Uniting Blacks in a Raceless Nation by Arnedo-Gómez Miguel;

Author:Arnedo-Gómez, Miguel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Since the speaker is proud of a never-ending name made up of the African-sounding names he listed prior, and now wants to show it to his “pure” friends, he is not exactly abandoning his African ethnic heritage. If the burning country from which these pure friends are coming is in Africa, then the poem may suggest to new Africans who arrive in Cuba that the black speaker is in touch with both Africa and the reality of the New World. Thus, the suggestion of abandoning an African or Afro-Cuban identity is not as clear as Dahl asserts. It is also important to remember the ethnically affirmative tone of the first part of the poem, and that this part is much longer than the second.

Despite ultimately falling prey to the homogenizing thrust of the ideology of mestizaje, Dahl’s interest in the poet’s personal struggle with his racial condition allows him to interpret his life experiences in ways that point to the difficulties of suturing fractures within his identity. As explained in this study’s second chapter, Guillén’s background and upbringing would have led him to assimilate certain aspects of the black middle-class identity. As also argued there, one such element was what Bronfman refers to as the model of civil citizenship, which proposed blacks’ assimilation of the dominant culture and rejection of Afro-Cuban culture as solutions to their social subordination. Dahl’s analysis delves into how this assimilationist conception of the Cuban black identity would have affected the poet from a young age. The critic rightly questions “the degree to which Guillén, his brothers and sisters were made aware by either parents or grandparents of their African roots, the horrors of slavery and the economic and social inequality which existed in an independent Cuba.”[37] As his analysis also suggests, such lack of awareness may explain the nature of Guillén’s first collection of poetry before Motivos de son [Son motifs]: his 1922 Cerebro y corazón [Brain and heart]. This was a book of modernista poems that was totally disconnected from black Cuban issues and Afro-Cuban culture. While acknowledging that the somewhat escapist nature of these poems responded to Guillén’s need to distance himself from the reality of his father’s recent death, Dahl also explains the absence of blackness in the collection in the following way:

the middle-class existence which the Guillén family enjoyed before the death of the father and liberal senator for Camagüey, had distanced the poet somewhat from contact with the lot of the poor black Cuban.[38]

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