Performing Poetry, Race, and the Caribbean: Eusebia Cosme and Luis Palés Matos

Performing Poetry, Race, and the Caribbean: Eusebia Cosme and Luis Palés Matos jill s. kuhnheim the university of kansas  In Postnationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands, Charles Carnegie asserts that ‘‘Western modernity has excelled in the production of discrete, stable, manageable categories’’ (65). These categories, such as race and nation, are social phenomena that, like Judith Butler’s notion of gender, must be continually reproduced , or performed, to be maintained. Carnegie, a social scientist, argues that the need to impose order in academic disciplines has led to privileging the national at the expense of mobile or drifting, transnational cultural flows. Adverse to ambiguity, he finds that his colleagues have often been unable to convey ‘‘the significance of lives that transect the borders and boundaries of place and race’’ (70). Arjun Appadurai extends Carnegie’s thinking when he proposes that ‘‘cultural differences are no longer taxonomic but interactive and refractive’’ (60). He says: ‘‘Culture is less a ‘habitus’’’ (Pierre Bourdieu’s term which refers to a tacit realm of reproducible practices and dispositions) and ‘‘more an arena for conscious choice, justification, representation’’—the latter often to multiple and spatially dislocated audiences (44). Both of these writers offer more interactive models of cultural identity that seem particularly apt to this moment, when ‘‘transnational’’ and ‘‘global’’ are buzz words, but their undoing of rigid concepts also allows us to see the past in a new light, to recognize people and practices that have slipped between or moved among more strictly defined categories . The Caribbean offers particular challenges to many concepts of category, as it encompasses diverse languages, cultures, ethnic and racial identities, within and across various nations. The issue of categorization is compounded by the facts of migration and transnational drift, both historical and present day. The Caribbean is a permanent example of continual transformation, for it is composed of hybrid sites that are ‘‘neither one nor the other, but something else besides, which contests the territory of both’’ (28). Homi Bhaba’s definition of ‘‘interspace ’’ resonates with Fernando Ortiz’s early twentieth-century definition of transculturation, and both characterizations draw attention to the fact that theories can construct regional identities as much as describe them. Paulla Ebron has developed this perception relative to Africa and, in her book, Performing Africa, she proposes that regional identity is the result of performance: ‘‘we have learned to imagine regions through repetitive tropes,’’ she states (10). Transcult- 136  Revista Hispánica Moderna 61.2 (2008) uration and hybridity, mulatez and mestizaje, cultural and racial mixing, constitute the Caribbean. Combining these ideas with an analysis of the work of early twentieth-century artists, Puerto Rican poet Luis Palés Matos and Cuban performance artist Eusebia Cosme, the discussion that follows will offer some specific examples of how elements of race, region, nation, and gender are performed in their work and of what effect performance has on the genre of poetry. We will find that both of these artists problematize race through poetic performances, unsettling some polarized extremes and reinforcing others. Neither can escape the representational regime of racial difference, yet both call attention to its boundaries and question conventional roles for poetry in the process. We will see how established concepts about poetry—style and content, audience, and circulation in the early twentieth-century Americas—represent part of the dominant culture that they both undermine. Palés Matos is the better known of these two figures: born in 1898 (the year when Puerto Rico became a colony of the U.S.), Palés began his career writing poetry in modernist, baroque or costumbrismo criollo styles (Castro de Moux 59). 1921 marked a change in Palés’s style, for he rejected his earlier individualist perspective and became an engaged writer. This transformation in his attitude led to his poesı́a afroantillana, or poesı́a negra, in which his work began to express the colonial situation and global subjection of the black race (Castro de Moux 121). His name was often associated with that of Nicolás Guillén in the Spanish American tradition for their shared negrismo; Palés, however, is a white poet who identified with the black heritage in the Caribbean as part of a defiant...