Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way

6. No Man’s Language

- 147chaPTeR six No Man’s Language If oscaR hiJueLos comPoses vaLedicToRies To Cuba, José Kozer writes so as not to say goodbye. If Hijuelos writes “from” Cuba but “toward” the United States, Kozer writes “from” the United States but “toward” Cuba. Born in Havana in 1940 of Jewish parents, Kozer is one of the major poets to have emerged from the contemporary Cuban diaspora. Although his first book of poetry, Padres y otras profesiones (1972), was not published until he was in his thirties, since then he has produced a steady stream of volumes that by now number more than a dozen.1 With the appearance in 1983 of Bajo este cien, a generous selection of his work published by the prestigious Mexican publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica, his work acquired a visibility that has continued to the present day. His poems are widely anthologized and studied.2 Among contemporary Cuban-exile poets perhaps only Heberto Padilla and Eugenio Florit have enjoyed a comparable stature. Upon leaving Cuba in 1960, Kozer settled in New York. He attended New York University, specializing in Brazilian and Latin American literature . He taught Spanish at Queens College from 1965 until his retirement in 1995. In light of his many years of residence in New York, Kozer could be considered, like Oscar Hijuelos, a Latino writer from New York; but his work makes this identification nearly impossible, for someone who comes to Kozer’s poems without knowing anything about the author would be hard-pressed to locate this poet in New York. Although his writing makes clear that he is a Cuban-Jewish exile, it says little about the country where he has lived most of his life. Like other exiled writers, Kozer tends not to write about the world that surrounds him but about the one he has left. His poetry is a shield against exile; and the exclusive use of Spanish in most of his work—a Spanish so rich, capacious, and cos- - 148 - Life on the Hyphen mopolitan that perhaps only an exile could have written it—is a part of his effort to build a verbal edifice that will isolate the poet from the realities of exile. Like some of the songs we sampled in Chapter 4, Kozer’s poetry is loquacious about Cuba but strangely silent about the United States. This sparseness of topical reference is all the more striking given the autobiographical slant of many poems. Indeed he has even published a book of self-portraits, Trazas del lirondo (1993). As Kozer himself has said, his poetry confounds the “biographical I” with the “poetic I.”3 Yet since Kozer’s poetic persona speaks from a virtual point in space without a name or an address, he does not seem to live anywhere in particular. When Cuba is the subject, Kozer’s poems teem with toponyms. But when it comes to New York City, where the poet has now lived for most of his life, they are far more reticent. To judge from much of his poetry, Kozer has a past but no present. The only map in his work is that of Havana, and particularly of Santos Suárez, the neighborhood where he grew up. Kozer’s nonretrospective poems tend not to leave his house. Rather than society-at-large, they occupy a sanctuary of interior, domestic spaces: doorways, stairwells, dining rooms, and bedrooms instead of streets, subways , high-rises, schools, and supermarkets. The poet’s vision reaches beyond the walls of his house only when it looks back to Cuba. Kozer looks back and looks in, but he seldom looks out. He may reside in New York, but he does not live there, if by living we mean engaging the time and place and culture of his surroundings. I do not mean to criticize or question Kozer’s choice of spiritual habitat . Rather, I am interested in appreciating his isolationism, that is, in understanding its value by examining the dynamics of inwardness in his poetry. In the previous chapter Hijuelos’s novels took us to one of the borders of Cuban America, the point at which it crosses over into the American mainland. In this chapter I want to explore Cuban America’s other border, contiguous with Cuba. If the American border raises the issue of assimilation, the Cuban border raises the issue of regression (again, in the allied senses of regreso and regresión), or what Kozer terms “contraction.” These borders are also, of course...