a ‘give and take’ which engenders a new texture”
(Morejón in Pérez-Sarduy and Stubbs 229). Morejón’s definition from her Guillén
book (23) implicitly defines a case of cultural equals, nonexistent under colonialism
and slavery. And yet under these asymmetrical cultural and power relationships,
transculturation did occur.
A good musical example of this would be the danzón, a musical and dance form
from nineteenth-century Cuba. Originating in the British Isles as a “country dance,”
it was later imported into France where it became the contredanse played on piano,
flute, and violin. French colonialists brought it to Saint Domingue (Haiti), but during
the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), many French and their slaves (known as “French
blacks”) emigrated to nearby Santiago de Cuba, the eastern part of the island. The

Callaloo 28.4 (2005) 967–976 967

 CALLALOO

“French blacks”—and Cuban ones as well—added their rhythms as well as percus-

sion, scrapers (the güiro is an indigenous instrument), and maracas. Not surprisingly,
Spanish colonial authorities, and their supporters in the local elites, viewed the
danzón as vulgar and low class (meaning black), and a dangerous example of cultural
nationalism. They were right about the latter, and so Spain prohibited danzónes,
especially during and after the bloody Ten Years War (1868–1878) for independence.
In the twentieth century the danzón incorporated sones, and even Chinese melo-
dies and rhythms (as in José Urfé’s “Bombín de Barreto”), and finally evolved into the
danzónete (with words) of the late twenties, then the danzón-mambo of the thirties and
forties and the cha-cha of the fifties. So an English melody and rhythm, by way of
France, Spain, Haiti, Africa, and China is refashioned in the Caribbean (twice) to
produce something quintessentially Cuban. Not all examples of transculturation are
that “successful,” but history shows that even the sweet, mellifluous danzón is the
product of slavery and its abolition, a bloody revolution that killed possibly 200,000
and brought great suffering to many more (West-Durán xviii).
Fernando Ortiz (1881–1968), Cuban Ur-scholar who wrote extensively on Afro-
Cuban culture, was the first to coin the term “transculturation”—that is, to make it
stick—in analyzing the historical, cultural, economic counterpoint between tobacco
and sugar that he claimed could be the organizing image for understanding the
island’s rich sociocultural brew. Ortiz analyzed transculturation as occurring in a
culture that is subjugated under colonialism and slavery and that is able to incorpo-
rate, transform, and subtlety subvert elements of the dominant culture to fashion
meanings that ensure not only the survival of a culture and its people but also their
ability to thrive and create a new culture. In the cultural encounters between Spain
and the “New World,” between Latin America and the Caribbean, a history of violent
conquest and creative resistance has generated communities with a unique sensitivity
to the movement of politics and history in the flow of everyday lives.
The demons and angels of history unleashed by transculturation are the product
of asymmetrical power relationships, and therefore the exchange can go through a
number of scenarios: colonial imposition (conquest, slavery, racialist domination),
obligatory assimilation, genocide, political cooptation, passive resistance (theft, sab-
otage, feigning sickness, illegal trade), political subterfuge, tricksterism, and outright
rebellion. From the point of view of subjugated peoples, the cultural response can
involve mimicry, commercial exploitation, top-down appropriation, and bottom-up
subversion (irony, parody, pastiche, carnival, open revolt) (Stam and Shohat 41–43).
Transculturation, then, can be used to describe religious phenomena (syncretisms,
such as in Regla de Ocha, or Santeria), biological terms like hybridity (music like the
danzón or salsa, food like ajiacos, callaloos, or sancochos), human-genetic realities
(mestizaje and race mixing), language (French or English creoles, Sranan-Tongo,
Papiamento), and healing methods (curanderismo, shamanism, Afro-Caribbean reli-
gious healing rituals) (West-Durán).
Transculturation assumes that identity is something that is evolving constantly,
often over vast historical periods. It is not a smooth process, nor a violence-free
cultural theme park (Stam and Shohat); the process can stall, be interrupted, unfold
haltingly, be incomplete, or simply fail. Transculturation is characterized by displace-

968
 CALLALOO

ments, dislocations, and retrenchments. It occurs in a series of different spaces as well,

public and private, practical and cultural, leisure and work related. More important-
ly, and often forgotten in the highly theoretical discussions on identity and hybridity,
transculturation also relates to material practices: to commodities, objects, and the
physical construction of tools, products, images, ideas, and symbols. It also includes
the material dimensions of the workplace, home, school, street corner, bar, and club,
to methods of transportation, and to the movement from site to sight (West).
In speaking of transculturation, Morejón draws on Guillén for good reason:
Guillén’s role in the country’s Afrocubanismo movement (1927–1940) was central in
Cuba’s redefining itself as an Afro-Caribbean nation. However, not everyone ap-
plauded Guillén’s poems. Hispanophile whites found embracing Afro-Cuban culture
heretical, but some African-Cuban professionals and the middle classes who be-
longed to some of the Afro-Cuban clubs also attacked Guillén or distanced themselves
from some of his more plebeian subject matter and language (see Kutzinski 152–53).
Guillén’s poem “La balada de los dos abuelos” (The Ballad of the Two Grandfathers)
is perhaps the emblematic expression of his thoughts on the union of white and black
Cubans as a symbol of cubanía.

“they raise their sturdy heads;

both of equal size
beneath the high stars;
both of equal size,
a Black longing, a White longing,
both of equal size,
they scream, dream, weep, sing.
They dream, weep, sing.
They weep, sing.
Sing!”
(Guillén 71)

On another occasion Guillén was even more explicit: “And the spirit of Cuba is
mulatto, and it is from spirit, not the skin, that we derive our definitive color. Someday
it will be called ‘Cuban color’” (Morejón in Pérez-Sarduy and Stubbs 235). Here
Guillén is more emphatic than in the poem that mestizaje is a national and cultural
process that has a racial component but ultimately transcends race. Of course, in Cuba
and other parts of the Caribbean, racial mestizaje (or miscegenation) is often ex-
pressed as a whitening process, since whiteness (racially, culturally, socially) is the
societal norm. Guillén clearly does not envision mestizaje as whitening, and by
insisting on the Cuban spirit instead of racial mixing, he avoids some of the facile
statements made by Gilberto Freyre of Brazil, who assumed that his country would
resolve its racial issues in bed. In this statement Guillén seems to be fleshing out the
full implications of Ortiz’s phrase: “There are Cubans so dark that they appear to be
black and there are Cubans so light that they appear to be white” (in Morejón 1982, 30).
Ortiz’s comment not only reflects on the pitfalls of racial classifications, which he
reminds us come from techniques of cattle breeding, but also suggests that Cuban

969
 CALLALOO

transculturation has a racial dimension, although its ultimate implications go far

beyond race.
In one of his most famous essays he states: “Cubanidad for an individual is not an
issue of blood, nor passport, nor where you live…[it] is a condition of the soul, an
ensemble of feeling, ideas and attitudes” (Ortiz 1991, 13). Ortiz even goes as far as to
say that you can be an exemplar of cubanía and not even live on the island, a statement
that anticipates debates about Cuba’s transnational status by several decades.
Morejón is indebted to Guillén and Ortiz in her insistence in seeing mestizaje and
transculturation as national concerns. In an interview she stated: “Fanon said that a
society is or isn’t racist. I think all Cubans, all those who live here and belong to
different races, have an obligation to confront this problem, whatever color we are,
because it is a problem of nationhood” (Morejón in Pérez-Sarduy and Stubbs 167,
emphasis mine).
In a comparative analysis she speaks about Guillén:

Guillén and Césaire represent two emblematic positions. For

Guillén the issue of the nation is a ruling or governing concern;
for Césaire, it is not. What predominates in his Cahier d’un retour
au pays natal, despite its affirmation of negritude, is an uprooted-
ness and search for nationhood in Africa, not his native Martin-
ique. His vocation is for the whole African continent, particular-
ly its African areas (like Brazil, the southern U.S., the coasts of
central America, and so on). Guillén assumes that Cuba will
achieve universal transcendence through the Cuban nation’s
vindication of its black population. […] Césaire has said: ”I’m the
conjunction of two traditions, American by way of geography,
African by way of history.” While this implies hybridity, it is not
the kind of mestizaje that Guillén talks about. When we speak of
America, we speak of indigenous culture, which is not opposed
to the ethnic mestizaje of our African heritages. Césaire’s vision
of Africa is mythical, Guillén’s is not. There is nothing wrong
with incorporating mythologies (of any kind, from Greek to
Hindu) into your writing, so long as you know they are a literary
device. (Morejón 2002, 52–53)

While Morejón might be oversimplifying Césaire’s view slightly, it does make

some important points about cross-cultural perspectives on Caribbean transcultura-
tion. Aside from pointing out one of the major pitfalls of negritude (its romanticiza-
tion of Africa), Morejón cautions against an overly Afrocentric view of Cuban culture.
While she enthusiastically speaks of Yoruba, Kongo, and Arará influences, it is always
couched in how these distinct African cultures have become Cuban. Implicitly,
Morejón also makes another point, which is that the first transculturation process in
Cuba took place between African peoples, before the more documented and touted Euro-
African transculturations. Morejón’s views are black and nationalist but not black
nationalist in the U.S. sense of the term (much less separatist).
Thirdly, Morejón seems to be closer to thinkers such as Glissant in his writings on
antillanité or poétique de la relation (cross-cultural poetics) and to a lesser extent the

970
 CALLALOO

Creolité writers of Martinique (Chamoiseau, Confiant, Bernabé). She has translated

Glissant, so perhaps this should come as no surprise. One of many definitions of the
Caribbean given by Glissant (and it is important to remember that to define it is to
engage in pluralities) would be dear to Morejón:

What is the Caribbean in fact? A multiple series of relationships.

We all feel it, we express it an all kinds of hidden or twisted ways,
or we fiercely deny it. But we sense that this sea exists within us
with its weight of revealed islands. The Caribbean Sea is not an
American lake. It is the estuary of the Americas. In this context,
insularity takes on another meaning. Ordinarily, insularity is
treated as a form of isolation, a neurotic reaction to place. How-
ever, in the Caribbean each island embodies openness. The
dialectic between inside and outside is reflected in the relation-
ship of land and sea. It is only those who are tied to the European
continent who see insularity as confining. A Caribbean imagina-
tion liberates us from being smothered. (Glissant 1989, 139)

Morejón also recognizes an affinity with Edward K. Braithwaite’s term “creoliza-

tion” (pointing out its commonalities with Ortiz’s transculturation) in an essay from
Fundación de la imagen (Morejón 237–238).2 Like Morejón and Guillén, the Anglophone
Caribbean Creolists were (and are) deeply concerned with creolization as a “synthetic
mode of nationalism” (see Bolland in Shepherd and Richards 29). Unlike Braith-
waite’s argument that a colored population bridged Euro-Creole and Afro-Creole
worlds (a small portion of the population) in Cuba, this group would be considered
a majority (or at least a large minority) and significant enough for Cuba to claim that
it is a mestizo nation.
Like her fellow Martinicans, Morejón shares a healthy skepticism about how race
is expressed in literature: “Race has a relevance for scientific thought and thinking
done through images. Poets bring everything to their poetry, their culture, their
language, their race. Race in the Caribbean has been a fountain of events, a catalyst,
an incentive, an act of faith, and more often than not a narcotic. But if closed in on
itself, racial attitudes, such as negritude, can become a dead end. Nicolás Guillén
addressed this admirably when he wrote, ‘It’s like trying to find a black cat in a dark
room’” (Morejón 2002, 52). For Morejón blackness is immersed in a historical tradition
that recognizes the enormity of the Middle Passage but also the creativity and
transformative experience of Africans in the Caribbean.3
Transculturation is not an entirely perfect term, but there is really none to describe
Caribbean or Cuban cultural complexity. Others have used other terms: creolization
(Braithwaite), cross-cultural poetics (Harris) or poétique de la relation (Glissant),
diasporic cultures, the womb of space (Harris), an open gnostic space (Lezama Lima),
the repeating island (Benítez-Rojo), to name only the best known. But despite its
limitations, transculturation has several advantages in that it:

1) allows for (and even demands that) different perspectives

be brought into play to explain transculturation, such as class,
race, gender, politics, economics, religion; because it is an en-

971
 CALLALOO

semble of heterogeneous elements, transculturation requires an

interdisciplinary approach to understand its full richness;
2) urges a historical approach because transculturation takes
place over time—often long stretches of time—and in specific
contexts of border experience (that is, where two or more cul-
tures meet peacefully or violently);
3) assumes that transcultured identities are something con-
stantly evolving, continuously negotiated, and nonessentialist;
4) does not abolish difference; it is syncretic. The different
components do not lose their individuality; they maintain their
particular identity and flavor. The elements exist in a dynamic,
evolving, and sometimes uneasy tension.

Regarding this last point, Benítez-Rojo reminds us that syncretism is not the same
as synthesis: “A syncretic artefact is not a synthesis but a signifier made of differenc-
es” (Benítez-Rojo 21). Following Ortiz, Benítez is not only rejecting the melting-pot
thesis that his predecessor also refuted but is putting forth an epigrammatic definition
of metaphor, translation, and transculturation.
Let us begin with metaphor. Transculturation is a metaphorical process in that it
finds the similar in the dissimilar, as well as the dissimilar in the similar, precisely
Aristotle’s definition of metaphor. It is movement, and metaphor, etymologically,
implies movement, from the literal to the figurative, which is an act of transformation.
Metaphor, by moving or displacing meaning from one signification to another, by
borrowing meaning from one domain of “original belonging” to a new one, might best
be understood as personal-poetic and historico-poetic problem solving: a “homecom-
ing through otherness,” to borrow a suggestive phrase from Heidegger. How else can
you explain the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre being a confluence of Atabey
(Arawak-Amerindian), Oshún (Yoruba-African), and the Virgin of Ilescas (Spanish)?
The movement mirrors not only the movement of thought (metaphor is more signif-
icantly conceptual than rhetorical) but other kinds of movements and displacements
in Caribbean history: migrations, exiles, slavery, the pendulum of political move-
ments and allegiances, cooking, the rhythms of nature, and even more so, of music, the
counterpoint of event and context.

Translation

In what follows, Morejón’s thought, her poetry, and her essays are the subtext of
a meditation on transculturation as translation and as philosophy of listening.
Following Morejón, transculturation will be seen as a performative and situated
knowledge engendered by memory, myth, and the empathic dimensions of the
imagination.
Moving from one language, culture, religion, rhythm, and history to another is
analogous to the process of translation. Given this definition of translation, we can say
that it is extended metaphor. Or, put differently, metaphor is an overarching concept
for translation, unless you are monolingual (in which case you can read but not

972
 CALLALOO

perform a translation). Going a step further, we can say that transculturation is

extended translation. What does transculturation as translation imply in a Caribbean
or Cuban context? Can we speak of Caribbean (and Cuban) identity as a translational
identity?4
In Latin America and the Caribbean, our indigenous or enslaved cultures became
invisible translators sworn to fidelity in copying European norms. Our “original”
indigenous and African cultures had to undergo a wrenching experience: to go from
original to copy and assume (perform) a new original. Whether it took decades or
centuries, this deculturation was a blend of military subjugation, destruction of
religious and cultural artifacts and temples, prohibitions on speaking one’s native
tongue, religious indoctrination, sexual humiliation, racism, and outright oppres-
sion. Despite these overwhelming obstacles, these measures always met resistance,
countermoves, and new ways of negotiating power.
One could argue that successful transculturation (and not all cases of transcultur-
ation are successful) is not a translation that merely repeats an original in another
language (culture) but one that becomes an active and resistant force as powerful and
creative as writing/cultural production. This creativity has wrought Regla de Ocha,
or Santeria, in religion or, discussed previously, the danzón in music. By “betraying”
the original, transculturation as translation questions and negotiates with Eurocen-
tric domination. Transculturation is performative in the sense defined by Elin Dia-
mond: “To reembody, reinscribe, reconfigure, resignify. ‘Re’ acknowledges the pre-
existing discursive field, the repetition—and the desire to repeat—within the perfor-
mative present, while ‘embody,’ ‘configure,’ ‘inscribe,’ ‘signify,’ assert the possibility
of materializing something that exceeds our knowledge, that alters the shapes of sites,
and imagines (I would say creates) other as yet unsuspected modes of being (identity)”
(Diamond 67, emphasis added).
Transculturation, like translation, requires listening, being open and empathic to
the other. It is a philosophy of listening, which means that transculturation is an
ingenious form of racial, historical, musical, culinary, and cultural translation, truly
an extraordinary philosophical endeavor that epitomizes the “openness of listening.”
Transculturation exemplifies the empathic dimension of the ethical imagination of
listening.

Translation and the Philosophy of Listening

Translation is a logomachy, a dialogue—both words we’ve borrowed from Greek.

Logomachy because there’s a struggle between two languages, cultures, and worlds:
a contested terrain. Dialogue because there is a conversation, an intense dialectic that
transpires, perspires even—a dialogue that implies ethics and erotics. All these words
have a common root, logos or legein. We always associate the logos with speaking,
with rational discourse, saying, account, expression, and so forth. In a “culture of
competing monologues,” as Gemma Corradi Fiumara points out, the structures of
logocratic domination create “a chronic struggle of territorial conquest where the

973
 CALLALOO

territory is the set of notions and principles for constructing reality.... [It is] predato-
ry” (Fiumara 21). This logocratic impulse is analogous to European territorial expan-
sion and empire building.
But as Corradi Fiumara, following Heidegger, has pointed out, the verb legein also
means to shelter, gather, keep, or receive—words more linked to hearing rather than
speaking. Heidegger says: “How are we to hear without translating, translate without
interpreting?” Listening is not a passive activity; it is an active engaged attentiveness
that is central to a dialogical ethics and understanding. It requires an openness that
goes to the heart of translation and philosophy: “Anyone who listens is fundamental-
ly open. Without this openness there is no genuine human bond (relationship).
Belonging together also means being able to listen to one another” (Gadamer 361).
How does this relate to Caribbean culture and history? Because of its unique
historical configuration, the Caribbean is where translation is put into overdrive,
because our transcultured realities exemplify “the openness of listening.” What the
openness means is that the logos belongs to no one, which might be a sly way of saying
that it belongs to everyone. Historically speaking, that might seem like a naive
statement since we are abundantly aware of many silenced voices that only recently
have begun to speak more freely: those of women, gays and lesbians, African Cubans,
and so on. More accurately it is a reminder that the logos contains the radical potential
of a noncoercive dialogue that is a step (an important one, but only one step) toward
liberation.
In her “Towards a Poetics of the Caribbean,” Morejón speaks of transculturation,
but she starts with a global image that echoes Glissant’s previous definition of the
Caribbean: “The monte, the sea, become an integral part of mythic poetry. In the
Caribbean, there is always a voyage, always a ship” (Morejón 2002, 53). The Caribbean
is always adding new layers of culture, meaning, and identity. By being the intersec-
tion of so many interests and cultures (indigenous, European, African, Asian), every
work of art is also an epic, a journey, and a new cosmology. Maybe this is what
Carpentier meant when he said that “America is a long way from having exhausted
its mythologies.” Transculturation always implies an unfinished subject, something
constantly evolving, changing, adding new elements, a witnessing of new births out
of old elements. In the realm of culture, this implies new definitions, and each new
definition is an interpretation, a translation, and a creation myth.
Morejón’s poetry is rich with these transcultured elements. The word manigua,
which she uses in a poem called “In Praise of Nieves Fresneda,” illustrates this well.
Some translations have rendered the expression “buscando la manigua” as “seeking out
the thicket” (another has “in search of the swamp”). Both are perfectly adequate
renderings. However, in analyzing Morejón’s work and images at greater length, I
kept manigua untranslated. Manigua is a Taíno, or indigenous, word referring to a
place with dense vegetation, consisting of shrubs, bushes, and lianas—a kind of
natural profusion of confusion (it is closely linked to monte as well). Curiously, it also
refers to the celebration of illegal card games, dice, and other forms of gambling.
Taking advantage of both profusion and confusion, many slaves escaped into the
manigua to begin a new life (gambling with freedom?) shielded from the oppressive
eyes of their masters. In the nineteenth century, the expression coger la manigua (“take

974
 CALLALOO

to the manigua”) meant to take up arms against Spain. So the use of an indigenous
word is taken up by black slaves, in Spanish, to rebel against Spanish colonialism.
What could be more Cuban?
In my own work I’ve used the expression to describe how I see Cuba negotiating
the goals, identity, and images of its history—how they will be interpreted and
contested as a manigua of meaning. A logos must listen: a logos that doesn’t listen has
been likened spatially to the conquering of territory, to the colonization of space. The
manigua is an image that avoids the predatory nature of logocratic culture.
In another talk Morejón spoke of García Lorca’s definition of poetry as “penetrat-
ing a jungle [manigua?] at night to hunt precious animals, otherwise known as words”
(Morejón 1995). Despite the use of the word “hunt,” this is not a predatory metaphor.
Lorca’s hunting is done at night, when the “hunter” has surrendered to darkness and
must listen more attentively. I would add that translating is hunting the precious
animal to turn it into a word, or conversely, unleashing the muscular creature buried
in words but achieved through the transfigurative art of listening.
In these words Morejón reveals that the situated and subjective dimension of
knowledge is crucial to understanding the Caribbean and Cuba. Among our sources
of knowledge, we count on memory, perception, and testimony. For some groups or
ethnicities, what is called social memory is not so important; this is in part a function
of where one is situated in history. The truism of “it is the victors who write history”
can also be extended to say that they also have the luxury of forgetting history
(witness how the Vietnam era is either being rewritten or forgotten, something
impossible for those who fought in it or against it). The powerful can afford to forget
and not pay dearly for it. One can say the same about cultural roots: when you have
them they can be taken for granted, but when they are lost or forcibly negated, there
is urgency in trying to recover them. Cuba is a country where one is impelled to
oblivion but where one cannot forget.
Our social and cultural memory in Cuba has expressed itself performatively:
verbally, spatially (carnival; liminally charged spaces), corporeally, all embodying a
kind of radical or heretical empiricism, which is process-oriented, participatory,
intertextual, built around play and chance, and at the same time highly symbolic,
erotic, a space where we dramatize our collective myths and histories.
Morejón reminds us that our culture, our identity, has been diasporic for centuries,
challenging us to cross back and forth between languages and cosmologies, to
embrace mono- and polytheism, to erase neat boundaries of thought, and to live, love,
dance, and belong in plural settings. Her Afrodiasporic consciousness is a grounding,
an incentive, an act of creativity, but never a narcotic.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña says, using many variants of the conceptual richness of
transculturation: “Multilingualism, syncretic aesthetics, border thought, and cultural
pluralism are becoming common practices in the artistic and intellectual milieus of
this continent, not because of matters of fashion as the dominant art world wishes to
think, but because of a basic political/historical necessity” (Gómez-Peña 56). Nancy
Morejón would not only agree with this statement, she has exemplified it in her work
and her life. Morejón’s thought and poetry are concrete examples of transculturation
in practice: they are wrenching, defiant, and hopeful as she crafts images of the body’s
memory, the soul’s hunger, and the dreams of those who have perished.
975
 CALLALOO

NOTES

1. Morejón’s literary and aesthetic vision (and views on transculturation) go far beyond the
influence of Guillén and Ortiz; or, more accurately, her own transculturation not only includes
Cuban sources but draws on the Francophone Caribbean, French surrealist poets, U.S. authors,
and Spanish writers of the Golden Age.
2. On creolization, see Braithwaite (1971), and for critical responses to Braithwaite, Shepherd and
Richards (2002). For French-speaking Caribbean thought, see Glissant (1989, 1997).
3. Further in the same essay she quotes George Lamming: “When we say black, it is not meant in
the biological sense, nor is it for racial applause. When I say black, it is in the name of a
profound and unique historical experience” (Morejón 2002, 53).
4. I am indebted to Gustavo Pérez-Firmat for seeing Cuban culture and identity as translational
(see The Cuban Condition).

WORKS CITED

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Reverie. Boston: Beacon, 1971.

Benítez Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island. 2nd ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
Braithwaite, E. K. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770–1820. London: Clarendon Press,
1971.
Diamond, Elin. “Performance and Cultural Politics” in The Routledge Reader in Politics and Perfor-
mance, edited by L. Goodman and J. de Gay. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Fiumara, Gemma C. The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Continuum, 1993.
Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989.
———. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. Warrior for Gringostroika. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 1993.
Guillén, Nicolás. Man-Making Words, Selected Poems of Nicolás Guillén. Havana: Editorial Letras
Cubanas, 1975.
Harris, Wilson. History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and the Guianas. Wellesley: Calalloux, 1995.
Heidegger, Martin. Early Greek Thinking. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984.
Kearney, Richard. Poetics of Imagining: From Husserl to Lyotard. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991.
Kutzinski, Vera M. Sugar’s Secrets, Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism. Charlottesville: Univer-
sity of Virginia Press, 1993.
Lezama Lima, José. La expresión americana. México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993.
Moore, Robin. Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.
Morejón, Nancy. Nación y mestizaje en Nicolás Guillén. La Habana: UNEAC, 1982.
———. Fundación de la imagen. La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1988.
———.Race and Nation. In AfroCuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics, and Culture,
edited by Pérez-Sarduy and Stubbs. Melbourne, Australia: Ocean, 1993.
———. “Poetry and poetics.” Lecture given at the University of Missouri, unpublished. April 1995.
———. “Toward a Poetics of the Caribbean.” Translated by Alan West-Durán. World Literature Today
vol. 2, nos. 3–4 (Summer/Autumn 2002).
Ortiz, Fernando. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. Caracas, Venezuela: Ediciones Ayacucho.
———. Estudios Etnosociológicos. La Habana: Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 1991.
Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo. The Cuban Condition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ricouer, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979.
Stam and Shohat. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge,
1994.
Shepherd, Verene, Glen L. Richards, eds. Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean
Culture. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2002.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Venuti, L., and M. Baker, eds. The Translation Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2000.
West, Alan. Tropics of History: Cuba Imagined. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997.
West-Durán, Alan ed. African Caribbeans: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003.

976