Sung with Ink and Paper: Nicomedes Santa Cruz and the African Strand in Peru

Abstract

The poem “Ritmos negros del Perú” by Afro-Peruvian writer Nicomedes Santa Cruz recovers Afro-Peruvian history and agency through the retelling of the journey of a mythical grandmother. through the retelling of her story, the poet claims blackness and African roots as pillars of Peruvian culture. In so doing, Santa Cruz opens the door not only for the recognition of Afro-Peruvians as people whose history and struggles, though unacknowledged, have contributed so much to Peruvian culture and society, but also for the decolonization of Peruvian history and culture.

There was a Buffalo Soldier in the heart of America,Stolen from Africa, brought to America, Fighting on arrival,fighting for survival.

—Bob Marley

Yo son carabalínegro de naciónsin la libertá no pue’o viví.

—Arsenio Rodríguez

My only consolation is that periods of colonizationpass, that nations sleep only for a time, and thatpeoples remain.

—Aimé Césaire

In Latin America the birth of the nation, though forged in the fires of humanistic liberation from colonial shackles, did not effectively terminate cultural domination. In fact, as Walter Mignolo observes, “the colonial difference” continues to operate today. The concept of “colonial difference” may be understood as the physical and imaginary space where two nations meet, but also as the space within a nation where the struggle for different meanings and signification takes place (x).¹ Today there is a sense that ethnicity, race, and heterosexuality have stopped functioning as transcendental signifiers, as organic warrantors of authenticity and originality and therefore representative of master narratives of the nation. There is a sense that these transcendental signifiers led to the systematic reproduction of the hetero-patriarchal order in which they operated, positing, for example, whiteness and heterosexuality as the norm and anything outside of said norm as its strange Other. The move away from master narratives of the nation has problematized representation itself and therefore its interpretation. Representation must account for residual colonial legacies; it must strive towards an understanding of differences within difference in an effort to decolonize our history and culture. This paper is addressed specifically to the Afro-Peruvian difference as expressed by Afro-Peruvian poet Nicomedes Santa Cruz in his poem “Ritmos negros del Perú.”²

In Ritmos negros del Perú Santa Cruz claims blackness as one of the legitimate pillars of Peruvian culture. The Afro-Peruvian experience together with other histories of pain and uprooting form a braid of skeins that together produced the complicated pattern known as Peru. By claiming blackness as one of the essential living roots of Peruvian culture, Santa Cruz opens the door for the recognition of Afro-Peruvians as peoples whose history and struggles, though largely unacknowledged, have contributed so much to Peruvian culture. In doing so, Santa Cruz restores blackness to its central place within Peruvian culture, and decolonizes both Peruvian history and culture and that of the Latin American continent. Through poetry, Santa Cruz pays homage to the generations of Afro-Peruvians who used language, song, and poetry to survive the pain of slavery, keeping the memory of an African ancestral origin alive.

The fact that the Afro-Peruvian difference is couched in poetic language suggests not only the importance of language as the sine qua non of human expression, but also the ways in which certain languages expanded as a result of colonization while others contracted or disappeared altogether. Colonization grafted alien languages onto different ethnicities and geographies, already plural and hybrid to begin with, bringing them within the orbit of western ideologies and modes of knowledge production. It was partly due to the role language played in the colonial enterprise that Spanish became the legacy of Afro-descendants, while at the same time many indigenous languages withered or died a slow death, even as indigenous communities were forced to become bilingual in order to survive in the New World. For that reason, representation must account for the ways in which different subjects are located within the languages they inhabit (Gunn 21–29, Hall 441–49). Today we must struggle to maintain a delicate equilibrium between who we are, who we were, and who we are becoming. We must be deeply accountable to our colonial pasts, but also accountable to the ever-unfolding present. It is to that ever-unfolding present that this essay is directed.

The displacement of large populations across the globe as a result of conquest, colonization, and enslavement in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had its corollary in the expansion of European notions of nationhood in the nineteenth century.³ Embedded in the ideas of Western European Enlightenment, the discourse of the nation was constructed as a unified narrative of humanistic ideas of emancipation in which the coordinates of time and space met seamlessly (Anderson 22–28; Bhabha 212–18; Zea 15–19). Although independence and nationhood were achieved by the struggles of peoples of diverse backgrounds and motives, including indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants, these ideas were deeply embedded in nineteenth-century Europe, insuring that post-independence societies would not be ega litarian (Helg 448–55). Master narratives of the nation clothed in the discourse of emancipation allowed for colonial trappings to remain hidden, and deployed them under the guise of humanism as the work of pioneering scholar on Afro-Latin American Literature Richard Jackson suggests (Black Literature 120–30), resulting in the erasure of the cultural contribution of some of the new nation’s most subjugated subjects.⁴

In Peru’s post-emancipation period the search for national identity was coterminous with the birth of national literature. Within this process of national formation, literature was seen as a unifying force capable of uniting what were perceived as disparate cultural elements (European, Indigenous, African, and Asian). It was within the process of national formation that the heterogeneous nature of Peruvian society gave way to a homogenous interpretation of Peruvian reality and culture whose principal goal was to find a “categoría unitaria que permitiera hablar de una literatura nacional peruana” (Cornejo Polar, Sobre literatura 20). Further, the fact that national literature referred exclusively to a Spanish written tradition prevented an understanding of the diverse and heterogeneous nature of Peruvian culture and society.

For that reason, Antonio Cornejo Polar insists that it is necessary to engage in a “reivindicación del carácter nacional y del estatuto literario de todos los sistemas de literatura no erudita que se producen en el Perú,” in order to unmask “la ideología discriminadora, de base clasista y étnica, que obtiene la homogeneidad mediante la supresión de toda manifestación literaria que no pertenezca o no pueda ser asumida con comodidad por el grupo que normalmente decide lo que es o no es nacional o lo que es o no es literatura” (Sobre literatura 23–24). For Cornejo Polar, any attempt at understanding Peruvian culture and literature today must include a methodology that allows us to see the different notes and tones that are part of Peruvian literatures, which he divides into three broad categories: the erudite literature written in Spanish, which has come to represent Peruvian national literature; the popular literature written in Spanish; and the oral literature of the native languages where Quechua reigns supreme (Sobre literatura y crítica latinoamericanas 24). The poetry of Nicomedes Santa Cruz is inscribed within the margins of what Cornejo Polar terms oral and popular literature.

With regards to the critical reception of Nicomedes Santa Cruz’s works, scholars such as Richard Jackson in Black Writers in Latin America (1971) and Henry Richards and Teresa Cajiao-Salas in Asedios a la poesía de Nicomedes Santa Cruz (1982) consider Santa Cruz to be a poet of Negritude due to the black consciousness expressed in his works. More recently, in Ecos de África en Perú (2003), Martha Ojeda acknowledges the message of vindication of Afro-Peruvian roots, but situates Santa Cruz’s writing within the strain of “poesía comprometida” and “contestaria” of the sixties and seventies, alongside Pablo Neruda, Nicolás Guillén, Nicanor Parra, and Ernesto Cardenal; this is because in her view Santa Cruz “no se limita a la ideología de la negritud sino que difunde un mensaje de solidaridad” (29–30).

For her part, Heidi Carolyn Feldman, in her path-breaking study of Afro-Peruvian musical revival Black Rhythms of Peru (2006), views Santa Cruz’s musical works, and the works of other Afro-Peruvian musicians, as partaking in a wider Afro-diasporic consciousness analogous to that charted by Paul Gilroy in his study of musical circuits of The Black Atlantic (1993). Borrowing from this study, Feldman coined the term “the Black Pacific world” to identify this important space left out of Gilroy’s work. She locates this physical and cultural space in “Peru and (tentatively) other areas along the Andean Pacific coast (for example, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, and Colombia) where the history of slavery, and even the persistence of people and cultural expressions of African descent, is unknown by many outsiders” (7).

While Feldman is correct in asserting that Gilroy’s study leaves out the Afro-Pacific musical circuit covered in her study, it is important to note that within the purview of literary criticism, the region is known to Latin American scholars as the Afro-Pacific region. The Afro-Pacific region encompasses coastal regions of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, and is characterized by a strong African imprint where the décima, and its attendant links with music reign supreme as the tradition par excellence within Afro-descendant communities. This fact is made clear in the studies of Jean Rahier, La décima: Poesía oral negra del Ecuador (1985), and Ana María Kleymeyer, La Décima: Fusión y desarrollo cultural en el Afropacífico (2000).⁵

For that reason, this study, though it agrees with the interpretations of the scholars listed above, differs from them in two important ways: it locates Santa Cruz’s décima production as part of the cultural circuit of the Afro-Pacific region, as the region is known in Latin America. It argues that the poetry of Nicomedes Santa Cruz, inscribed within the margins of what Cornejo Polar terms oral and popular literature, marshals in a transformation that opens the door for the decolonization not only of Peruvian culture and history but the very culture and history, literary and otherwise, of the entire Latin American continent.

Santa Cruz’s poetry is rooted in the music and dances of Afro-descendants, located primarily on the Peruvian coast, whose memory of Africa was preserved orally and through a process of cultural syncretism, reinvented and reimagined again through rhythm. His poems are inspired by the life of the descendants of African slaves who managed to keep the memory of their origins alive, then reinvented and created those memories anew in songs wrought into décimas. The décima was popularized in 1591 by Spanish musician and novelist Vicente Espinel (Pasmanick 252–54). Br“e9y, a décima is composed of ten verses of eight syllables with a variation of an ABBACCDDC rhyme (Santa Cruz, La décima 29). Décimas are usually sung or recited while accompanied by music. Given its oral and aural nature, the décima tradition is a live genre still practiced today in many countries of Latin America.⁶ Further, because of its internal rhythm and rhyme function as a mnemonic device, the décima became a favorite form of artistic expression among Spanish speaking Afro-descendant populations of Peru,⁷ outside of the power circles of what Ángel Rama called “the lettered city” (La ciudad letrada 32).⁸ This is also true of other oral traditions in Latin America.

Evidence of the oral roots of the décima tradition is found within the structure of the décima itself. Most décimas (Spanish plural) open with an octosyllabic cuarteto forzado, or forced quatrain, that introduces the theme of the décima. Stanzas of ten verse lines of eight syllables are composed live or recited from memory by the décima performer, totaling four stanzas with one for each line of the forced quatrain. If composed live, the décimas highlight the ability of the decimista (décima performer) to improvise décimas on the theme proposed in the forced quatrain, and to rhyme the last line of each décima stanza accurately with each of the lines in the forced quatrain. It is within the formal constraints of the décima that improvisation takes place.

The performer improvises the lyrics live, but always returns to the theme proposed in the forced quatrain. The improvised lyrics are poured into the formal mold of octosyllabic verses bound by a ten-line stanza but always return to the forced quatrain, which anchors the poem and serves as a touchstone or guiding post. Although the art of the décima in its live, improvised form is still practiced, today many performers recite décimas that have been committed to memory and have been passed down orally from generation to generation or in writing. The expression “Y dice así” (And so it says) usually follows the forced quatrain and could serve as a transition between each of the four décima stanzas. The emphasis on “saying” points to the spoken word and to the oral nature of the art of the décima. Further, given that décimas are accompanied by music and have an internal rhyme as well as an aural musical rhythm, the performer or performers might dance, sway, and add rhythmic sound with their feet and their hands; they might also interact with the audience, or even challenge an audience member to participate and compose their own verses. Conversely, an audience member might propose a theme and challenge the performer to improvise décimas. The communal and participatory nature of the décima performance, as well as its reliance on rhythm and formal elements as mnemonic devices, make the décima an art in its most complete form. Thus, the décima could be considered as part of a repertoire of embodied practices that in Latin America have played a vital role “in conserving memory and consolidating identities in literate, semiliterate, and digital societies” (Taylor XVIII).

In a sense, rhythm inscribed in the body operates as a kind of cultural memory that allowed Afro-descendants to survive the Middle-Passage, to remember their origins, to be born again as Afro-Peruvians, and to articulate agency and cultural resistance. Here it is important to remember that though the form and the language of the décima is European, its rhythm and content bear witness to the existence of an African memory that survived the Middle Passage and that was reinvented and reimagined anew by Afro-Peruvians, who, though no longer slaves, still occupied the lowest rungs of society and lived in the margins of the lettered city. Nevertheless, in the mid-twentieth century, as Afro-Peruvians gained more access to education and privileged means of representation, many décimas that circulated as part of the oral tradition began to be transcribed onto paper. But, just as important, many more began to be composed, written with ink and paper but still performed in front of live audiences; hence the title of this essay, “Sung with Ink and Paper.”

The transformation of the décima into a hybrid oral-written form did not impede its growth but rather aided its popularity and circulation. Perhaps more importantly, it gave Afro-Peruvians national visibility and agency while simultaneously cementing the tradition as a performance art of Afro-Peruvian roots.⁹ But the décimas composed by Santa Cruz were not just any kind of poems; they sought to forge diasporic connections with the Black Atlantic, with the Caribbean, with Brazil, and with Africa (Feldman 84, Romero 307–25).

By placing Afro-Peruvian history and roots alongside other Afro-Latin American cultures, Santa Cruz effectively located Afro-Peruvian experience as part of a greater history of slavery in the Americas. In so doing, Santa Cruz claimed historical agency: no longer were Peruvians of African descent people without history and community; on the contrary, they shared deep Atlantic roots with Africa, with other peoples of African descent in the Americas; and, in a parallel history of dispossession, with indigenous communities, as manifested in the collection Ritmos negros del Perú (1971).¹⁰

The collection Ritmos negros del Perú opens with a décima that gives the collection its title and is the center of this study. The poem begins with a quarteto forzado that introduces the poem’s subject matter:

Ritmos negros del Perú	Black Rhythms of Peru
Ritmos negros del Perú	Black rhythms of Peru
Ritmos de la esclavitud	Slavery rhythms
Contra amarguras y penas	Against bitterness and sorrows
Al compás de las cadenas	To the rhythm of the chains
Ritmos negros del Perú.	Black Rhytms of Peru.
… Y dice así:	… And so they say:

The lines in the quarteto forzado are powerful: they identify rhythm as a kind of cultural memory that allowed Afro-Peruvians to survive the Middle Passage and slavery against all odds: “Contra amarguras y penas” but to the “compás de las cadenas.” The radicalization of the décima coincides with a key moment in the development of a diasporic consciousness of the impact of slavery in Africa and abroad by the descendants of former slaves, articulated for example through the poetry of Nicolás Guillén and the writers of Negritude (Kesteloot 102–15, Mansour 9–15, Swanson, “Más allá” 60–82). In this era, the Civil Rights movement is underway and global change is in the air. In an interview with Pablo Maríñez, Santa Cruz talks about his growing consciousness of the African imprint within the continent and worldwide as a result of meeting other intellectuals of African descent during his visit to México in 1982 as a participant in the Primer Festival y Foro del Nuevo Canto Latinoamericano (116–20).

In this way, the momentous transformation of the décima fits within a wider cultural response among black communities where art is used to combat silence and invisibility. As Paul Gilroy observes, once slavery curtailed the possibility of return to Africa, rhythm was deployed as a way to combat the sorrows of uprooting and slavery; it was rhythm that persistently expressed their desire to be free and to be whole again (76). Once the Atlantic was crossed, rhythm’s connection to the African source was reborn again as a localized hybrid form; in Peru it was reborn specifically as Black Peruvian rhythms but inscribed within a larger history of the Middle Passage and the Black Atlantic in the Americas. Thus, when deployed to claim belonging, to assert rootedness, and express resistance and self-assertion, the décima as a European form is subverted, turned inside-out. In the forced quatrain, the bard announces that the décima’s subject matter will be the poetical retelling of that history, a history marked by the rhythm of bondage’s chains, as this is the substratum that will form a common denominator shared with others in the African Diaspora. It is from within that sorrowful history the bard speaks from: “… Y dice así.”

In the first décima, the poetic voice draws an ancestral link to Africa through a female ancestor, a mythical grandmother, the first ancestor to set foot in South America.

De África llegó mi abuela	My grandmother arrived from Africa
Vestida de caracoles	Dressed in seashells
La trajeron l’o epañoles	She was brought by Spaniards
En un barco carabela.	In a caravel.
La marcaron con candela	They branded her with hot iron
La carimba fue su cruz	The slave brand was her cross
Y en América del Sur	And in South America
Al golpe de sus dolores	To the rhythm of her sorrows
Dieron los negros tambores	The black drums broke into
Ritmos de la esclavitud.	Rhythms of slavery.

The speaker’s voice makes a point in identifying her Middle Passage circuit and destination as South America to differentiate it from the black experience of Brazil, the Hispanophone, Francophone, and Anglophone Caribbean, and the United States. This is important because while English-language discussions of the Black Atlantic and the Middle Passage center primarily around the Anglophone world, in Latin America the long-held view that African roots are confined strictly to Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil has marginalized the African population within the continent, resulting in the erasure or denial of its cultural manifestations and contributions to national cultures within the Spanish speaking continental part of Latin America.

The journey of the grandmother is marked by a double displacement: immediately after arriving on the coasts of South America clad in seashells, she is branded with the hot carimba (slave branding tool). She is then transported to the ocean on the other side of the Atlantic, to a region known today as the Afro-Pacific that encompasses coastal areas of Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador, bearing the carimba mark as a cross. Though the drums that bear witness to the unspeakable horrors of the slave trade accompany her long journey from African terra firma into the watery womb of the Atlantic to the New World, they do not resound with force until her arrival in Peru where she will be resold to a plantation owner. A key element of the poem is the fact that the last line of the stanza identifies the sound produced by the drums that accompany her journey as slave rhythms, signaling the fact that she, like many others, has become a slave.

It is interesting to note the double meaning of the word “black” in the lines “Dieron los negros tambores / Ritmos de la esclavitud.” Blackness marks her entry into Western lettered culture circuits not as a human being but as merchandise. Blackness also points towards the evils associated with the practice of human trafficking: the drums are black or have turned black because the practice is bad. However, if blackness as racialization, with its attendant history of racism, is the underbelly of Western civilization; and if her history and that of her people was erased by virtue of the carimba mark; paradoxically, it will be because of the carimba mark enshrined in law and born as a bodily sign of unspeakable horror that her descendants will be able to lay claim to their denied humanity and erased history: “Al golpe de sus dolores / Dieron los negros tambores / Ritmos de la esclavitud.”

Another important aspect of Santa Cruz’s décima is the gendered nature of the history it retells. It seems as if this mythical but nameless grandmother is so monumental, her suffering so great, that she stands for the African continent itself. However, though a metaphor for the African continent, she is not just a vast silent canvas where western fantasies are projected, nor the silent ground witness to economic transactions. No. The victims were so many, and the sorrow so painful and deeply felt, that she becomes a powerful gestalt that stands for human suffering and, for the same reason, a powerful avatar of resistance.¹¹

However, if the first décima tells the history of the mythical grandmother in broad strokes, and, given the anonymity and loss of personhood and humanity, ends with slave rhythms, the next décima turns to resistance. Broad strokes give way to specificity as it tells of the slave circuits within the continental part of the Americas, hereby reclaiming a suppressed and erased history. Through the story of the mythical grandmother the fate of countless Africans is retold—once on Peruvian soil, she is sold again to available plantation owners. In Lima, her final destination is the sugar plantation called “La Molina,” a plantation that was but a cog in the complex of the sugar industry and “its repeating islands,” as Antonio Benítez Rojo has so eloquently described them (18–32).

Por una moneda sola	For one coin only
La revendieron en Lima	They resold her in Lima
Y en la Hacienda “La Molina”	And in the Plantation “La Molina”
Sirvió a la gente española	She served the Spanish people
Con otros negros de Angola	With other blacks from Angola
Ganaron por sus faenas	They earned for their labor
Zancudos para sus venas	Mosquito bites for their veins
Para dormir duro suelo	Harsh ground for sleeping quarters
Y naíta’e consuelo	And nothing, no solace
Contra amarguras y penas …	Against bitterness and sorrows …

We witness a change of pace in the rhythmic pattern of the entire poem, marked by a return to the forced quatrain that grows into a crescendo. The first décima ends with rhythms of slavery, signaling her loss of personhood; the second décima ends with the powerful force of cultural resistance, against all odds, against bitterness and sorrows, as the bard states. In the third line, the use of the definite article reiterates that it is a Spanish slave circuit and widens the separation between the slaves and their Spanish masters. From the sixth line onward, as the speaker’s voice describes the harsh conditions of work and life on the sugar plantation, this suffering sets the stage for the birth of Afro-Peruvian music. This music rises amidst nothingness and enforced silence but is deployed “Contra amarguras y penas …” in the next décima stanza.

In the third décima, the speaker identifies the sugar plantation as the birthplace of Afro-Peruvian music rooted in the rhythms of slave labor. Rhythm inscribed in the body as memory is deployed as resistance, while song serves as a means to recover voice and therefore agency. As pain has no voice, and the possibility of its representation is closely related to power, the transformation of pain into representation (verbal or artistic) bears witness to human agency, creation, and consciousness (Scarry 3–12). In time, the tripartite combination of rhythm, song, and its attendant corporeal movement, not bound by the discipline of forced labor, will free body and soul from the horrors of slavery and slave work. In time, this tripartite combination will transform sorrow into rhythms and song, such as socavón and zaña mentioned in the poem: a new identity is born from the experience of erasure of identity.¹²

En la plantación de caña	In the sugarcane plantation
Nació el triste socavón	The sad socavón was born
En el trapiche de ron	In the rum factory
El negro cantó la zaña.	The black man sang the zaña.
El machete y la guadaña	The machete and the scythe
Curtió sus manos morenas	Hardened their dark hands;
Y los indios con sus quenas	And the Indians with their quenas
Y el negro con tamborete	And the black man with his drum
Cantaron su triste suerte	Sang their sad fate
Al compás de las cadenas …	To the rhythm of the chains …

Afro-Peruvian musical traditions were born in the matrix of pain and suffering. Their sound captures the rhythm of the chains and the stories they tell uncover the underbelly of imperial imaginings forged with the forced labor of Indians and Africans. By placing indigenous history of suffering and dispossession alongside the suffering of Afro-descendants, Santa Cruz acknowledges that shared history of dispossession with indigenous communities across the Americas. He also recognizes the heterogeneity of Peruvian society and culture, a theme that runs through the collection. The themes of heterogeneity, creativity, and syncretism point to music and rhythm as a kind of memory and also as a raw ore that allows for the forging of transculturation, interethnic communication, and perhaps cultural rapprochement: “Y los indios con sus quenas / Y el negro con tamborete / cantaron su triste suerte / Al compás de las cadenas …”¹³

The fourth and last décima stanza speaks of the passing of the first generations of musicians who bequeathed Peru their musical legacy, still heard today in the modern sugar fields, still resounding with rhythms that connect Peruvian localities with the African source, “De Cañete a Tombuctú / De Chancay a Mozambique.”

Murieron los negros viejos	The old blacks died
Pero entre la caña seca	But amidst the dry sugarcane
Se escucha su zamacueca	Their zamacueca is heard
Y el panalivio muy lejos	And their panalivio from afar
Y se escuchan los festejos	And one can hear the festejos
Que cantó en su juventud	That blacks sung in their youth
De Cañete a Tombuctú	From Cañete to Timbuktu
De Chancay a Mozambique	From Chancay to Mozambique
Llevan sus claros repiques	Carrying within their vibrant sounds
Ritmos negros del Perú.	Black Rhythms of Peru.

The last décima stanza enumerates musical genres bequeathed to Peru: the zamacueca, the panalivio, and the festejo. Their sound travels an imaginary route connecting Peruvian localities with legendary Timbuktu and Mozambique. The identification of Angola as the possible origin of the mythical grandmother, in the second stanza, along with Mozambique and Timbuktu, creates a triangular geography of the transatlantic slave trade in Africa that implicates not only the Spanish but also the Portuguese and the French, major forces of slavery and colonization.

However, it is important to underscore the valuable lesson the story told in the poem teaches us about the dynamics of culture: that people who were left with so little have contributed so much to a culture. It stands in stark contrast to the importance placed on material possessions in Western culture. The poem demonstrates the powerful force of memory, rhythm, and music to construct agency and to lay claim to a once denied humanity and history. As Diana Taylor expressively articulates, music, rhythm, and performance are powerful symbolic sources that “function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity” (2). In the last décima, though the sound returns to Africa as a source, the poem recognizes the hybridity of these musical genres in its use of formal elements and musical accompaniment. The last three lines of the décima bring the poetical rendition of Afro-Peruvian history back to the source through sound, only to return transformed into Black Peruvian Rhythms. If in the first décima we witness the arrival of the mythical grandmother to American soil, in the last décima, though she is no longer alive, her memory returns to Africa as the primary source of rhythm and song. In the process, she has become Afro-Peruvian. Just as the forced quatrain that opens the poem serves as a guiding post for the décima performer, Africa remains the powerful source that guides Afro-Peruvian rhythms. Moreover, rhythm connects Africa and America (both Atlantic and Pacific) through a language of sound that is shared by communities of Afro-descendants in the wider African diaspora.

Conclusion

Because the African strand was erased during the process of national formation, the poetical reconstruction of African history and the ways in which it is tied to Peruvian history are of paramount importance to understanding Peruvian society and culture today. By interpolating different ways of experiencing the nation and different ways of historicizing, of keeping memory alive beyond the domain of textual expression through the pulse of a shared memory of pain enshrined in rhythm, the collection and the poem function as a powerful counter to the master-written narratives of the nation. Inscribed within the margins of oral and popular literature, by claiming agency and rootedness as an act of resistance and self-affirmation, the poem marshals in a transformation that opens the door for the decolonization of not only Peruvian culture and history but also the very culture and history, literary and otherwise, of the entire Latin American continent. Furthermore, Santa Cruz’s works counter, within a discursive terrain, negative stereotypes that had nefarious consequences in the real lives of peoples of African descendent as these stereotypes circulated freely within the circles of what Rama called “lettered societies.”

Bereft of possessions during their uprooting, and barred from access to education and writing during the colonial and post-emancipation period, Afro-Peruvians turned to music and rhythm to reclaim the memory of their origins using the few resources at their disposal: Spanish molds, rhythm, and song. The poem emphatically insists that Afro-Peruvians (or other subaltern cultures for that matter) did not lack history and agency. Rather, because once they entered Western culture circuits, they were denied access to writing, they preserved history orally: through rhythm, music, and song, albeit with the aid of European resources. In societies where lettered culture and writing were vital routes to access power and privileged means of representation, hybridization brought a means of access, ensuring that attempts to exclude them from national culture, while powerful, remained ultimately unsuccessful. In this way, Afro-Peruvians survived and functioned within the colonial and postcolonial societies they entered initially as slaves. This is perhaps the fundamental lesson to be learned from other Latin American oral musical traditions (the Mexican Corrido, the Cuban Rumba and Son): though they belong to unlettered peoples and stem from below, they are never outsiders.

Consequently, the history of subaltern people lives on in the music, the rhythms, the dances, and songs of their bards and artists. By inscribing Afro-Peruvian history within a wider history of slavery in the Americas, Santa Cruz links his cultural heritage to Africa as an ancestral origin and to other communities in the African diaspora. Furthermore, by recognizing indigenous experience of pain, Santa Cruz identifies the potential of sorrow transmitted through sound to transcend national and ethnic boundaries. In a sense, rhythm allowed indigenous and African slaves to remember and overcome unspeakable pain, to claim belonging, to assert rootedness, to express resistance and self-assertion, and ultimately to keep the memory of their origins alive. The acoustic nature of rhythm, music, song, and movement lives on because it speaks in multiple chords. It changes with each performance, always reaching outside towards Africa as the source while recognizing itself as but one difference among the complex pattern of differences that compose Peru. This is the main message of Santa Cruz’s homage to Afro-Peruvian rhythms and roots.