Abstract

In this essay, I describe a “lullaby poetics” practiced by two poets from Puerto Rico who wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century: Clara Lair and Carmen Alicia Cadilla Ruibal. This poetics goes beyond the literary subgenre of the lullaby, inaugurated and practiced by the poet Gabriela Mistral ten years before Lair and Cadilla Ruibal began to write. As developed by the writers from Puerto Rico, the lullaby poetics contains and preserves a complex symbolic experience that the colonial discourse about maternity tries to erase. This is an experience that is at the foundation and at the heart of every society. Here, I claim that to understand the lullaby poetics inaugurated by these two poets the reader must revisit and revise the current approaches to literature, history and sociology as practiced by contemporary feminist, post-feminist, and post-colonial discourses.

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