Kitchen Cosmos

The following post was published last month as my contribution to the blog for the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, where I am a fellow this year for the seminar on food.

Pots and pans, mortars and pestles, pitchers, whisks, knives: the implements for processing, cooking, and storing food represent some of the most elemental and yet creative of human inventions. Because of their familiarity through daily use, these utensils sometimes even become characters in legends, or the focus of certain traditions, of the kind my students and I examine and analyze in the Latin American Cultures course.

In Popol Vuh, the cosmology of the Quiché Maya, cooking tools famously rebel against their masters. The creation story relates that the gods needed three tries to create humankind. In the first attempt, the mud-sculpted proto-humans fell apart. In the second attempt, the mannequin-like figures made of wood could walk and talk, but they had neither heart nor mind, and could not recognize kindness and respect. They were punished by the gods, by their own dogs and turkeys (animals that were eaten), and even by their cooking utensils:

Then the grinding stones said this to them: “We were ground upon by you. Every day, every day, in the evening and at dawn, always you did holi, holi, huki, huki on our faces. This was our service for you who were the first people. But this day you shall feel our strength. We shall grind you like maize. We shall grind up your flesh,” said their grinding stones to them.

Then spoke also their griddles and their pots to them: “Pain you have caused us. Our mouths and our faces are sooty. You were forever throwing us upon the fire and burning us. Although we felt no pain, you now shall try it. We shall burn you,” said all of their pots. Thus their faces were all crushed. (76-77, trans. Christenson)

The mannequins were eventually drowned, and those few who survived became the monkeys.

The third try was the charm: humans were successfully amassed out of different colors of corn dough. In general terms, Mesoamerican belief systems hold that people are made of corn, and corn is kin. Even today there are those who believe that to sell corn is to sell one’s cousin, sibling, or parent–the same failure to recognize kindness and respect that doomed the wooden people.

El diluvio y la destrucción de los hombres de palo. Diego Rivera

Caribbean and Amazonian cosmologies tend to feature gourds as womb-like containers of treasured abundance. In Taino myth, for example, the ocean and all its fish are born from a dropped calabash when Deminán and his brothers try to return the gourd to its safe perch in the clouds. Cuban writer Antonio José Ponte, in his essay collection Las comidas profundas, writes of a tradition in eastern Cuba in which a gourd or a jug is kept in a secure spot out of the sun and away from animals, to be gradually filled with fruits as they come into season over the nine months of a mother’s pregnancy:

Poco a poco, entre el espíritu de la botella, figuración de Las Mil y Una Noches, y el espíritu del niño esperado, empieza a establecerse una relación muy estrecha. Todo lo dulce a la redonda, toda carne de fruta entra a la matriz de vidrio para componer un doble, un niño de tierra. La barriga de la madre y la del botellón se vuelven fermentaciones gemelas (48).

[Little by little, between the spirit of the bottle, allegory of A Thousand and One Nights, and the spirit of the expected child, a very close relationship begins to be established. All that is sweet from the surrounding area, all flesh of fruit enters into the womb of glass to create a double, a child of the earth. The belly of the mother and the belly of the jug become twin fermentations.] (my trans.)

The resulting mixture, a sangría-like drink called aliñado, is imbibed to celebrate the baby’s birth, or even stored much longer and fermented further as the child grows.

These mythological and ritual examples from the Americas blur the lines among humans, food, and food preparation utensils, as co-actors in one environment, to demonstrate an ancient truth: we are not only what we eat or drink, but also the embodied practice of how we prepare and consume it.

de-cor-ar

A new room, more than one empty shelf,
spaces to fill with something about myself...

Brazilian books, a museum catalog
of Mexican art, a stylized frog
from Colombia made of clay,
a Chilean invitation for a special day,
en eclipse that was a gift for the wall,
more books to display to all
the visitors, some orchestral works from Brazil,
a brightly colored mug from the top of the hill
at Sugarloaf, a Taino statuette,
a Literature in Spanish encyclopedia set,
books on cinematic splendor and Panama's gold,
a compendium of maps from New Spain of old,
an Amazonian atlas, and from Paraty
a wooden boat a colleague gave to me,
a calendar in Portuguese,
and bookending all of these,
works by Fuentes and García Marquez.
But up in the corners where the shelves are darkest,
there are many more spaces to fill...

and it may be that to never fill them, I will.

Animating Neruda

"The most important living poet of the Spanish language," an oft-repeated epithet in Roberto Ampuero's The Neruda Case, situates the reader chronologically before 1973, before the September 11 coup in Neruda's and Ampuero's native Chile that led to the death of freely elected socialist president Salvador Allende and the power grab of Augusto Pinochet. Certainly still one of the most important poets--not just in Spanish but in any language--Neruda also makes for a tempting literary character. Not unlike Antonio Skármeta's Ardiente paciencia (1985; germ of the 1994 Italian film Il Postino), in which the master poet befriends a postman and unveils for him the power of metaphor, Ampuero's El caso Neruda (2008; English translation by Carolina de Robertis 2012) animates "don Pablo" through an imagined friendship with the protagonist.

In this instance the protagonist is the Cuban-American detective Cayetano Brulé, already known from Ampuero's earlier novels. But in The Neruda Case we learn the origin of Brulé's profession: it is Neruda himself who "creates" Brulé as a detective--encouraging him to try on that line of work as just one more  disguise in the parade of disguises we all wear in life, as the poet says--and giving him his first case. In his dying days, the repentant poet assigns Brulé the task of searching for someone from Neruda's past, and the search takes Brulé from Chile to Mexico, Cuba, East Germany, and Bolivia before returning to Chile in the final hours of Allende's government. Brulé assumes that his search has to do with alleviating Neruda's cancer, but we learn, along with Brulé, that this particular "cancer" is best understood metaphorically: Neruda is consumed by regrets stemming from his series of lovers--Josie, Maria Antonieta, Delia, Matilde--and wants to achieve a certain peace with his conscience as a dying wish.

The choppy narrative shows us the mistakes and false starts of Brulé's learning curve as a detective, always hinting meta-fictionally at the process of detective-novel writing through Brulé's analyses of the Georges Simenon novels he reads along the way. Neruda has given Brulé the novels, featuring the French detective Jules Maigret, as "how-to" primers for the incipient detective. But both Neruda and Brulé hypothesize the absolute incompetence that the European literary detectives such as Maigret, Holmes, Poirot, Marple, et al would display if forced to operate in their beloved but chaotic Latin America.

Neruda's poetry appears throughout the novel, quoted by admirers and detractors alike. Brulé, often quite frustrated with or disillusioned by Neruda, experiences something of a demystification of the great poet who has so recently (in the narrative's chronology) won the Nobel prize. But chapters written in Neruda's autobiographical voice simply humanize him more than demystify him, and so do the final chapters depicting the near simultaneous demises of the Allende government and of Neruda himself.

An important motif throughout the narrative is "Latin America." At Mexico City's glorious and glorified Museum of History and Anthropology, Brulé has an uncomfortable but profound epiphany: "For the first time, he was clearly aware of the magnitude of disaster dealt to the indigenous people of the Americas by the invasion and domination of white men, whose blood, he could not deny as he glanced at himself in a windowpane, flowed copiously through his veins" (75). He realizes that he could "never again be the same Latin American as he'd been before": proud of the "legendary past of Havana and the vague origins of Valparaíso, [he] now understood that Mexicans, as a people, inhabited a realm unknown to him, rooted in millennial depths unimaginable to someone from an island that had barely five hundred years of recorded history" (75).

Brulé can recognize diversity within the vast geography of Latin America, but also commonality, as in his repeated rejection of European detective methodology as unsuitable in Latin America, or when, sharing the bed of a frank and casual lover in East Berlin, he identifies with "the Latin American school of love, which preferred amorous encounters with tentative beginnings and gradual consummation, wrapped in romanticism, and always initiated by the man." In contrast, his lover's "female emancipation, born of true socialism, made him feel uncomfortable and inhibited." (184).

Brulé is simultaneously undergoing the disintegration of his marriage, and if love is inevitable in a novel about the man who penned Veinte poemas de amor [...], Cien sonetos de amor, etc., then it is depicted here most often as a love of little endurance: Neruda's serial relationships, Brulé's failed attempts to save his marriage, and the tangled love affairs that Brulé must untwine in order to find the information he needs to resolve Neruda's nagging deathbed doubt. I think the novel entertains and engages most as an extended meditation on the ephemeral nature of love, of power, of life itself.

El cofre de tesoro

Hallarás este cofre de tesoro

en alguna antología ocultada,

y una vez la gran tapa levantada,

verás puras frases labradas de oro.

Voces, palabras, y signos de un foro,

las letras en multitud combinada,

formarán la escena cristalizada:

mímicas del habla, como de un loro.

No podrás vencer la amarga sorpresa.

No hay cálice, corona ni amuleto,

ni rastros de piratería ilesa.

Mas descubrirás el magno secreto:

el cofre es la poética belleza,

y el único botín, este soneto.

Abóboras das Américas

Verdes, amarelas, brancas, ou cor-de-laranja; enormes ou pequeninas; lisas ou ásperas, as abóboras americanas têm um papel fundamental não só nas tradições alimentícias mas também no folclore do hemisfério. Sabemos por evidências arqueológicas que foram cultivados diversos tipos de abóboras há dezenas de séculos nos Andes e em Meso-américa, e que através do tempo as abóboras têm complementado o regime básico de feijão, milho, batatas e pimentas. Nos principais idiomas americanos de hoje, os nomes das variedades são múltiplos: pumpkin, zapallo, abobra, squash, porongo, gourd, sem esquecer os primos calabaza, cabaça, e calabash, mesmo que estes últimos não aludem ao mesmo fruto.

No folclore americano a família das abóboras é associada à origem do mundo e também ao ciclo da vida. Por exemplo, segundo a mitologia taína, Deminán era o filho de Yaya, espíritu divino. Deminán fez cair, do teto da barraca de Yaya, uma abóbora que continha os ossos do irmão mais velho dele. Quando a abóbora rompeu no chão, nasceram dela os rios, os lagos, os mares, e dos ossos do irmão nasceram todos os peixes. Com certeza as sementes da abóbora parecem peixes!

Também na cosmologia maia do povo quiché, na estória dos gêmeos heróis do Popol Vuh, a abóbora tem um papel importante como metáfora plurivalente. Um dos gêmeos utiliza uma abóbora para substituir a cabeça do irmão, morto por um morcego que lhe tirou a cabeça. (O pai deles tivera perdido a cabeça, que foi pendurada numa árvore e de onde produziu saliva-sêmen que engravidou a mãe dos gêmeos.) Com a cabeça-abóbora, os gêmeos enganaram os Senhores de Xibalbá, o Lugar dos Mortos, no jogo parecido com o futebol que era típico dos povos meso-americanos. Depois os gêmeos converteram-se na Estrela da Manhã e na Estrela da Tarde (Venus). Quer dizer que a abóbora forma um elo unindo uma série de imagens relacionadas cosmologicamente: cabeça, balão, estrela, e as épocas cíclicas do universo.

Aquilo de subsituir a cabeça por uma cabaça é um motivo repetido na célebre lenda norte-americana, escrita por Washington Irving, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." O fantasma do cavalheiro degolado leva uma abóbora como se fosse cabeça, a que atira e atinge no amedrentado Ichabod Crane no caminho desolado de uma noite de outono. Fica claramente implicada aqui a tradição do jack-o'-lantern, costume que praticava-se na Irlanda entalhando o nabo para fazer uma lanterna vegetal mas que, uma vez transplantada aos Estados Unidos, assumiu o rosto da abóbora.

No Brasil também abundam abóboras, e outros frutos da mesma família genérica (como o melão e a melancia), nas lendas que implicam o ciclo da vida de várias fontes indígenas (como o nascimento, de um melão, da serpente-via láctea). Segundo Câmara Cascudo, a origem da personagem da "cuca" pode ser no fato de essa palavra significar, em algumas regiões do país, a abóbora quando perfurada para desenhar olhos, nariz e boca. Neste dia de Halloween e temporada mexicana do Dia dos Mortos, fica cristalizado--naquele sorriso de caveira que tem o jack-o'-lantern--o melancólico perceber, no contexto americano, do ciclo da semeada e da colheita, da vida e da morte.

Novelas I'd Like to See

Attention Latin American telenovela producers:

PLOT IDEAS!! FEEL FREE TO STEAL THEM!!

Although I don't have much time to watch novelas, there have been a few over the years that I've enjoyed tuning in to view with my family (plus + great language practice!), such as Catalina y Sebastián (Televisión Azteca), América (Rede Globo), or the more recent En Nombre del Amor (Televisa). Telenovelas form a huge part--the most profitable--of Latin American primetime and are exported not only within Latin America but all over the world. The Rede Globo machine in Brazil, and certain Televisa efforts in Mexico (Carla Estrada productions), set the bar for excellence in all respects: filmography, acting, script, costumes, music. The best novelas not only excel in these areas but also engage with the viewers' social, political, and economic concerns and desires. A few suggestions for (tele)novelas I'd like to see:

(1) Setting: Chiapas, 1994. Daughter of rich hacendado falls for daring, but poor, Zapatista revolutionary. Yes, the same old formula, but it would be a way of getting a Mexican telenovela to actually deal with political realities in Mexico.

(2) Setting: Contemporary Brazil. Two non-white Brazilians, of different ethnic and geographic backgrounds, meet and fall in love. Protagonists' gender: open.

(3) Any novela produced in Mexico, Chile, Colombia, etc. that dares to set its story outside the country of origin. Brazil (Rede Globo) seems to be the only country that does this with any frequency, and I admire what it implies about the country's imagination and ambition. They've set novelas in Morocco, Greece, Mexico, even the US (for example, New Mexico of the Old West in the singular farce Bang Bang).

(4) A Mexican novela that dares to feature a main relationship that is not heterosexual.

(5) More of the lushly filmed Mexican historical novelas, like Carla Estrada's Amor Real and Alborada, but more proactively rehistoricized regarding women's roles and the roles of indigenous and African characters.

(6) More of the brightly comic, and satirical, Colombian novelas in the tradition of Betty la Fea and Pedro el Escamoso (and the current Chepe Fortuna, with its bald, though secondary, satire of Chavez's Venezuela).

More ideas / más ideas / mais idéias?

Cumbia del calambre

Yo tengo mal de amores, caray,
y me tiembla todo el cuerpo.
Por eso fui al consultorio
 y así me dijo el médico:
"Con esa calentura que tienes,
muchacho, que para curarte,
hay que bailar la cumbia,
¡la cumbia del calambre!"

Esos ojazos que tiene mi amor
me taladraron el pecho.
Por eso me recetaron así
cuando fui con el curandero:
"Con esa presión alta que tienes,
muchacho, que para curarte,
hay que bailar la cumbia,
¡la cumbia del calambre!"

Baliando con ella me siento feliz.
La tengo conmigo y la estrecho.
Por eso todos me dicen lo mismo
que no existe otro remedio:
"Con esa comezón fuerte que tienes,
muchacho, que para curarte,
hay que bailar la cumbia,
¡la cumbia del calambre!"

seis sóis

seis sóis de seis céus

coleção que são

coleção colagem

alguns mexicanos

outros estadunidenses

mais um dominicano

mas no mosaico

mais universais

vários sorrisos

só um sem raios
tem de metal, de barro, de vidro
naturais, pintados, até transparente

todos capturados

pela minha câmara

em dias de sol

quanto sol neste verão

quantos sóis verão?

seis sóis sós

cada sol no seio do seu céu

Flush

Slick

                                    Slick   

                                                                        Slick

Dispersants.

The Gulf is so big.

Slick

                                    Slick   

                                                                        Slick

Crustaceans.

The shrimp are so small.

The encabpsulated drobps of bpetroleum add ubp

bpeyond where anybpody can count.

Blackened fish? Fish oil?

This is not what the health guides mean.

Pelicans gulping

for air / not fish.

Dolphins diving

for clear water / not fish.

This mess is so huge and so smelly and so dirty

that the only plumber who can

flush this bowl

is the ancient one-legged storm-bringer,

pan-Caribbean creator / destructor

Hurakán.

Natural solution / divine intervention

to a manmade problem.

What will happen then?

Slick

                                    Slick   

                                                                        Slick

Dispersal:

Drobplets encabpsulating Houston.

Drobplets encabpsulating Atlanta.

Drobplets encabpsulating Washington.

And at least a few little drobplets sent

along the Gulf Stream

to London.

Hurakán can see to that.

Music from Spain to Latin America

The Tulsa Symphony Orchestra closed its "Around the World" 2009-2010 concert season on May 1 with a night of "Music from Spain to Latin America" conducted by James Bagwell. The fact that the previous concerts in the series all focused exclusively on one country--Germany, Italy, "America" (the United States), England, and France--whereas this concert slides from one side of the Atlantic to the other and back again:

(a) provides for a nice change of pace
(b) allows for a sensational range of pieces
(c) reinforces the perception that all Spanish-speaking (and Portuguese-speaking?) countries are the same
(d) all of the above

The answer is D! It was a terrific concert, just weakly contextualized. The concert series brochure features photos of iconic landmarks, one for each concert page (such as Neuschwanstein Castle for Germany); the featured photo for the "From Spain to Latin America" concert is Pão de Açucar (Sugarloaf Mountain) in Rio, even though no Brazilian or even Brazilian-inspired music appears on the program."Latin America" is a continent-plus sized area of which Argentina, Mexico, and Cuba are featured in the program; surely a better icon could have been selected. And so, in spite of Brazil's internationally famous musical traditions (and the opportunity to include at least Villa-Lobos!), the evening's pieces ranged from a Frenchman's composition about Spain (Chabrier's España) to a Mexican's composition based on a Cuban poem (Revueltas's Sensemayá): I have no complaint about artists finding inspiration anywhere they like, but for a series focused on nationalities, this particular hodgepodge does little to explore the nuances of most people's general understanding of "Latin" identity.

And maybe that's just fine--after all, it's about listening to great music, which this all certainly is. And even by the unrealistic measure of composer nationalities matching national inspirations, four of the six pieces are by composers taking on the styles of their own countries: de Falla's El sombrero de tres picos in Spain; Moncayo's Huapango in Mexico--something of an unofficial national anthem in that nation; and Piazzolla and Ginastera in Argentina, the former's Oblivion and Libertango and a suite of four dances from the latter's Estancia.

Rich Fisher's interview with James Bagwell on Studio Tulsa (KWGS) was very helpful in clarifying early 20th-century composers' experimentation with national identities in music, in all parts of the Americas, and identified the cross-border interest among the French and Spanish, for example. The program notes in Intermission offered insightful information on the composers and their creations as well. But the guest conductor, in his introductions to the compositions during the concert, twice used "Latin American" to mean "Spanish."

I should emphasize that I'm proud of TSO and how they rose from the ashes of the previous symphony organization. I have thoroughly enjoyed every one of their concerts this season. Stand-out performances from this particular concert, in my humble opinion, included their renditions of España, Huapango, and Libertango. And I am glad they brought attention to classical music in Latin America, no matter how obliquely. But I hope that sometime they can offer a concert featuring simply Argentina, Brazil, or Mexico (for example) on its own, equal weight with "America."

The Latin American outlook for next season is mixed, in more than one way: one of the announced concerts is titled "Broadway to Buenos Aires" (January 29, 2011) but with little evident connection to the Argentine capital other than Anderson's Blue Tango and the mythologized figure of Evita Perón through Webber's music. However, I also note that one of the announced guest conductors for next season is Uruguayan Gisele Ben-Dor, known especially for her promotion of works by Ginastera, Revueltas, and Villa-Lobos, among other Latin American composers. On March 12, 2011, she is slated to conduct compositions by Liszt, Prokofiev, and Brahms. It's all in the mix. ¡Viva TSO!

Continent of Corn

Chances are high that if you've grown up just about anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, you and your metabolism are very familiar with corn (maize). Whether it's corn on the cob (yellow or white? red or blue?), popcorn and corn chips or tortillas and tostadas, grits and cornbread or arepas and esquites, pozole and atole or cornflakes and canjica, corn unites the Americas! It's true that corn's presence is somewhat diminished in the Caribbean, and it's also true that Asians and Africans tend to eat corn in abundance. But it is still the case that Europeans remain largely unfamiliar with corn, except popcorn (and polenta!), and corn as livestock feed.

We know from paleobotany that corn has been undergoing hybridization during thousands of years of cultivation in the Americas. Indigenous Americans discovered the process of nixtamalization, in which corn is mixed with lime (or ash) to allow for the more nutritious digestion of the niacin in corn. The word comes from Náhuatl, and has even been documented, in its form of "nixtamaleros," as an insult implying indigenous ancestry (and thus corn tortillas), wielded by those northern Mexicans who prefer wheat tortillas!

Today the US produces approximately half of the world's corn, and Brazil and Mexico are also big producers. Experiments in hybridization continue, albeit controversially: to protect the ancestral stock, the Mexican government had resisted, until just a few months ago, the import of genetically modified corn. Corn rivals sugarcane not only in the production of glucose-based products such as corn syrup (ubiquitous and insidious in US products) but also in ethanol. Recent interest in ethanol production from corn in the US and Mexico spiked the price of corn and damaged Mexican production practices. But it is more efficient to produce ethanol as an alternative fuel from sugarcane than it is from corn. This gives leading ethanol producer Brazil an advantage based on the extent of arable land in its tropical climate. A joint US-Brazil economic plan to stimulate ethanol production from sugar cane in Caribbean countries prompted the Venezuelan government, which has too much to lose in potential petroleum sales, to complain about a disguised neocolonization of the islands.

In Spanish, maíz (or elote or choclo, etc.) and in Portuguese, milho, corn is justly celebrated by quintessential Latin American writers Gabriela Mistral and Miguel Angel Asturias, both Nobel laureates. The Chilean Mistral equates corn with its Mexican homeland, where she lived as an influential educator, in her poem "El maíz": "El santo maíz sube / en un ímpetu verde, / y dormido se llena / de tórtolas ardientes [...] Y México se acaba / donde la milpa muere." The Guatemalan Asturias, in Hombres de maíz, constructs a novel fluctuating between the Maya stories and mores he learned from his grandmother, and the surrealist techniques he learned in Paris while studying at the Sorbonne.

Asturias's title refers to the pre-conquest Quiché Maya compendium of knowledge known as Popul Vuh, which holds that the gods, after several failed attempts, finally created humans from corn. The hair-like tassels, the teeth-like kernels, and the milky insides of the kernels likened to breastmilk or semen, are a few of the most salient similes in the Mesoamerican worldview's linkage of corn to the substance of human life. A custom observed across several Maya groups is the burial of a newborn's placenta in the milpa (cornfield), a symbolic return to the origin of life in the Americas.

Iconos de la geografía latinoamericana

Los siguientes íconos sintetizan formas geopolíticas e ideas culturales de los países latinoamericanos. Se los ofrezco a mis estudiantes, con algunos significados sugeridos para cada ícono, en espíritu didáctico.

México pirámide por su simbólica presencia cultural mesoamericana; semejanza topográfica al país en relieve / cornucopia por su semejanza al mapa bidimensional; símbolo de la abundancia del país (en varios sentidos)

Centroamérica volcán por la presencia volcánica en casi todas las naciones del istmo / plátano por la forma del istmo y el papel protagónico de su cultivo en la zona

Cuba lagarto por su forma en el mapa, basado en el poema de Nicolás Guillén con su verso del "largo lagarto verde"

Haití, República Dominicana puños en oposición por su forma en el mapa, compartiendo la isla de La Española, y por su historia de agresiones mutuas

Puerto Rico cofre de tesoro por la riqueza implícita en su nombre y por su forma casi rectangular

Venezuela corona por ocupar la corona de Sudamérica en el mapa; por la corona de estrellas en su bandera; por la "industria" del certamen Miss Universo (6 ganadoras desde 1971)

Colombia espiral por su forma en el mapa; por recordar las imágenes de novelas colombianas La vorágine y Cien años de soledad (la tormenta al final)

Ecuador bola de helado por el frío de las alturas andinas, derritiéndose hacia el este con el declive hacia el calor de la selva amazónica, sugiriendo la falta del cono que acompaña el helado, que sería un territorio de forma cónica hacia el este, fuera de su territorio actual, que Ecuador reclamaba

Perú cabeza de cóndor por su parecido en el mapa (con su pico hacia el noreste) y por representar de esa manera uno de los máximos símbolos espirituales de varias culturas andinas, incluyendo a los incas

Bolivia corazón por su ubicación central y la expresión popular, "corazón de Sudamérica"

Chile termómetro por su semejanza bidimensional; porque la gama de sus climas refleja los cambios en el mercurio, desde el frío de la zona sureña hasta el calor del desierto de Atacama en el norte; por ser El Mercurio el nombre del diario principal de la nación

Paraguay cancha de fútbol por la popularidad del deporte y por asemejar el país los dos lados, divididos por el Río Paraguay, de una cancha de futból en un momento de acción en el lado oriental, donde está la gran mayoría de la población

Argentina bombacha el pantalón suelto típico de los gauchos, por su forma en el mapa y por representar el gaucho, como del célebre poema Martín Fierro, símbolo de lo argentino

Uruguay cuña de queso por su creación como estado-tapón literal entre Brasil y Argentina; por evocar la gran población de ganado

Brasil piraña por su semejanza a la imagen cuando visto desde el norte en el mapa; por evocar el acto de devorar, acto clave simbólico en el concepto artístico de Oswald de Andrade, la antropofagia / amuleto por sugerir la forma de un muiraquitã amazónico o una figa afro-brasileña

American Tropics

I’ve had a particularly productive month in the London area as a visiting research fellow at University of London’s Institute for the Study of the Americas . Neatly bisecting my four weeks in England was the University of Essex-sponsored conference, “American Tropics: Toward a Literary Geography." Given my current research on representations of the body in Latin American literature of the 1920s and 30s, and also an investigation into contemporary Amazonian theater, I particularly enjoyed new perspectives of the American Tropics seen/scene from London.

At the very well organized conference, of the ideal size and duration for getting to know people (about 70-80 participants over parts of four days), I met fellow Latin Americanists as well as colleagues in fields related to my own but outside my specialty: anthropology, geography, the US South, the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. And among the many general concepts I learned figure the following:

The names, titles, and a rough idea of the creative styles of Wilson Harris (Guyana) and Elizabeth Nunez and Harold Sonny Ladoo (Trinidad), important contemporary writers of the Anglophone Caribbean;

Of the successful and prize-winning efforts of the Saramakas of Suriname to map their ancestral lands in order to protect them from logging interests;

Very useful general ideas about place, space, map and body, and the interplay between language and landscape;

That the emplacement of New Orleans as a city of the Americas (and not just an American city) is an ongoing critical endeavor among several disciplines and with much enthusiasm;

That James Fenimore Cooper wrote a high-seas novel in which the Florida Keys play a particularly symbolic role regarding the liminality of gender roles;

That Guantánamo Bay has a long history of use as a detention center; and the US-Cuban history of the legal ambiguities on which the Bush administration relied for purposes of acting outside the law;

That the University of Essex holds a first-class collection of Latin American art, mostly on display in its library;

Details and examples regarding the historical process of musical and marketing styles presenting São Paulo, Salvador, and the general Brazilian imaginary to the world;

That there is a rich vein of literature pertaining to the border dispute in the region of Amazonia shared by Colombia and Peru, but that residents of the area relate more closely to each other across the border than they do to the faraway Andean capitals of Lima and Bogotá;

That the practice and spirit of shamanic kanaima remain extant not only in areas of Amazonia but also in comics and online gaming phenomena;

Of the importance of the five directions quincunx in the Mesoamerican conception of thinking about place in the world, and of the vitality behind the blue-green color associated with the center;

That with regard to the three tropical zones in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, the American tropics (or neotropics) host the longest continual stretch of land (along with the greatest biodiversity and river system on the planet); and that the mouths of the Amazon lie almost exactly along the equator.

I state these, unabashedly, as facts I have learned or added to already built contexts: let no one forget that learning is, and always should be, a lifelong process, for everybody’s benefit. And I state them without giving the names of the presenters who illuminated me, to protect the innocent, although I am willing to provide them to a courteous inquirer. Beyond the limits of the conference, I add the following incomplete list of further concepts I learned:

That I am most grateful for contacts established with colleagues at my host institute along with the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, independent scholars, and colleagues met at the conference;

That the Institute for the Study of the Americas sponsors the excellent series through Palgrave Macmillan, “Studies of the Americas” , along with the editorial offices of Journal of Latin American Studies;

That the British Library, which has an outstanding Latin American collection, will be hosting an exhibition in 2010 on the bicentennial of the independence of the Spanish American republics ;

That the London area can experience an almost tropical climate for a few weeks in late June and early July;

That historian Charles Boxer (1904-2000) and statesman George Canning (1770-1827) are important and intriguing figures in the history of Latin American studies in Britain; the latter’s house in posh Belgravia now hosts a very nice public library on all things Latin American along with frequent concerts and lectures sponsored in conjunction with Latin American embassies;

That the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Kings College (where Boxer, above, once held the Camões Chair) was the first of its kind in the UK and continues to be unique in many ways;

Of the existence of Peepal Tree Press and its first-rate selection of titles by Caribbean and Caribbean-diaspora writers;

That the British Museum , which houses an impressive pre-Hispanic Mexican collection, will be sponsoring the September 2009-January 2010 exhibition “Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler” congregating artifacts from prominent museums in the Americas as well as Europe; it is to be the first such exhibition based on the life of the Aztecs’ “last elected ruler”;

That the Kew Gardens display narrative posted underneath its rubber tree specimen rather blithely states that the tree became widely planted throughout Asia by the turn of the 20th century, without mentioning the involvement of Kew Gardens in the cultivation of the seeds stolen by Henry Wickham from Amazonas state, in what has recently been labeled one of the original acts of biopiracy, for propagation in the British colonies of Asia.

That I heard as much Portuguese as Spanish spoken on the streets of London, with both languages represented amply in non-European as well as European variants.

To avoid continuing on too long, I’ll stop here, and heartily thank my family, for their key emotional support for this opportunity, and my employer, the University of Tulsa, for its fundamental financial support in helping me fulfill the research fellowship.

The Aviary

A hallucinated rhapsody

Primeiro foi a gritaria da papagaiada imperial:
Amo el canto del cenzontle,
pájaro de cuatrocientas voces
pero amo más a mis hermanos:
We’re three caballeros, three gay caballeros
They say we are birds of a feather
X-polynation:
Colibird, Humming-flor, Beijabrí
Minha terra tem palmeiras
onde canta o sabiá;
as aves, que aqui gorjeiam,
não gorjeiam como lá:
¡Cuac! ¡Cuac! ¡Acucuac!
Um papagaio verde de bico dourado
principiou falando numa fala mansa,
muito nova, muito:
Ya viene viene la golondrina
Viene viene la golonchina
va que vuela la golonmaya
pero el cielo prefiere el rodoñol
su niño querido el rorreñol
el roquetzal, que vive en tu escudo
el rorroner, the coyote’s after you,
Roadrunner, if he catches you,
transfórmate:
¿Altazor o Altazur?
A hawk or a handsaw?
Toucan or not tucán, that is the question.
A guacamacarara
foi pra Araraquara
deitou numa rede e compôs
Cuculzornaíma, o Un viaje en hamaca
Maculcantazur, O Herói sem Nenhum Pudor
Altacunaimacán, Pluma envuelta en serpientes.
Ya los pajarillos cantan:
Qui-qui-ri-doodle!
1 pássaro na mão > 2 voando
Pájaro cascabel, pájaro chupamiel,
chupa la bella cracker de miel
Polly wants a galleta maría
donde el águila paró
y su estampa dibujó
el cóndor pasa,
se la pasa criando cuervos
entre cuatro zopilotes
volverán las oscuras golondrinas
Little bird, little bird, ‘neath the cinnamon tree,
¡Cómo canta la zumaya!
¡Ay, cómo canta en el árbol!
¡La rama en que cantaba el tecolote!
Little bird, little bird, do you sing for me?
Pajarillo verde, quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermoré,’
Pajarillo verde, ‘Nevermore’ voy a llorar
The Trumpet of the Swan:
¡Cuac! ¡Acucuac!
Make Way for Ducklings!
¡GuaCuac! ¡MaCuac! ¡AraCuac!
Eram centenas e centenas de colheireiras cor-de-rosa…
Tive uma tal sensação de lindeza,
fiquei tão comovido,
de repente deitei no chão da lancha…




References: Above all, Vicente Huidobro in structure, style, and a few well-known verses, as much as Mário de Andrade, to whom I give first, last, and middle words here, and from whom I borrow “hallucinated rhapsody” from different titles. Strongly present: Miguel Angel Asturias, whose Guacamayo squawks throughout, and Oswald de Andrade, whose general idea of antropofagia informs the methodology here. Cameos: William Shakespeare (with and without anthropophagy by Oswald de Andrade), Nezahualcóyotl, Walt Disney, Gonçalves Dias, Nicanor Parra, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Pepe Guízar, Federico García Lorca, E. B. White, Robert McCloskey, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Joe Darion, Edgar Allen Poe, Warner Bros., José Joaquín Palma and José María Bonilla Ruano, y varias frases y canciones de dominio público.

Santo Domingo on the Edge

Flashback: Dominican Republic, March 2004.

There is no beach in Santo Domingo, port capital of the Dominican Republic. The waves crash right up almost to the edge of the interminable seaside drive. No restaurants along the shore, hardly, just casinos that flash and flicker from the other side of the road. The drive from the airport at night along the oceanside is a long zoom through neon and open flame, the faraway casinos and burning trash.

Further inland, the colonial home of Diego Columbus—the country’s flagship cultural heritage site—appears about ready to slide down the bank of the Ozama River on its way to the Caribbean. The house perches on the edge of the rather dutifully named Plaza de la Hispanidad, a concept and setting wholly maintained by the mulatto descendants of Spaniards and Africans. Yet the visitor to Santo Domingo would search in vain for the Plaza de la Africanidad. Perhaps there is no such named plaza because in fact all plazas in the city are so inherently African that there is no need to commemorate such an identity. But the identity to exalt, especially with regard to the Haitian crisis on the other edge of the island, is the European one. Dominicans tend not to think of themselves as Black, because then they'd be Haitians.

In all of Latin America, the Dominican Republic is the only nation to have won its independence from a non-European country. The struggle was won against Haiti, itself newly independent from France. But the new nation sought successfully to become a Spanish colony again! When it finally won independence from Spain in 1865, it was in fact its second battle for independence. The Dominican Republic was occupied by US forces twice during the twentieth century. Arguably the Dominican Republic, like many other nations on small to mid-size islands, will always have trouble defending its sovereignty. Still, everything looks good for Dominicans when they compare their situation to that of Haiti. I happened to be in Santo Domingo shortly after Haitian president Aristide stepped down / was removed from power. Dominican soldiers, just returned from Iraq, sealed the border. There were some refugees and UN workers staying at our conference hotel. I saw a popular Dominican TV host interview a top Haitian official, in Spanish, about the crisis.

But the Haitian situation seemed much less important to Dominicans than their own impending presidential elections. A taxi driver, who had completed his law degree, told me rather dryly that he would kill president Mejía if he won re-election (Mejía lost to popular candidate Leonel Fernández in May 2004). In March, everywhere I looked people wore the colors of Fernández’s party, so I’m hoping Dominicans celebrate the fact that their votes were counted and respected.

Off the coast of Santo Domingo sits the massive Columbus Lighthouse. It’s shaped like a huge cross when seen from above, some twenty stories high. The building contains the remains of Christopher Columbus (a claim disputed by Spain), while the lighthouse on top is diminutive in comparison. It is a source of pride for only a few Dominicans; for most, it is a reminder of profligate governmental spending on grandiose projects that do little to help the everyday conditions of the populace. Beyond the beach, tourism in the country seems to be moving away from Columbus-mania toward ecotourism and African and indigenous culture tourism. Here’s hoping the Dominican Republic can wean itself off Columbus and his highly ambiguous legacy, to focus instead on the vibrant cultural manifestations of today.