Costa Rica's Black Body: the Politics and Poetics of Difference In Eulalia Bernard's

Poetry
Author(s): Kitzie McKinney
Source: Afro-Hispanic Review , FALL 1996, Vol. 15, No. 2 (FALL 1996), pp. 11-20
Published by: William Luis

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 Costa Rica's Black Body: the Politics and
Poetics of Difference In Eulalia Bernard's Poetry

by Kitzie McKinney

Among the countries of Central America, Costa Rica considered Jamaican "foreigners" [non-citizens] (Duncan
is singular in its desire to see itself as homogenous, and Mel6ndez 89). At first denied physical access to the
democratic, white, European and middle-class. Its rela country's geophysical and political center of power,
tively small black, and almost non-existent indigenous restricted to the Atlantic coast by law until 1949, Costa
populations were-and still are-kept at the margins of Rica's black population has struggled for four genera
society, at the bottom of the country's socio-economic tions to resist acculturation and preserve its traditions
pyramid. Official discourse has often forgotten or over and cultural identity, while finding a voice and claiming
looked the presence and contributions of the country's a presence in a country which still values conformity
indigenous inhabitants, as well as those of African and minimizes difference within its borders.1 Awareness
slaves brought by the Spaniards in the second half ofof the difference and uniqueness of Costa Rica's
the seventeenth century to work on the Matina cocoa collective black body has inspired and shaped all of
plantations and the Guanacaste cattle ranches, black Eulalia Bernard's works, whether literary, social or
fishermen from Panama and Nicaragua, and, finally, the political.2
thousands of Chinese, Jamaicans and other Antilleans The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, educator, dip
who emigrated to Costa Rica's Atlantic Coast in the lomat, community activist and 1991 recipient of the
1870s to construct the San Jose-Atlantic coast railroad World Peace University's Distinguished World Citizen
and later developed the cocoa and banana planlations in award, Eulalia Bernard is, along with novelist Quince
Limon province. Duncan and poet-anthropologist Shirley Campbell, one
Attracted to Costa Rica by the promise of employ of Costa Rica's few published black writers. In 1976
ment, the Anglophone black Jamaican settlers in par she produced Negritud, her first collection of poems
ticular brought with them linguistic and ethnic tra issued as a recording. Then in 1981 she published
ditions entirely different from-and, they believed, supe "Nuevo ensayo sobre la existencia y la libertad
rior to-those which were part of Costa Rica's distant polftica," followed by a 1982 collection of poems in
but dominant Hispanic culture. The first two genera Spanish, Ritmoheroe, and, in 1991, a bilingual col
tions of settlers in Limon province clung to the hope of lection entitled My Black King.
earning enough money to return to live in Jamaica. This essay examines the ways in which Eulalia
Meanwhile, they created an enclave with English Bernard's poetry reclaims the black body both politic
speaking schools and churches, men's social lodges, and ally and esthetically, by subverting stereotypes which
"coconut walks" by the sea; they held community neutralize the presence of difference in national culture
cricket and baseball matches, concerts and dances, horse and history, by constructing an autobiographical
races, recitals of verse, and meetings of Marcus persona with multiple destabilizing roles, and by re
Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association envisioning the black body as a medium leading to
(Palmer 97-114 and 191-224). Both the Costa Rican deeper personal consciousness and collective vision.
government and the new Caribbean immigrants viewed The title poem of Bernard's second collection directly
each other with "a total absence of interest": among the addresses and challenges one of the most prevalent
19,136 black inhabitants (1.9% of the total national popular stereotypes of the black body. "Ritmoheroe" is
population) included in the 1927 census, 17, 245 were a farmer who comes to the town of Coronado to

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Costa Rica's Black Body

celebrate Carnival with drink and improvised dancing in with social privilege, who "blush" as a way of gaining
the streets. He bears the name of his stereotype, the distance from a body which brings them embarrass
black man with rhythm, whose body is viewed with an ment? Or does the laughter express just the opposite: a
ambiguous mixture of scorn, condescension and warm manifestation of solidarity with a figure who, like
admiration: Carnival itself or certain African divinities such as
Legba and Esu, offers release from the constraints of
; Qu<£ hombre, qui bruto! personal and social propriety, and who creates and,
Silba, canta, baila, indeed, incarnates spontaneity for the eyes and the
jdivierte! ese hijo de... pleasure of others?4 The poem's visual quotes raise
Deja su finca de cacao
these questions but do not give easy answers. Laughter
"pa" venir bien "tomao",
itself takes on the ambivalence of the man's gestures,
bailar por las pesetas
en la fiesta de "Coronao"; and the poem executes the figures, does the dance, also
le dicen a su paso: waving front and back, leaving us to interpret its
jRitmoh£roe! Ah, meaning. In this context, it is appropriate to say that
payaso, payaso. the reader, along with Ritmoheroe's public, has been
waved out of facile stereotyping and left to question and
"Ritmoheroe" le diran; deal with issues of political and poetic identification
Premio: "siete" mucha espontaneidad. just where one wants to belong and what one wants to
con una mano delante
see-according to the secret, inner designs of one's own
y otra atras
reading of multicultural scripts.
Todos se divertiran,
de risa "rojos" se pondran
Other poems in Ritmoheroe are more explicit and
incluyendo a la "Reina del Carnaval" (R: 41-42) detailed in their indictment of the socio-political
problems evoked in the title poem: the function of
Ritmohdroe is presented as a clown who provokesCarnival
the as a diversion that maintains social and racial
spectators' laughter by being exaggeratedly childlike and by distracting black participants from the need
inequities
for political action, duping them with a false sense of
also dehumanized, mechanical, as he gestures and dances
his way through the streets. His body is an instrument and control ("El Carnaval en America Latina" R:
power
to that end, both for himself and for others an esthetic
39-40); the harmful passivity created under colonialism
and preserved by continuing social and economic
and voyeuristic pre/text that, by its difference, creates
oppression
distance and ambivalent laughter to fill the space of that ("Cristo Negro" R: 79-80); and the marginal
difference. After gratuitously commanding a pleasurecivil and
al psychological status of Jamaican blacks, who
either
ready there ("jdivierte!"), the speaker adds emphasis to could not or would not sing the Costa Rican
class and socio-linguistic differences, using the non anthem or pry loose from "white hands" the
national
standard forms of Spanish ("'siete' mucha necessary papers to obtain the national identity card. In
espontaneidad"), visibly highlighted on the page
a land of democracy, these immigrants remained ex
through the use of quotation marks, as are the words cluded "foreigners": "...una estrella negra/en el flamante
"rojos" and "Reina del Carnaval." bianco, azul y rojo/de nuestra bandera" ("Requiem a mi
The text's typographical setting off of these words primo Jamaiquino" R: 35-36). The reconfiguration of
creates a politically hierarchized but also ambiguous the Costa Rican national flag with a "black star" in
cultural space of bodies and relationships. The quotationplace of the traditional mountains and sailing ships
marks suggest that both whites and blacks, including again underscores parallel founding histories and unequal
the Carnival Queen, laugh at Ritmohdroe's antics. Is
destinies. On the one hand, Europeans "discovered" the
this the divisive, exploitative laughter of "proper"
country, tilled the earth, put down roots, and became
Limdn townspeople mocking a crude, drunken peasant citizens of a new nation. On the other, Antilleans also
whose very gestures play with and play out the irreduarrived by ship and transformed tropical jungle regions
cible truth of exile and poverty: hands covering privatesuch as La Estrella with their labor. Yet even when
parts, surviving/fleeing "with just one's skin"?3 Of these contractual workers were invited to become set
blacks succumbing to values and language bound uptlers and farm the land adjoining the railroad, they did

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 Kitzie McKinney

not gain the right to become citizens. When the railroad did not offer riches, but that, unlike Jamaica, did offer
was built and the Atlantic Coast banana and cocoa land and employment. Conveyed through his body's
plantation economy collapsed, black settlers lost rhythms
their and rhymes and offered to the reader able to see
jobs. Prohibited by law from seeking employment beyondin
stereotypes is a glimpsed vision of a time and a
land on the new plantations on the Pacific Coast,place where history and myth fuse and are reborn in a
many
problematic
were forced to leave the country and look for work in space of memory and complex feelings
about
Panama. Like Marcus Garvey's ambitious but ill-fated origin and identity. "Peasant" Costa Rica was not
purely
plans for the Black Star steamship line, their hopes of"Spanish," and Ritmoheroe's body serves as a
returning home vanished along with their jobs and their of the mysterious erasure of Costa Rica's
reminder
savings. "others": its native populations and the presence of
But there are other cultural subtexts evoked by slaves in the territory. As they call back collective
Ritmoheroe's physical presence and historical situation memory of the African presence in Costa Rica, dance
which paradoxically challenge the irony of his heroic and poetry herald a more profound and broader
nickname. For the distance and the difference between conception of the sacred and the heroic in human life.

the black "hero of rhythm" and the dominant culture's

Just as "Ritmoheroe" celebrates the Carnivalesque
privileged myths of the rebellious, heroic Hispanic unmasking of a stereotype as a paradoxical figure of
pioneer are not as great as the poem's divisive quotation
heroism and history, the poem "Paisanita" tells the
marks might suggest. First of all, Ritmoheroe's history
story of a transcendent figure who, by embodying a
of immigration, poverty, independence, and love of the cluster of stereotypes, helps to destroy them:

land echoes Hispanic Costa Rica's unwritten "founding"

jHola!, Viigencita de los Angeles,
epic of origins: that of the autonomous, freedom-loving
^Me permites que te llame paisanita?
settler who fled the established centers of Spanish
Tu sabes, por aquello de negrita.
wealth and power in colonial Latin America and moved
into the mountains of a country too poor to be noticed, ^Sabes que han contribuido mucho al mundo
who cherished his farm and his liberty, and who, unlike quienes te trajeron a Cartago?
the conquistadores, kept his sword sheathed and lived in Pues, al menos yo, te agradezco
peace with his neighbors (Lascaris 30-40). In addition, el que ahora pueda ir ahf
the black farmer's descent from mountains to town, y sentirme entre hermanos,
from solitude to solidarity, and his status as a Carnival sin pellizcos y reganos.
esque hero also bring to mind another episode in Costa
Rican history from which racial references have been Tu, nos has librado a los paisanos
de la extrana responsabilidad de dar la suerte.
almost completely erased: the successful defense, spear
Tu, la das ahora, a aquellos que,
headed by Alajuela resident Juan Santamarfa, against the
a pellizcos, la arrebataban de
North American militaristic encroacher William Walker.
sus hermanos negros.
What the authors of history have overlooked, but what
the statue of Santamarfa in Alajuela and his nickname Has hecho el milagro,
"El Erizo" [the spiny-haired one] have retained, is thede que los pellizcos de antano
hero's mixed racial background. According to family se hayan transformado
friends and witnesses, Santamaria's father was a black en hermosa ronda de multicolores manos. (R: 69-70)
cattle driver who came down to Alajuela from the
mountains of Guanacaste province; his mother was aDirectly addressed to Costa Rica's patron saint, the
mulatta from the Central Valley (Duncan and Melendez Virgin of the Angels, the poem opens with the immedi
49-52). acy and intimacy of a friendly greeting and an affection
Thus when Ritmoheroe comes to town, he stumbles ate diminutive, as the speaker asks the Virgin for
out of one legend and into another, momentarily permission to call her a countrywoman and a peer. It is
forgetting the difficulty and loneliness of his life and only at the very end of the first stanza, at the point of a
labors on the cocoa plantation, his efforts to survive in closing rhyme, that the meaning of the familiar greeting
a region deemed unliveable by citizens of European and the vague, summative request becomes clear,
descent, and his free choice to emigrate to a country that surprising the reader and underscoring another

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Costa Rica's Black Body

"forgotten" fact in Costa Rican cultural and spiritual pinched are now hands that reach out and include; thanks
history: "Tu sabes, por aquello de negrita." The physical to the "Virgencita," a black Madonna, the eyes of the
marker of shared racial identity is a reminder that the faithful have been shown how to envision a multiracial
Virgin who appeared in Cartago to an Indian girl around society. Ritmoheroe's solitary jig becomes a dance that
1635 did so in the form of a black woman.5 includes hands that join in and support a circle larger
The speaker's newly-racialized use of the word than any one participant. At least in this poem, the
"paisanita" consequently brings to mind another constel "negrita" and her peers gain access to a culture that
lation of popular stereotypes and assumptions held by acknowledges and includes their contributing presence
whites who consider all Costa Rican blacks "paisanos" and identity.
and "chumecos" ("Jamaicans" understood as "foreign In both "Ritmoh6roe" and "Paisanita," the spirit
ers"), plantation workers indistinguishable from one an which breaks down stereotypes and inspires a revision
other (Duncan and Melendez 142). This generalization of Costa Rica's multiethnic history arises from literal,
obscures and denies the reality, the diversity and the specific representations of the black body as a complex
collective potential of Costa Rica's black population. figure of humble origin. It works through these figures,
The poet's tongue-in-cheek inclusion of the Virgin her empowering them to serve as synecdochical parts of a
self in this group of "paisanitos negros" foils the de collective body whose spiritual reality and power be
personalizing mechanism inherent in the very process come evident only indirectly, through the esthetic and
and language of stereotyping. The frame of racial refer spiritual illumination of dance or prayer, rather than
ence now extends to Heaven and the narrator celebrates, through imposition and coercion. This thematic pattern,
indeed appropriates, the miraculous inclusion, the literal simultaneously ironic and regenerative, is an important
incarnation of the Queen of Heaven as a black Costa structuring device in Eulalia Bernard's other poems as
Rican "paisanita." Moreover, when one considers the well. Through it, questions of nationalism, racial iden
sexist and classist stereotyping of the coarse but "will tity, and linguistic and esthetic approach are raised in
ing" country "paisanita," the irony of this incarnation terms of both the individual and his/her ethnic collectiv
becomes all the more acute.6 The Virgin and the whore ity. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the more
meet in one body, in the space and time of a professed self-referential poems in which the poet-narrator either
miracle. is the black body or is intimately connected to it. The
In the remainder of the poem, the poet-narrator gives roles she presents and the position she takes vis-a-vis
thanks for the personal and collective consequences of her community explore the possibilities of relationships
the Virgin's apparition. Following this miracle, she re between the individual and the collective body.
ports, black people traveling about Cartago were no In "Infancia Alegre," the poet-narrator evokes the en
longer accosted by whites eager to take advantage of joyment she felt as a child when she saw her face re
popular custom and attract good luck by pinching some flected in a wood floor which she had just polished with
thing new and never before seen: in this case, the skin a coconut husk: "Gustaba brillar el piso de madera,/con
of a black person. At first reading, perhaps, the cepillo de coco,/hasta verme la cara en ella/...Mi casa
"miracle" might seem hyperbolic. But naive pinches are era alegre...Mi infancia fue bella, bella,/de manos
not far removed from the acts and attitudes of whites diligentes./Esperanza llena" (/?: 47-48). Unlike many
who saw the black body as a depersonalized, exotic ob other literary scenes in which the black child reacts with
ject inviting the playing out of colonialist roles offright or disgust to his/her own image or that of other
aggressor and victim. In this context, the Virgin's inter black people, this young girl reacts positively to what
cession is political as well as spiritual in its effects and she sees.7 Her poise and pleasure in her own image, in
its irony. For it literally took an instance of divinerecognizing and being herself, are immediately linked to
intervention to impose this tiny bit of consciousnessthe security of a happy home, to notions of purpose,
about the literal reality of Costa Rica's black body, to pride, and useful work ("manos diligentes"), and to a
deflect persecution and violence, however minor and un hopeful, optimistic future ("esperanza llena") within a
witting, and to take one tiny step in transforming thecommunity characterized by tolerance, self-affirmation,
self-serving exploitation of others into a community and mutual respect. At the same time, the shiny floor
capable of recognizing and honoring difference and in that serves as her mirror marks cultural difference and
cluding people of color in its circle. The hands thatthe black enclave's claimed superiority: while Limon's

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Spanish-speaking settlers built ground-level houses
with earthen floors, the region's black inhabitants raised
their homes off the ground and created an interior living
space combining functionality with African, English
and Jamaican esthetics (Duncan and Melendez 107-110;
Purcell 37-40). The child's gaze is framed by history
and its ongoing process of reappropriation, the cultural
braiding of metissage, while her labor, unlike that once
demanded of Jamaican plantation servants, is directed to
what belongs to her: a home proudly furnished, a person
affirmed and supported by those who find beauty,
respect and happiness within.8
Many subsequent poems in both collections acknow
ledge the contributions of both men and women to the
poet-narrator's abiding sense of her own strong self
image and poetic voice. Unlike many black women
writers, particularly of the Caribbean, who represent the
male as an absent or negative figure, Eulalia Bernard re
members the experience of her community as Antillean
male immigrants founded settlements, sent for families,
and supported their communities. My Black King is
dedicated "...to all the men of my family...[who] have
given me a beautiful childhood, challenging adolescence
and creative adulthood." Several of Bernard's poems cel
ebrate the physical attractiveness of black men, as well
as their inner qualities: "I love men with appeal./Broad
shoulders, tall limbs,/Dark skin, pouted pants seats,/
And dimples wherever possible. /I love men... who can
be/Good friends; important fathers/Witty even in their
compliments..." ("Straight Talk," MBK). Her poem
about dock workers grows from a basic metaphor
("[You are] The backbone of your country") into an
evocation of their multiple roles in the making of both
Costa Rican and world history: "Boxing champions;
football heroes,/Carnival dancers..,rioters;/Loaders of
ships, lovers of sex,/Port of hopes.../You are strong,
fertile and free/Like the sea, like the sea!" Many other
male characters in her poems are directly associated with
the earth ("Hombre-Tierra," R: 89-90), with nature
("The Naked Man," MBK\ "Seamos libres," R: 23), and
with the history and struggles of the black community
("Requiem a Mi Primo Jamaiquino," R: 35-36).
Through their expressions of anger and resistance to
exploitation, they are, like Ritmoheroe himself, agents
who expose the limits of racial tolerance in a country
that takes pride in its democratic ideals. At the same
time, they express themselves in a unique language, the
Limon Creole called Mecatelio ["mek-a-tel-yu"] that
braids together Spanish, standard English and Jamaican
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Kitzie McKinney
English to get beyond the letter and attack the du
plicitous, alienating effects of reforms imposed from
outside: '"Ah no' end up I am not/In no aula de mierda
to get/A damn doctorado in...'Hombre desocupado'"
("Bilingual Campesinos Speak Out," MBK).
The limitations of appropriating a heroic model of the
male body and its associated images of conquest and
mastery as exemplary political and poetic instruments
for engaging the self with the world-especially when
that self is female-are explored in My Black King's
"jOh libertad! New York." In this surreal epic, the poet
narrator imagines herself trying to rescue "Africa's lost
children" from New York City's coldly impersonal
"forests" and return them to the nourishing breasts
("pezones ahumados") from which they have been re
moved. Taking heroic metaphorical body imagery to its
most extreme, she challenges the city as a sexual ad
versary, demanding to make love to it and thereby ab
sorbing its phallic imagery: "...Entra,/Acomoda tu
libertad rfgida/Entre mis glutios silenciosos y abiertos
..." (1-3). Unlike Cuban poet Nancy Morejon's
collection Amor, ciudad atribuida, poemas, in which the
female narrator-lover joyfully embraces the city of
Havana, "Libertad" expresses the speaker's frustration
and anger with a heartless city that "inverts affection"
and kills communication among its inhabitants.9 But
this woman's body cannot master the metaphors of the
sexual duel. The city's incoherence spills over into the
poem itself, and the narrator's commands in the first
stanza fade into didactic lectures and an admission of de
feat in the second: "Sabes que me angustian tus voces de
matales [sic];/Oh libertad siempre erguida." The black
Madonna may protect "children of Africa" by becoming
a miraculous physical presence in Cartago, but the
poet's sexual embodiment in "Libertad"-her most expli
cit in either collection-generates neither liberation nor
effective poetic vision.
But if the poem itself falls short in its appropriation
of heroism and epic, it does help us understand the na
ture of the challenge for a narrator who wishes to trans
form the female body from a passive, stereotyped sex
object to a poetic and political symbol and agent of
change. The resemblance between Ritmoheroe's drunken
wagging and weaving and the poet-narrator's futile
poses suggests another, paradoxically anti-heroic way of
using language to evoke the human body: deforming the
body as a metaphor of mastery and "reforming" it
through frivolity and indirection, helping us to see be
yond its fragility and transcience, re-associating meta
Costa Rica's Black Body

phors of valor and imagination with the power of voice Jamaica and Limon, Costa Rica. Her language affirms
as a medium and a means to heroic ends. And it is difference without losing sight of connectedness and
without exploiting or dominating others.
precisely through the figure of the black woman/mother
as almost-absent body and compelling voice that thisFrom this position of equilibrium and sense of multi
poetic strategy is born. plicity comes the resourcefulness that characterizes this
In the autobiographical poem "Mi Madre y and
El many other poems. My Black King, in particular,
presents
Tajamar" from My Black King, the poet-narrator re a disconcerting variety of "poses" and roles
members herself as a small girl, held by her motherwhich
"al the poet-narrator assumes, ranging from petulant
lover ("Sublimation") to "proud bride" of a beloved
mas alto pedestal,/Del tajamar." Laughing together,
they rediscover and acknowledge the sensual, repetitive"black king" ("My Black King"), from world citizen
richness of the sea and its power to evoke memory:("My "... Last Chains") to a "black is beautiful" icon ("Au
la felicidad de encontrar,/El tesoro de la vida,/En la brisa
thentic") and exotic cliche-commodity ("Reflection"). At
del mar, /En el olor del mar, /En el sonido del mar,/Entimes,
la too, the poems themselves cannot contain the
poet-narrator's desire to expand the image of the black
lejanfa del mar." Aided by the presence and the rhythm
of the waves, the mother teaches her daughter aboutbody
the and its cultural context still further: as the texts
past: the "solemn truth" about her African ancestors,shift
the from references to places and figures from Africa,
powerful weapon of language that can be used to keep Africa-America and the Caribbean to typographical
that history alive, and the sense of identity that issuspension
re points, the reader is led into his or her own
created by remembering. musings-and confusion-about the shared terms of "dias
pora literacy" (Clark 42-43). Like Ritmoheroe's dance,
The lesson learned by the child becomes quite literally
the poet's future charge: "Aprendf que serfa soldado,these strategies deform mastery and provoke improvi
/Con la palabra desenvainada, /En la mano." Her sational
mis re/formation by luring the reader into a gallery
sion is to reappropriate the unsheathed sword ofofthe fixed portraits/portrayals, then subverting them by
conquistador, the Word of the crusading missionary,exaggeration,
in contradiction and the enigmatic silence/
order to preserve memory through language. Inspace
so of the suspension points.10 What seems to be
doing, she not only retains the heroic modality of questioned
the through these performances is not just the
masculine noun "soldado," but also transforms it reader's ability to see beneath these masks, but also the
through the context of transmission from mother to poet-narrator's own conflicting positions vis-a-vis her
daughter. The body of memory is maternal, and, community and her audience. On the one hand, she
through it, the partially repressed anatomical referenceindulges in what Doris Sommer terms the pre-emptive,
("vaina") that is both the sheath and, in common fig singular "cult of individuality" of the "heroic, autobio
urative language, the "empty," insignificant container, graphical I," including widely disparate tendencies: at
acquires new regenerative power. The range of meaning one extreme, the personal pleasures of trying on
of the word "desenvainada" shifts from the baring of a clothes, music, hairstyles, and modes of being alive in
sword, as was implicitly the case in "jOh libertad! New the world; at the other, a penchant for "messianism," as
York," to the act of giving birth through an empower practiced by the Latin American intellectual who speaks
ing language of association and extended relationship. "for" others (108-9). On the other hand, she speaks as a
As her mother speaks, the young girl imagines her witness from behind the masks, "one among equals,"
Coromanti and Fanti ancestors by metaphorically bor representing-but not pre-empting-"the collective con
rowing the brilliance of distant stars, the waves of the sciousness of colonized peoples" (Sommer 21). The
sea, and the power of her mother's words. It does not narrator's performances may be a "puppy show" played
matter if the appropriation lacks the logic of proof or as a self-parody of the Costa Rican black Pan-Africanist
evidence, or even if it is wholly arbitrary and subjective. with a "doctorado;"11 or their energy and Carnivalesque
Through this new-found language of exchange derived flair may be aimed at decentering and destabilizing not
from its interplay of maternal authority and her own just the stereotyped black body but also language itself,
imagination, she becomes a meaningful part of a col putting it in flux and forcing it to remain eclectic,
lective whole, balancing culture and nature, past and flexible, and unpredictable.
present, love and pride, physical and spiritual reality, Like Ritmoheroe, Cartago's "Virgencita" and the bi
and the geographical and affective space of Africa, lingual peasants who refuse to tone down the creative

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 Kitzie McKinney

energy of their Mecatelio, the poet-narrator acts as an gle for identity and creativity of the poet-narrator and her
intermediary and an outspoken prophet who will not let people, but also exposes the racial and ethnic differences
black Costa Ricans forget their essential difference, that underlie Costa Rica's mythologized cultural
particularly those of the third or fourth generation who "veils."13 The unitary, unifying Eurocentric myths, the
communicate in Spanish rather than in English and who institutionalized language of "progress," and the priv
are most vulnerable to the seductions of Hispanic cul ileged exploits of the solitary hero are challenged and
ture's Eurocentrism: broken apart by the rhythms as well as the images of
the mother, the daughter, Ritmoheroe, the black Ma
jNo! Antillano, donna, and many other voices of bilingual, bicultural
no te encadiles
inhabitants who speak up and speak out about their ex
con las luces del Mediterraneo; periences in a country that still often ignores, stere
vuelve tu mirada
otypes or exploits those who live at the margins of
y brillen tus pupilas
mainstream society. From them and their ancestors
con el Mar Caribe.
comes a mandate for a comprehensive revalorization of
national image:
jNo! Antillano,
tu pedestal estl
en las playas lianas Somos del pais del tres:
con matices africanos. de tres Cordilleras;
jNo! Antillano. de tres colores en la bandera;
Necio eres si enterrar de tres razas entremezcladas

tu etnia prefieres, de tres lenguas

que tus ojos, tu pelo, tu de tres poderes;
en esencia eres de tres mujeres para cada hombre;
Antillano. ("Esencia Antillana," R\ 50) de tres niiios en hogares finos.
De tres Dioses con tres voces;
de tres comidas y
Just as the mother raises her daughter to the "highest
hasta de tres vidas.
pedestal" of the jetty by the sea, so the narrator presents
Somos el pais de tres y
the West Indian as a work of art grounded on "shores del tercer mundo. ("Somos El Pais Del Tres,"
with African shades of color" and glowing with Carib Ritmoheroe: 71)
bean light. The refusal of Eurocentrism and the warning
about the "living death" caused by burying one's ethni At first glance, this poem reads like a mnemonic jingle
city are explicit, as is the Biblical parable of the lamp
for recollecting, reciting and inculcating the main geo
taken from concealment and made to shine upon its pedpolitical, socio-cultural, religious, and economic facts
estal. At the same time, this poem serves as a reminder
and features of Costa Rican reality. All realms of
to white Hispanic readers, particularly those eager to
national life are cast in sets of threes: mountain ranges,
mythologize their country as the "most European [pro the flag, governmental branches, good nutrition, birth
gressive and homogenously white] of Central American control for "good families," three languages, three races.
countries" or "the Switzerland of Latin America,"12 that
But the meaning of the trios and triads soon appear less
its celebrated New World beaches reflect the enduring,
obvious as the text deviates from references to the dom
fundamental African tonalities of eyes, hair, and skininant
of culture and begins to evoke what is less well
the coast's first settlers. "Esencia Antillana" simply and
known about the nation's blacks and indigenous
unequivocally affirms Costa Rica as a Caribbean coun
peoples. Are the "three Gods with three voices" an al
try, through its geography, history, and racial compo
lusion to the Catholic Trinity? Or to the unnamed Afri
sition. What is more, it hints that even Spain's "Med
can gods who sing and dance at dawn, "sin encerrar/
iterranean lights" are plural, their "true reflections"
egofsmo en sus voces"? ("Soy del gremio," R: 25-26).
Are the nation's "three languages" Spanish, English,
being not just European, but Arabic, Jewish, and Afri
can as well. and Mecatelio? Or Spanish, English and the indigenous
Ultimately, then, the image of the black body Bri-Bri?
in And what of the "mixing of three races" in a
Eulalia Bernard's poetry not only dramatizes the Strug
country that, according to the 1989 British yearbook,

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Costa Rica's Black Body

had an 86% white, 12% black, 1% mestizo, and 0.5% "for" and "to" her people, and the communal "we" by
indigenous population?!4 which her voice is subsumed, legitimized and empow
Like an African-inspired trickster who appears in in ered. But what matters more than the positions, which
nocuous, even insignificant, form and ends up hum quickly and easily turn into trickster's masks, is the
bling the mighty, this poem lures its reader into inter dance back and forth between them. Through it, the
preting its "threes." But then it begins to sound and tobody gives visible form to its rhythms, allowing for
"Signify" upon that which might have been left out of both mastery and escape, opening new possibilities for
the reader's cross-cultural education:15 the "invisible invention, improvisation and change. Eulalia Bernard's
poetry makes no claims to resolve a complex reality of
presences" from the margins of national life, the African
gods and those of the Indians, the history and culture political,
of cultural, ethnic and economic difference that is
blacks in Lim6n province and the mystery of Costa still working out its own articulation.16 But her poems
Rica's tiny indigenous population that remains in thedo more than linguistically and culturally celebrate the
mountains of Talamanca, the silent, invisible neighbors experiences, memories, illusions and hopes of Costa
of the blacks who live on the coast. The poem ends by Rica's black body. They also invite the reader to dance
"between" the ambiguous roles of participant and en
demystifying a favorite national fiction: despite its "first
world" trappings and rhetoric of development, Costa gaged witness, maker and reviser of stereotypes, host
Rica is not Switzerland. Its problems and possibilities, and guest of images. And these images, in turn, repeat
contradictions and aspirations, languages and peoples areedly and continually unveil visions of difference and
those of a developing country with multicultural promise
re for the transformative, unpredictable, open
sources not yet fully brought to national consciousness. ended process of change, thereby bearing and articulating
This is the point of the poem and the lesson of the our fears and our dreams of the body and of life itself.
trickster inscribed in it: to insist on threes, breaking the
country out of complacency and exclusionism and offer
ing it a particularly Afro-Caribbean gift: that which NOTES
VeVe Clark calls "Marasa consciousness," a Vodoun
inspired reformulation of binary oppositions that invites I would like to express my thanks to Eulalia Bernard for
us to transcend apparently dialectical, irreconcilable op speaking with me about her poetry, life and projects during
positions and "read the sign as a cyclical, spiral rela my visits to Costa Rica in February, May and June 1991, to
Bentley College for providing me with a 1990-91
tionship" (43). By making us think about the syn
sabbatical and a 1993 summer research grant to work on
cretisms which might be celebrated among its litany of
this essay, to Eileen Julien, Maureen Goldman, Baltasar
threes, the poem goes beyond a tongue-in-cheek account
Fra-Molinero, Roxana Pages-Rangel and the Afro-Hispanic
of what exists in Costa Rican national life and opens Review's outside reader for their thoughtful suggestions,
the way to what it might yet be. and, most of all, to Thelma Darkings of San Jose, CR, for
This is, in practice, the function of all of Eulalia Ber hearing out my initial readings of these poems, sharing her
nard's work and the source of the energy emanating own experiences as a black woman in Costa Rica, and
from the image of the black body in her poetry. Her teaching me some Mecatelio and much about her joyful
poems name, play with, and break apart stereotypes of practice of dance. This essay is dedicated to her.
the body, finding in that play elements of renewal that
elude description or definition and that resurface as en 'For an excellent recent anthropological analysis of the
West Indians' experience in Costa Rica, see Purcell.
ergy or power expressed as possibility and virtuality.
2Bernard's activities extend beyond her work as a writer.
The black body foils mastery, not just by decentering
She has taught at the United Nations International School
the heroic myths and hegemonic voice of the dominant
and at the University of Costa Rica, where she gave Latin
culture by means of Carnivalesque clowning and hetero America's first course in Afro-American studies. She also
glossic, iconoclastic verbal inventiveness, but also by served as Costa Rica's Cultural Attache in Jamaica and
challenging the position and the intentionality of the headed a 1974 Ministry of Education commission for
poet-narrator herself. Her own represented body also recommending cross-cultural educational reform in the
seeks to invent and, at times, even to invert its posi Limon province school curriculum ("Plan Educativo de
tions, moving between the heroic "autobiographical I," Lim6n"). At the time My Black King appeared in print
vaunting a personal style and prophetically speaking (1991), she was busily engaged as founder and president of

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 Kitzie McKinney

Costa Rica's first society for black (male) entrepreneurs. Bernard") whose claim of a "doctorado" makes her voice
3My thanks to Roxana Pagfis-Rangel for pointing out the more likely to be heard, between the child who polished the
frequent use of the popular saying "[quedarse] con una mano wood floor with a coconut husk and the narrator who

delante y otra atras": for example, in salsa lyrics and in presents herself as King Solomon, pondering and weighing
describing the situation of Cubans who fled the island with the future of a people ("Desearia devorar una/onza de fuerza
less than the shirt on their backs. salomonica/para continuar la/construccion del templo/de
redencion de mi/pueblo: Limon." "Deseo," R: 27-28). She
4The relationship between the West African gods Legba
and Esu and their New World incarnations in trickstermight see herself at one and the same time as a "messianic"
figures such as Brer Rabbit, the spider Ananse, and presence
the and a child wishing to transform her recognized
smallness and isolation into an inspired, powerful voice.
Signifying Monkey is explored in Gates 3-43 and Poliner.
12These phrases routinely appear in Costa Rican tourist
5In reality, the appearance of the Virgin exacerbated,
brochures,
rather than ended, the ghettoization of Cartago's free especially those promoting the country's in
blacks and mulattos in the district called "la Puebla de los vestment and "pensionado/rentista" retirement programs to
Angeles": "Podna decirse que mas bien el culto a la white North Americans and Europeans.
'negrita' fue aprovechado para concentrar en un suburbio de 13The first poem in Ritmoheroe begins with a command
Cartago a los mulatos y negros, evitando de esta manera to "unveil the body" ("jNo!, no me hables asi'/desvela tu
una dispersi6n inconveniente a las autoridades" (Duncan cuerpo" ["Seamos libres," 23]). While the most obvious
and Melendez 38). When read against history, Bernard's "object" is a second-person beloved in an intimate rela
poem reveals the irony hidden beneath the narrator's tionship, the poem merits consideration as a socio
professed gratitude. political allegory, where the "other" is the Costa Rican
6In Carlos Salazar Herrera's short story "La calera," for nation, invited to cease its divisive, deceptive discourse
example, the "dark" temptress Cholita ("the little mestiza") and unveil its true multicultural, multiethnic "body."
lures a man away from his white wife (21-26). The 14My thanks to Roberto Ugalde for bringing these
seductiveness of the "negrita"/"morena" and her rhythm statistics to my attention.
ical hips is also a popular theme in Latin American and 15For a presentation of the black concept of intertextual
Caribbean dance music, especially merengues and cumbias Signifyin(g), see Gates 44-88.
which evoke a "rustic" setting, and in Afro-Latin American 16Until recently, the Costa Rican folklore presented in
poetry in general. For a presentation of the latter, see schools-even those of Limon-focused exclusively on that
Carter 73-82. of Guanacaste (Duncan and Melendez 141). At present,
7My thanks to Baltasar Fra-Molinero for pointing out however, black culture has begun to be more visible on the
this contrast. national scene. The musical "Limon Limon" was well

8For an excellent discussion of metissage as an estheticreceived, not just in San Jose but also in Mexico as Costa
and political strategy in women's autobiographical wri Rica's contribution to a 1991 international cultural festi
ting, see Lionnet. val. Ross de Cerdas' cookbook combines brief socio
cultural and historical essays and art work with a collection
9"...y encuentro la piel de la ciudad vieja/y me empapo de
of Afro-Caribbean recipes. After publishing her first col
sed/busco el beso irreparable/lo piso con mis piernas /corre
el liquido/comulga con el hombre sencillo..." (Morejon lection of poems, Naciendo, and teaching creative writing
15). See also Marting 36-38. at Moravia's prestigious Lincoln School, Shirley Camp
'"Clark's tripartite marasa framework for figuring bell is bringing her family's cultural history full circle by
representations of diaspora history and culture ("masteringleaving the Spanish-speaking work milieu of San Jose-to
form/deforming mastery and reforming form": 42) has beenwhich her parents came as Anglophone citizens-and
returning to Lim6n to study and share black culture through
particularly helpful in guiding my reading of Bernard's
poems. cultural and anthropological projects.
nThe Mecatelio expression "puppy show" appears in the
poem "Intangible Love" (MBK), in which a black mother
demonstrates the difference between a superficial, effusive WORKS CITED
display of affection ("puppy show") and her own acts of
love and support for her young son. My interpretive Bernard,
sug Eulalia. My Black King. Eugene, Oregon: World
gestion here is that these poems "say" one thing Peace University, 1991.
superficially and signify quite another. At the same time, . Ritmoheroe. San Jose, Costa Rica: Editorial
however, there is an intriguing space between the Costa Rica, 1982.
"campesinos" who refuse the "damn doctorado" ("BilingualCampbell, Shirley. Naciendo. San Jose, CR: UNED, 1988.
Campesinos Speak Out," MBK) and the author ("Dr. EulaliaCarter, June. "La Negra as Metaphor in Afro-Latin

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Costa Rica's Black Body

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Duncan, Quince, and Carlos Melendez. El Negro en Costa
Rica. San Jos6, CR: Editorial Costa Rica, 1972.
Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory
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