Afra-Hispanic Writers and Feminist Discourse

Author(s): Miriam DeCosta-Willis

Source: NWSA Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp. 204-217
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4316260
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 Afra-Hispanic Writers
and Feminist Discourse

Miriam DeCosta-Willis
University of Maryland Baltimore County

Serious and silent before the world

that is a human stone,
moving, adrift, lost in the meaning
of the right word, of her useless word
-AIDA CARTAGENA PORTALATIN

Afra-Hispanic literature-the writing of Black Spanish-speaking women

of the Caribbean and Central and South America-is an emerging litera-
ture, similar in its evolution to that of African and West Indian women
writers. Although it is too early to write of a Black female literary tradi-
tion in Latin America, it is possible that the recovery of lost or forgotten
texts will permit the archeological reconstruction of a discursive tradition,
however fragmentary and discontinuous.1 In Cuba, for example, where a
small class of free, literate Blacks emerged during slavery, there were
women who wrote, but their manuscript poems and narratives gather
dust, perhaps, in family attics or provincial archives. In his Tema negro en
las letras de Cuba (1608-1935), published in Havana in 1943, Jose Antonio
Fernandez de Castro, describes Juana Pastor, an eighteenth-century
writer and contemporary of Phillis Wheatley's (23-24). Although this
"brown poetess and distinguished teacher" wrote sonnets and d&cimas, her
work has not survived. Nor has the writing of other Cuban, Dominican,
Colombian, or Venezuelan women of African descent who might have
written in the nineteenth century.
When one considers that more than seventy-five African-American
women published books in the United States before 1900, and that some
seventy Caribbean women of African descent have published novels in
the past thirty years, the number of Afra-Spanish American women

Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to the author at 700 7th Street, SW 205,
Washington, DC 20024.

NWSA Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2, Summer 1993, pp. 204-217

204

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Afra-Hispanic Writers and Feminist Discourse 205

writers seems quite small indeed. The dearth of writers is somewhat sur-
prising, given the size of the Black female population in the Spanish-speak-
ing countries of the New World. Many social, economic, and cultural
factors have contributed to the silence of Afra-Hispanic women. Writing
about African women, Carole Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves
explain a phenomenon that also applies to diasporan women of color:
"European colonialism [or North American neocolonialism], as well as
traditional attitudes of and to women, combined to exclude African [or
Afra-Hispanic] women from the educational processes which prepare one
for the craft of writing" (3). Limited access to education, prescribed
domestic roles, and exclusion from the literary marketplace have deprived
Spanish-American women, particularly Black women, of a voice.
In the 1940s, during the waning years of the Afrocriollo movement in
Latin America,2 an Afra-Uruguayan poet, Virginia Brindis de Salas,
published two collections of verse: Pregon de Marimorena (1946) and Cien
carceles de amor (1949). At the same time, an Afra-Dominican poet, Aida
Cartagena Portalatin, who is one of the most prolific and innovative
writers in the Caribbean, published her first two collections of poetry:
Visperas del suenio (1944) and Del sueiio al mundo (1945). One of the best known
and most widely published Afra-Hispanic writers is Nancy Morej6n of
Cuba, whose work includes at least ten volumes of poetry, a collection of
essays, two works of literary criticism, and a study of local history.3 Other
Black women writers include Georgina Herrera and Lourdes Casal (now
deceased) of Cuba; Dominican Sherezada "Chiqui" Vicioso, who lived in
the United States for many years; Eulalia Bernard of Costa Rica; Yvonne
America Truque, a Colombian, who currently lives in Canada; Ecuador-
ian Luz Argentina Chiriboga, whose first novel, Bajo la piel de los tambores,
was published in 1991; and two Colombians, Irene Zapata Arias and
Edelma Zapata.4
At least two Afra-Hispanic writers-Nancy Morejon and Aida Cartagena
Portalatin-have gained international prominence, for their works have
frequently been anthologized and translated, but other writers, such as
Vicioso, America Truque, and Argentina Chiriboga, have not yet received
wide attention. The literary texts of Afra-Hispanic women reveal an
emerging feminist consciousness, as these writers treat female subjectivity,
explore sexuality and the female body, and examine silence, voice, and
language. The novel of Luz Argentina Chiriboga-the first by a Spanish-
American writer of African descent-and the poetry of Morej6n, Vicioso,
and America Truque illustrate various approaches to feminist issues.
Nancy Morejon, for example, examines rape, the female body, and the
sexualization of racism in her poem "Amo a mi amo" [I Love My Master].
In an ingenious subversion of the negrista text (with its description of the

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 206 Miriam DeCosta-Willis

Black woman's exoticized body: hips, thighs, breasts), Morejon creates a

Black female subject who gazes upon the White male body (eyes, hands,
feet, and mouth), an act that clarifies the distance between physical sub-
mission and psychological resistance. In this provocative study of gender,
race, and class oppression in Cuba during slavery, Morejon uses three
semiotic codes-language, sex, and material culture to critique the
ideology of racial and sexual domination based on White male power and
privilege. Although her work reveals a strong feminist consciousness,
Morejon maintains that the term "feminist" has a Western slant, as she
explains in an interview:

In our Western world there are certain feminist movements that I

respect very much as a woman, but sometimes they don't go to the real
point of our time and our societies. They develop ideas that belong
maybe best to a consumer society. I think the task of a womanist (let's
talk with Alice Walker's term which I love very much) in our region
should be something related to our society and to our history. ("A
Womanist Vision" 266)

The poetry and fiction of Ecuadorian writer Luz Argentina Chiriboga,

whose novel is "framed by the feminist cause," also examines women's
issues ("Interview" B2). In Bajo la piel de los tambores [Under the Skin of the
Drum], she explores the sexual dimensions of female subjectivity, but in
her erotic tale the woman is both a desiring subject and the object of male
desire. The protagonist is an Afra-Ecuadorian woman, whose racial and
sexual identity evolves in opposition to social and religious proscriptions.
Educated in a Catholic boarding school, the young woman eventually
asserts her right to economic independence and sexual expression; after a
brief marriage to an irresponsible, domineering, and abusive man, she re-
jects the romantic/domestic script in which she was inscribed, freeing her-
self to write a different plot. In a recent interview, Argentina Chiriboga
discussed the feminist subtext of her novel:

A woman must not consider marriage as her only goal. She must excel as
a human being and acquire the ability to participate productively in
society.
Machismo exists in our society [and] women suffer humiliation
because of the system. (B2)

Argentina Chiriboga's ideas are shaped, apparently, by the prevailing

ideology of international feminism, which gained ascendancy in the 1970s
and 1980s.
Feminism also informs the poetry of Chiqui Vicioso, but her ex-
periences as a Black working-class Dominican York, (a Dominican who
has immigrated to New York), also make her sensitive to the effects of
racial prejudice and class oppression on women. In her poetry, she depicts

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Afra-Hispanic Writers and Feminist Discourse 207

the struggle of poor women-Dominicans, in New York, victimized by

crime, poverty, and drugs-Dominicans like Rosa, who plays the numbers
because such "dreams are better than the movies, / they cost a buck and
last a week" and Maria Luisa, who rationalizes her addiction to soap
operas, saying "they are my joy in this solitude" ("Perspectivas" 40). In a
recent testimonio, Vicioso explains how her experiences in New York forged
her racial, political, and feminist identity:

The New York experience, which was so crucial to my discovery of my

Caribbean and racial identity, has made me a very, very critical person
with respect to my own society. Things I never noticed before, I now
see. Like racism, for example. Class differences. Santo Domingo is a
very societally structured city. The situation of women is atrocious.
("An Oral History" 233)

Vicioso's two collections of poetry, Viaje desde el agua [ Voyagefrom the Wat
published in 1981, and Un extrano ulular trafa el viento [The Wind Brou
Strange Howling] published in 1985, treat feminist issues within a bro
social and political context, underscoring the connection between class
race, and gender in the lives of Dominican women.5
Both Vicioso, who has spent many years in the United States, and
Yvonne America Truque, who now lives in Canada, treat the immigrant
experiences of Black women from Central and South America. America
Truque's bilingual (Spanish/French) poetry examines the female subject's
quest for voice and power. As the female persona of "Mujer batalla"
[Battle Woman] struggles for self-actualization, the language of the poem
underscores the process of transformation (9). Words and phrases like
"undress, "'"womb, ''rebellion, "''rage held inside her womb,'" and
"break silence" reveal the pain of the process, while the dialogue between
the narrator's "I" and the subject's "you" underscores the dialectical
tension between feminine and feminist representations of the female self.
The subject finally changes into someone different from and unrecogniza-
ble to the narrator.

It was she. I saw her one day

she seemed the same and I
and I, did not know her.

Then, I saw her running through the streets

with rage held tight inside her womb
breaking Silence-Knots
Institution-Home. (lines 1-3 and 13-16)

America Truque, Chiqui Vicioso, Luz Argentina Chiriboga, and Nancy

Morej6n all depict women who are breaking silence-sometimes with
rage-and gaining control of their discourse.

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 208 Miriam DeCosta-Willis

A more detailed analysis

ing women of African descent, Virginia Brindis de Salas (1908-1958) and
Aida Cartagena Portalatin (1918-), will reveal the different textual strate-
gies that Afra-Hispanic women use in their evolution from feminine to
feminist writers.

VIRGINIA BRINDIS DE SALAS:

GAZING UPON MY DARK FLESH

The poetry of Virginia Brindis de Salas is trapped in the narrow discur-

sive space that women's texts occupied in the prefeminist era. The
women in her poetry either descend into anonymous invisibility and
muted silence or rise up, assertive and vociferous, like Marimorena, a
crazy woman ("una loca") in Preg6n de Marimorena.6 The contradictory
characterization of the persona reflects the poet's ambivalence about
female subjectivity, for she writes some of her poems in a feminine mod
using the langauge, images, rhetoric, and literary conventions that mirror
patriarchal visions of female experience. I use "feminine mode" to char-
acterize a form of literary expression which reinforces, through appeal to
sentiment rather than to intellect, conventional images of women as nur-
turers who inhabit domestic spaces; which underscores the sexual and
reproductive roles of females; and which dichotomizes women, idealizing
them as virgins/goddesses or denigrating them as whores/witches. In her
study of poetry, Daisy Cocco de Filippis distinguishes between two types
of women: the "mujer-musa" (woman-muse) or woman-as-object, who
"adorns holy places and decorates the interiors of structures built for
men," and the "mujer-autora" (woman-author), who is the subject or
agent of her own discourse (13-21).
Cocco de Filippis's paradigm assumes a male author of the woman-
muse text, but Brindis de Salas also writes in the feminine mode, using
female objects as muses.7 In "Semblanza," for example, the Uruguayan
poet, like male writers, objectifies a "passionate, exalted woman," a
stranger whom the narrator addresses with the pronoun tu in a monol
speech act that reinforces class differences. The female sexual object is
ontological contradiction, both passionate and exalted, a divinely wild
woman, whose hips evoke the ritualistic movement of a totemic animal:

Paso de la culebra
tus caderas,
muchacha negra. (lines 10-12)

Movement of the snake

your hips,
Black girl.

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Afra-Hispanic Writers and Feminist Discourse 209

Like an explorer, the androgynous female poet/male narrator (for the text
is fleshed out in the language of male desire) charts the topography-the
artistic representation of a particular locality-of the girl's body through a
series of metaphors (blood/Nigeria, map/face, armpits/jungle vegetation),
as s/he points out the signs of the "daughter's geography"8 (Shange).

Combada
y de ebano arrogante
el mapa de tu mirada. (lines 5-7)

Curved
and arrogant in ebony
the map of your face.

Brindis de Salas's words, "mapa de tu mirada, " resonate in the words of

Juan Zapata Olivella's "La mulata." His "mapa de tu cuerpo desnudo,"
conjures up a horizontal terrain of hips and breasts, as the narrator in-
forms the object of his desire:

Si miramos el mapa de tu cuerpo desnudo,

se asomarfan todos los pueblos del mundo. (lines 15-16)

If we gaze upon the map of your naked body,

all the towns of the world would appear.

With a rhetorical volte-face the narrator and the narratee-one vocal, the
other silent-switch roles in Brindis de Salas's "Madrigal"; the female,
however, still speaks from the missionary position, prone, as it were, under
the weight of the male. Is this another example of what Lemuel Johnson
calls the "strange emergence of passion" -that "dialogic knotting of rose
and brier," of the lyrical and liturgical in love poetry (19-20)? Would a
rose by any other name-blood, armpits, hips-smell as sweet? Or is
"Madrigal" just another version of "the ass struggle" with the woman-
muse as votive priestess, offering her body as sacrament on the altar of
male desire?

Tu miras mi carne morena

con ojos que son dos ascuas;
quisiera ser una fuente
donde escancies sed de ansias.

Quiero quemar la sangre

de mis venas en el tr6pico
de tu frenesl trashumante.

You gaze upon my dark flesh

your eyes two burning embers;
would that I were a fountain
to quench your anguished thirst.

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 210 Miriam DeCosta-Willis

I want to scorch the blood

of my veins in the tropical heat
of your nomadic fury. (Young, Image 164)

Imitation of masculine literary models, according to Lucla Guerra

Cunningham, is common in women's literature of earlier periods. She
explains:

To trespass the frontiers of a conventionally masculine activity and to

adopt masculine norms which were sanctioned as "artistic and literary,"
women writers had to erase their unique experience of history and of
themselves within the enclosed space of the home. (6)

Writing like men, women privileged male protagonists, represented male

images of women, and suppressed female experiences. Male texts, par-
ticularly those of Afra-Uruguayan writers like Pilar E. Barrios, Carlos
Cardozo Ferreyra, and Juan Julio Arrascaeta, probably informed the
poetry of Brindis de Salas, but she subverted masculine discourse and in-
serted a female presence between the lines or in the margins of their texts.
Her poetry was also shaped by the ideology of race, which prevailed in
Neo-African societies from the 1920s through the 1940s and which found
cultural expression in movements like Negritude, Negrism, or Afro-
Cubanism, and the New Negro Movement.
Her poems are double-voiced, as the woman writer re-creates the male
text, but, at the same time, subverts masculine discourse to female social
and political ends. Her Marimorena poems, for example, are written in
just such a "female mode"-and I use "female" instead of "feminist"
because the poet does not privilege gender in social and psychological for-
mation. The "pregones" are written in the female mode, which encodes
within the discourse of race/class protest a critique of oppression based on
gender. "Preg6n nutmero uno" and "Preg6n nuimero dos" read like
Guillen's "Tengo" or Pedroso's "Hermano negro," poems in which
narrators protest the economic exploitation of dark-skinned workers by
European and American capitalists. Marimorena, the subject of the "pre-
gones" is a poor Black woman; her racial identity is clear in descriptive
tags like "morena vieja" (old dark woman), "negra analfabeta" (illiterate
Black woman), and "Marimorena morena" (dark Marimorena), and her
class identity is apparent in descriptions of her workday: she labors from
six in the morning until late afternoon, thirty-one days a month, in sun
and rain, for a few coins.

Por dos vintenes un diario,

Marimorena,
camino de su sudario. (lines 21-23)

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Afra-Hispanic Writers and Feminist Discourse 211

For four cents a paper,

Marimorena,
on the way to death.

The ideological context of Brindis de Salas's "pregones" is clear in the

frequent allusions to money, political propaganda, and the newspaper in-
dustry, but a close reading decodes a covert subtext: protest against
gender-based oppression. Marimorena is the antithesis of the feminine
muse: voluptuous lover/nurturing mother (a sexually feminine and asex-
ually maternal dyad, which, according to feminist scholars, underscores
the female body's duplicity in the coexistence of transgression and pro-
hibition). In effect, Brindis de Salas deconstructs the feminine model and
creates a female subject who is both a/sexual and un/motherly.

Tu voz
que nunca arrull6
a tus hijos
ni a tus nietos .... (lines 18-2 1)

Your voice,
that never sang lullabies
to your children
or to your grandchildren....

Old and weather-beaten, laughing like a crazy woman in her rain-soaked

boots, she survives, like Toni Morrison's Pilate, "whose equilibrium
over-shadowed all her eccentricities" (138). Also eccentric, Marimorena
is an original wild woman, although she is not fully realized because her
voice has been appropriated by a powerful narrator, a ventriloquist, who
offers a written text (art) in exchange for experience (life), pleading:

Toma mi verso
Marimorena

Quiero tu angustia
quiero tu pena, (lines 1-2, 8-9)

Take my verse
Marimorena

I want your anguish,

I want your pain....

There is double irony here in that the narrator offers a written text
verse) to an illiterate woman, who, conversely, earns her living selling
printed words. The poetic text is a dialectic of sound and silence, as
images of speech are projected onto a mute subject: "the slash of your
mouth'"; "'pariah voice'"; ''no one can make you shut up'"; and "'a voice

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 212 Miriam DeCosta-Willis

spins round. " Here, positio

subjectfrom an elevated po
the surface to be a foregrounding of the female subject is actually an
"othering" of the Black woman. In Brindis de Salas's poetry, the female
subject has not yet claimed her voice, and, thus, has not yet asserted an
autonomous self.

AIDA CARTAGENA PORTALATIN:

DECIPHERING THE NAKED VOICE

Strong but subtle feminism informs the work of Aida Cartagena

long acknowledged as one of the most important voices in cont
Dominican poetry. According to Cocco de Filippis,

The demystification of the woman begins with AEda Cartagena Portalatin.

In the decade of the Fifties, Portalatin discards forever the terms "sub-
missive," "empty-headed," "virginal" from feminine poetic diction,
and she begins to redefine the boundaries of the feminine world. (28)

"Una mujer esta sola, " published in 1955-before The Feminine Mystique,
before The Second Sex, before the Women's Movement-depicts the female
as open, adventurous, pensive, serious, self-reflexive, and, most important:
single, solitary, isolate. Although written in the third person, the poem
examines, from the inside, the interior life of the subject: her dreams, her
thoughts-"ahora todo es nada" ("now everything is nothing"), "pensa-
mientos que traducen lo hermoso" ("thoughts that translate beauty")-
and her feelings, brilliantly evoked with an alliterative play on the word
esperar (to hope/to wait), which does not have the same connotations in
English:

Espera en la desesperada y desesperante noche

sin perder la esperanza. (lines 4-5)

She waits in the desperate infuriating night

without losing hope.

The juxtaposition of opposites (everything is nothing; party or mourning)

suggests that a woman's life is complex and contradictory. Woman, as
represented in Cartagena's text, is not what Toril Moi calls the "seam-
lessly unified self" of patriarchal ideology (8); instead, she is characterized
by disjunctures and contradictions. But there is a rhythm to her life, a
moon rhythm, a blood rhythm, that is intuited in the repetition of words
and phrases:

Con los dos ojos abiertos. Con los brazos abiertos.

Con el coraz6n abierto.

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Afra-Hispanic Writers and Feminist Discourse 213

Una mujer esta' sola. Sujetando con sus suenios sus suefios,
los suenios que le restan y todo el cielo de Antillas.
(lines 2-3 and 11-12)

With both her eyes open. With her arms open

With her heart open.
A woman is alone. Suppressing her dreams with her dreams,
the dreams that remain and the full Antillean sky.

The rhythm is in her blood, the moon cycle of bleeding, announcing the
stages and events of a woman's life. Blood flow: the rite of passage signal-
ing a girl's coming into womanhood. Blood burst: the broken hymen and
stained sheet marking a woman's sexual initiation. Blood birth: babies
aborted or miscarried or carried to term. It is this blood rhythm that the
poet evokes in her lines

de la sangre que salta, de la sangre que corre,

de la sangre que gesta o muere de la muerte. (lines 18-19)

about the blood that leaps, about the blood that runs,
about the blood that conceives or dies of death.

Male and female readers understand "blood" differently, a difference

that can be attributed to nature and socialization. In his article on Brindis
de Salas, for example, Lemuel Johnson cites several "kinds of signifying
in [his] use of 'blood' ": a Black man, blood plasma, bad blood, and so
forth (28). "Blood," however, signifies different things to women:
menstruation, womanhood, childbirth, sisterhood, kinship, and female
bonding. Since we bring at least two different experiences to our inter-
pretation of a text-our reading histories and our lived experiences-it
follows that our different "realities" as women or men, Blacks or Whites,
heterosexuals or homosexuals (or the variations along those continuums)
shape our understanding of a work. As we read through the prism of
gender or race or class, we revise a text, deepening and enriching its
meanings, in a process described by Adrienne Rich: "Re-vision-the
act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from
a new cultural direction-is for us more than a chapter in cultural his-
tory" ( "When We Dead Awaken" 35). It is astounding that Cartagena
Portalati'n, in a poem written in 1955, treats, almost presciently, con-
temporary topics such as female silence and voice, self-representation,
blood-as-sign, and woman's language.
Among other things, "Una mujer esta sola," is a meditation on the
significance of language in the social construction of female identity. The
poetic images-similes, metaphors, and adjectives-contextualize the
struggle of the solitary woman to claim her voice (to assert an autonomous
self; to create art through language) in a society that, traditionally, has

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 214 Miriam DeCosta-Willis

imposed silence upon women. Cartagena Portalatmn understands that

woman's voice, particularly in Hispanic cultures, was long repressed, and
that, consequently, writers were forced into silence or circumlocution.
She begins the poem with a simile, "her heart open like a full silence,"
that underscores the connection between woman and voicelessness, and,
later, she uses the past participle callada in the phrase, "Seria y callada
frente al mundo" ("Serious and silent [literally, "silenced"] before the
world"), rather than the adjective silenciosa to suggest, perhaps, that
silence is imposed from without. The woman's voice is suppressed by a
world that she characterizes as

m6vil, a la deriva, perdido en el sentido

de la palabra propia, de su palabra inu'til. (lines 14-15)
moving, adrift, lost in the sense
of the proper word, of her useless word.

The subject distinguishes between two forms of language: la palabra propia,

like the French langue, a linguistic system used by a community of people;
and su palabra inu'til, similar to the French parole, an individual speech per-
formance. The first "word" is modified by the definite article la (the),
which implies that it is a universal language, and it is also modified by the
adjective propia (proper or right), suggesting that it is a socially acceptable
form of communication. By contrast, the second "word" is modified by
the possessive pronoun su (her) and the adjective inu'til (useless), indicat-
ing that woman's language-her words, her voice-has no value.
The solitary woman of the poem inhabits a closed, monologic space-
not unlike the dark attics, garrets, and upper rooms where other fictive
women struggled to raise their voices-but many of the words and figures
of speech (estatura/dignity, abiertoslopen, iz6/hoisted, llevar/to carry away,
viento/wind, andfuga/flight) suggest openness and movement up or away.
The subject is mute, as it were, and verbally/physically disconnected from
others; she exists outside of a society that celebrates (without her) rituals
of birth and marriage and death:

y nadie dice nada de la fiesta o el luto

de la sangre que gesta.... (lines 17-18)

and no one says anything about the party or the mourning

about the blood that leaps....

Even more significant, no one helps her to find her voice so that she ca
discover who she really is. In the lines

Nadie se adelanta ofreciendole un traje

para vestir su voz que desnuda solloza deletreandose
No one comes forth to offer her a dress
to clothe her voice that weeps, naked, deciphering itself

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 Afra-Hispanic Writers and Feminist Discourse 215

Cartagena Portalatin uses "powerful, womanly" images (Rich, Sources

35)-the language of woman's culture: traje and vestir-to express the im-
portance of voice in shaping identity. The voice is naked (bare, exposed,
unadorned, vulnerable, "lacking confirmation or support") and weeping
as it tries to decode itself. Significantly, the verb deletrear means "to spell
(out): to decipher, interpret," and the root of decipher is French cifre (" 1.
zero; one that has no weight, worth, or influence: Nonentity 2. a method of
transforming a text in order to conceal its meaning"). Thus, deletrear la voz
has a double meaning: (1) to decode the spoken text, and (2) to translate
the text of a woman's life.
The texts of women writers like Aida Cartagena Portalatmn, Virginia
Brindis de Salas, Nancy Morej6n, Chiqui Vicioso, and Luz Argentina
Chiriboga-writers from various countries of the Spanish-speaking
Americas-indicate the diversity in form and content of Afra-Hispanic
literary expression. These writers deal seriously and imaginatively with
linguistic, ontological, and epistemelogical issues: they raise questions
about female identity and subjectivity, language, sexual expression,
cultural domination, literary conventions, diasporan history, male priv-
ilege, and sexual/racial politics. No longer silent or lost in the meanings of
words, they are writing themselves into the literary histories of their indi-
vidual countries and into an international movement of cultural workers
who share their belief in liberatory feminism as "a process of self-conscious
struggle that empowers women and men to actualize a humanist vision of
community" (Collins 39).

Notes

'Richard L. Jackson cites, for example, in The Afro-Spanish American Author II, the work of
Piedra, who applies the poststructuralist theory of difference to a recently recovered body of co
Afro-Hispanic texts. According to Jackson, Piedra "challenged the contention of traditional li
history ... that black writings of literary significance in the Spanish American world began in th
century" (xviii).
2In Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America, Jackson uses Afrocriollo as a comprehensive term
for the Black-centered cultural movement that developed in the Spanish-speaking New World
from the late 1920s through the 1940s and has been called negrismo, negritud, Afro-Cubanism, an
Afro-Antillianism.
3Nancy Morej6n is perhaps best known to North American readers through the collection that
was translated into English, Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing, edited and translated by Kathleen
Weaver.

4Works by other Afra-Hispanic writers include the following: Georgina Herrera, Getes y cosa
(Havana: Uni6n de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, 1974); Lourdes Casal, Los fundadores. Alfonso
otros cuentos (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1973) and Palabrasjuntan revoluci6n (Havana: Casa de las
Americas, 1981); and Eulalia Bernard, Ritmohiroe (San Jose: Editorial Costa Rica, 1982); Richar
L. Jackson notes in his 1989 bibliography that the work of Irene Zapata Arias was published in
Ramiro Lago's Poesta liberaday deliberada de Colombia (n.p.) and that Edelma Zapata's poetry appeare
in Giorgio M. Manzini, Humanitas (February 1983) 40. The works of Argentina Chiriboga, Sherezad
Vicioso, and America Truque are on the list of works cited.

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 216 Miriam DeCosta-Willis

5Vicioso has also published an essa

ainos de Camila Henriquez," in Cocc
6Two of the poems from this col
anthologized in Ann Venture Young's
(178-80 and 182-86). Page references
mine.

7Costa Rican poet Eulalia Bernard also writes in the feminine mode. Her poem "To Women's
Liberation" in My Black King (Eugene, OR: World Peace University, 1991) includes the following
lines: "The bee needs the nectar of the flower. / The babe is secured in the womb of the mother, /
Both enjoy the throbbing of their bodies together." (lines 4-6)

Works Cited

America Truque, Yvonne. "Mujer batalla." Proyeccion de los silencios. Montreal:

Centre d'Etude de Diffusion des Am6riques Hispanophones, 1986.
Argentina Chiriboga, Luz. Bajo la piel de los tambores. Quito: Editorial Casa de la
Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1991.
"Interview." El Comercio 25 March 1991: B2.
Brindis de Salas, Virginia. CiMn carceles de amor. Montevideo: Compania Impres-
ora, 1949.
. "Madrigal." Young 164.
* Preg6n de Marimorena: poemas. Montevideo: Sociedad Cultural Edit
Indoamericana, 1946.
. "Preg6n nu'mero dos." Young 182-86.
. "Preg6n nuimero uno." Young 178-80.
"Semblanza." Young 162.
Cartagena Portalatln, Aida. Del sueio al mundo. Santo Domingo: La Poesia Sor-
prendida, Colecci6n El Desvelado Solitario, 1945.
. "Una mujer estA sola." Antologt'a de la literatura dominicana. Ed. Jose
AlcAntara Almanzar. Santo Domingo: Biblioteca Esencial, 1972. [pp.? 2451
. Visperas del sueno. Santo Domingo: Ediciones La Poesia Sorprendida,
1944.
Cocco de Filippis, Daisy, ed. Sin otro profeta que su canto: antologza de poes!ta escrita
por dominicanas. Santo Domingo: Biblioteca Taller, 1988.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990.
Davies, Carole Boyce, and Anne Adams Graves, eds. Ngambika: Studies of Women
in African Literature. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1986.
Davies, Carole Boyce, and Elaine Savory Fido. Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women
and Literature. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1990.
Fernindez de Castro, Jos6 Antonio. Tema negro en las letras de Cuba (1608-1935).
Havana: n.p., 1943.
Guerra Cunningham, Lucia. Splintering Darkness: Latin American Women W
in Search of Themselves. Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review P
1990.
Guillen, Nicolas. "Tengo. " Literatura afro-hispano-americana. Ed. Enrique No
Lexington, MA: Xerox College Publishing, 1973. 117-119.

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Afra-Hispanic Writers and Feminist Discourse 217

Jackson, Richard L. The Afro-Spanish American Auth

Bibliography of Recent Criticism). West Cornwall,
. Black Literature and Humanism in Latin Amer
Georgia Press, 1988.
Johnson, Lemuel. "'Amo y espero': The Love Lyric, Virginia Brindis de Salas,
and the African-American Experience of the New World." Afro-Hispanic
Review 3 (1984): 19-29.
Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Methue
1985.
Morejon, Nancy. "Amo a mi amo." Octubre imprescindible. Havana: Ediciones
Uni6n, 1982.
. Where the Island Sleeps like a Wing. Ed. Kathleen Weaver. San Francisco:
Black Scholar Press, 1985.
. "A Womanist Vision of the Caribbean." Davies and Fido 265-69.
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Signet, 1977.
Pedroso, Regino. "Hermano negro. " Black Poetry of the Americas. Ed. Hortensia
Ruiz del Vizo. Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1972. 46-48.
Rich, Adrienne. Sources. Woodside: The Heyeck Press, 1983.
. "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision." On Lies, Secrets, and
Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.
Shange, Ntozake. A Daughter's Geography. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983.
Vicioso, Sherezada (Chiqui). "An Oral History (testimonio). " Breaking Boundaries:
Latina Writings and Critical Readings. Ed. Asunci6n Horno-Delgado, Eliana
Ortega, Nina M. Scott, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach. Amherst: The Uni-
versity of Massachusetts Press, 1989. 229-34.
. "Perspectivas. " Vicioso, Viaje desde el agua. Santo Domingo: Visuarte,
1981. 40-41.
Un extrano ulular trata el viento. Santo Domingo: Alfa y Omega, 1985.
Viaje desde el agua. Santo Domingo: Visuarte, 1981.
Young, Ann Venture. The Image of Black Women in 20th-Century South Amer
Poetry. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1987.
Zapata Olivella, Juan. "La mulata." Young 90-92.

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