“La abuela sale de la cocina:” Voicing Diasporic Subjectivity in the Poetry of Cristina Rodríguez Cabral

In 1913, Uruguayan historian Orestes Araújo wrote in Tierra uruguaya that “La raza [uruguaya] es caucásica…como consecuencia de una mestización que no terminará mientras sigan afluyendo al Uruguay individuos de los demás pueblos civilizados del planeta en que vivimos” (48). For Araújo, mestización meant the blending of different Caucasian cultures rather than the blending of indigenous, African, and European cultures that Mexican José Vasconcelos would term as mestizaje in La raza cósmica (1925). More than 100 years later, Uruguay is still largely perceived as a “White” nation despite studies over the last fifty years that contradict this projected image. Carlos Rama’s Los Afrouruguayos (1967), for example, is an earlier investigation that discusses the prominent role in Uruguay’s history, particularly in the country’s Revolutionary War of 1801–1830 (32–44). More recently, Karla Chagas and Natalia Stalla comment in their 2008 study on Afro-Uruguayans on the border with Brazil that the Afro-Uruguayan population has suffered from a silencing that is connected to slavery as well as contemporary issues resulting from unequal access to educational and employment opportunities (16). Chagas and Stalla’s goal to recover this repressed history goes hand in hand with George Reid Andrews’s Blackness in the White Nation (2010), wherein he examines the African diasporic presence in Uruguayan cultural production as evident in literature, music, dance, and religion.

In an effort to draw attention to Uruguay’s African diasporic presence in literature, I argue that it is useful to move beyond the national boundaries that have kept Afro-Uruguayan cultural production in a peripheral position to consider it within a larger diasporic framework, particularly in conjunction with the Spanish Caribbean. Through these horizontal flows, Afro-Uruguayan artists who have remained marginalized within the literary canon of Spanish-American literature will be able to assert their subjectivity. By subjectivity, I refer to the problematizing of “the simple relationship between the individual and language, replacing human nature with the concept of the production of the human subject through ideology, discourse or language” (Ashcroft 202). The development of subjectivity within poetry, as thoroughly outlined in Dominique Combe’s “La referencia desdoblada: El sujeto lírico entre la ficción y la autobiografía” (1999), finds its roots in the Romantic period, when German poets like Johann Wolfgan von Goethe and Wilhelm Schlegel distinguished lyrical poetry from epic poetry through the assertion of the self, expressing the poet in his or her authenticity (128). Since Romanticism, this theory of lyricism has changed or shifted: in 1956 Gottfried Benn called all lyrical poetry a “questioning of the self” (496) while Karlheinz Stierle described the poetic voice as a “problematic subject” who is “in search of identity” (436) in 1977. I point to Benn and Stierle’s theories as influential to understanding how the lyrical subject, when presented in the first person, can be thought of as autobiographical enunciations that respond to this questioning of the self and the search for identity.

In particular, I will focus on Cristina Rodríguez Cabral and her use of themes, intertextual play, and multilingualism to create transnational links with other members of the African diaspora, particularly in the Spanish Antilles, as a source of self-identity. In an interview with Miriam DeCosta-Willis, Rodríguez Cabral commented that “I defined myself as a Black woman, a broader concept than that of an Afro-Uruguayan” (qtd. in DeCosta-Willis 389). That is to say, she creates a sense of identity with the African Diaspora in general precisely because hegemonic discourse in Uruguay, in its effort to promote itself as a “White” nation, has interpellated Afro-Uruguayans as invisible citizens. Elucidating an ongoing dialogue with the Spanish Caribbean to highlight Afro-Uruguayan contributions to cultural production is a sort of return to the source. Reid Andrews discusses nineteenth-and early twentieth-century newspapers, such as Nuestra Raza, that promoted Black consciousness within Uruguay. He declares that:

Nuestra Raza’s aim to articulate racial difference led them to look towards the Caribbean and principally...