December, 2000 Volume 3, Issue 3 Past Issues About dis/content Editorial Collective Contributors Contact Us Submissions Links Home   Poems by Puerto Rican Women Translated, with an Introduction, by Marta Maria Maldonado There’s no love without freedom, There’s no duty without rights, How then does a woman manage To live.  – Lola Rodríguez de Tió Poetry is a signifying act, a cultural practice. Poetry names the world. Poetry is not words alone. It enacts a dialectical interplay between voice and silence, between presence and absence. In the process of evoking meanings, what is said in poetry is as important as what is not said. The word the poet uses is not dissociated from the world; one mediates the other. But this mediation is not a neutral practice; it conceals or reveals choices and biases. Thus poetry and poetics cannot escape politics. Consider, for instance, some general trends in men’s poetry regarding representations of women. Often women are an absence – huge blank – in men’s poetry. Such absence suggests an incomplete reality, one in which men – and only men– are considered the makers of history. When women do appear, they are frequently relegated by male poets to the confines of the private and the interior. Thus the reality of women’s work and material struggles is obscured and even rendered invisible. The portrayal of women as muses – as ephemeral and ethereal entities at the service of the male poet – also denies women their historical subjectivity, places them in a subordinate position, and excludes them from the sites of struggle for social change. Although women have been writing poetry for a long time, the substance – themes and images – of women’s poetry (with some exceptions, of course) has only recently been embraced by the patriarchal canon. But the canonical reinforces the same old assumptions about the “appropriate” roles of women as passive creatures and as objects of men’s sexual desire or subliminal fantasies. All odds and obstacles notwithstanding, women all over the world are increasingly reclaiming poetry and inscribing in it the specificities of their history. The dirty little secrets of women’s material and ideological struggles are now revealed. The new poems by women continue to name and record the old silences and their consequences. History, his-story, is revisited and challenged in women’s poetry – word by word, metaphor by metaphor. The poems we offer here reveal attempts by Puerto Rican women to re-state and reinstate their history – a history marked by the contradictions of the Island’s predicament in which patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism enact their mutual transactions, while continuously subalternizing women economically, socially, politically, and culturally. In “Ay ay ay de la Grifa Negra” Julia de Burgos affirms her “negritude” in a Puerto Rican society. She often notes throughout her work that a colonial culture continuously compels her to erase every sign of the “fact of blackness.” “Ay ay ay” is a cry denoting both fear and pain. The fear is one of being recognized as black and thus one of being an unwanted Other. The pain stems from a recognition of the history of “being” black – a history of slavery and genocide during Spanish colonial rule of Puerto Rico. Colonialism, like money, changes hands. Since 1898, the history of Puerto Rico has been one of US economic and cultural domination accompanied by people’s resistances to US colonialism. For the Puerto Rican, survival under colonial conditions has demanded erasures of both history and color. Hegemony has urged the Puerto Rican to wash away her blackness, to “mejorar la raza” (improve the race) by blending in with whites. Thus, to recall the history of being black is painful, because it involves recognizing our own subordination and the violence perpetrated on us throughout five hundred years of colonialism. Julia de Burgos also introduces a notion of history by spelling out a specific connection with the past: “they tell me that my grandfather was the slave.” For Julia, then, this history turns out to be a source of both pride and pain. The poem ends with projections about the future. Again, both fear and pain frame those projections. Julia seems to be predicting a moment of her “de-racialization:” “Race escapes me,” she says. In other words, blackness transforms itself through its contact with whiteness. Julia, however, celebrates this conjuncture, of course only ironically. For she already affirmed her blackness with full force. Then Julia places this very conjuncture in a male-dominated context: “fraternity of America!” This apparent contradiction points up the very hegemonic bloc in which Julia, the Puerto Rican woman, is implicated as a colonial subject. In a limbo crafted by imperialist-colonialist power in alliance with the dominant classes in Puerto Rico, both Julia and we stand and stagger – one foot pulled in the direction of assimilation and the other in the direction of “Puerto Ricanness.” Recognizing such contradictions seems a necessary step for decolonization and liberation. The poem by Magaly Quiñones foregrounds women as agents of change in their particular historical contexts. She spells out the material and ideological conditions that prompt her to resist the status quo and seek to effect change. By spelling out the nature of her grievances (which are both material and ideological), she creates a space for political awareness and reflection, and claims politics and social change as legitimate spheres of action for women. She justifies an agenda of political transformations informed by the specificities of her conditions. But Quiñones does not stop there. She also voices solidarity with the struggles of men, children, and other women. The poem transcends an individualistic mentality and embraces a poetics of the masses. She resolves to be one of the many in “the kingdom of the few.” Olga Nolla denounces orchestrated attempts of the dominant to script her life in a manner that serves the power and privilege of white males as well as the upper class to which the poet herself belongs. Hegemony encourages her to submit to institutions such as the family, the church, and the state. Hegemony also prompts her to forget her historical moment, suggesting that this world is only a transition to a better world and that therefore there is no need to worry about what happens around her. Such insistence on historical amnesia leads to her sense of estrangement. Patriarchal power demands that she should confine herself within the sphere of the domestic – the sphere to which women supposedly belong. But Nolla contests all such “instructions” that deny woman her identity as a human subject and her active agency. “Something’s wrong, . . . ” she says. But, for Nolla, the point is not only to say it, but to change the world itself. Next Section     Table of Contents