Madre or the Queen of the Mountain
Donald Wellman 12/7/2011
Written on the flyleaf of Louis Zukofsky’s All, signaling a change in my scholarly
itinerary as it has swerved from Bach to bolero and salsa in a desire to
integrate and synthesize disparate inquiries into cultural hybridity, I find this note: “mi gente” means
“my people,” “asere” is “brother,” “bro.”
What forms of cultural identification are in play here, if any? Does “asere” signify an elective affinity
that might distinguish postmodernist insecurities from modernist
ideologies? From the Yoruba language,
“asere,” according to the raperos, Los Orishas, signifies cubanidad. There was a time when a nation, a people, associated its
oppressed subjectivity with the grip of colonial exploitation. The postcolonial
poet, instead, writes for a possible people, an emergent people—it is “a people
yet to be born for whom the poets must write,” an expression that originates
with a young Martinican surrealist, Suzanne Césaire. A future people, an
emergent nation. Ethnicity, with respect to an emergent nation, is fluid;
“asere” is archaic and postmodern. Does it also evoke consumerist
identifications, rock-star rebel and Billboard’s Hot 100, Jim Morrison’s dreams
of tribal exceptionalism, promoted by
RCA and Elektra, or Daddy Yankee with his successful line of bling. Los
Orishas proclaim: “asi soy yo, recordarás mi voz (ya Orishas, asere) / de calle
, de calle soy yo” (A lo Cubano, “El
triunfo”). Yotuel, one
of the Orishas, has said, "We make music, not just beats with samples on
top. We talk about social issues, the reality on the streets.” He distinguishes
the music of Los Orishas from the obsession with money and women that are
stereotypical attributes of rock or reggaeton success. Forgive my rant.
Both modernism and postmodernism have
implied a recovery of archaic sources, materials that survive as living
presences, organelles attached to the surfaces of popular culture. Resembling
and influencing my thinking, Nancy Morejón identifies Nicolas Guillén as a postmodern
poet in advance of the critical designation. His rejection of high modernist
abstraction together with his embrace of popular culture in his poemas son signals for her the cultural
synthesis most important to cubanidad.
A rejection of high modernist aesthetic tenets (those that value form over
content or substance) is likewise crucial for the visual artist Ana Mendieta. I
lay the beginning of this story at the doorstep of the North American poet
Charles Olson, the first to use the term “postmodern” in precisely this sense
of combining the archaic and the contemporary (in “The Present is Prolog,”
1952: 207). Such instances of archaic recovery by means of participatory or
performative actions distinguish themselves from modernist cultural appropriations,
like Picasso’s use of African masks in Desmoiselles
d’Avignon. Put it another way, before I am charged with atavism,
postmodernity is often a matter of feeling at home with cultural differences?
Lovely thought! [With respect to identity and immigration, by way of contrast
to cited examples, both William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky (this essay
begins on the flyleaf of the Zukofsky 100 Program at Columbia University, Sept.
17-19, 2004, where I introduce Peter Quatermain to the assembled poets and scholars)
are typically modern in their generally ambiguous feelings towards cultural
attributes associated with their respective roots and in their desire for
assimilation.[1] This
parenthesis, a bridge to multiple projects in the study of cultural hybridity,
will also serve as a footnote to my “Witness for Elsie.”]
I will attempt to model receptivity
to cultural difference as it can be heard in some examples of Cuban music. In
the contemporary versions of “La Negra Tomasa” that I have found, the male
vocalist invariably slips from the impersonal “la” to the possessive, “mi
negra,” with reference to the identity of the black woman who prepares his
coffee. Is this usage reflective only of endearment? Curiously “La Negra
Tomasa” in the D. J. Kane video of that title is portrayed by a very light
skinned mulata. Only in the version of the lyric performed by Compay Segundo do
I hear consistent reference to "1a negra," giving the character more
scope or independence, but possibly objectifying her differently. Compay
Segundo uses phrasing that refers to significantly African aspects of Cuban
identity, calling Tomasa "Mandinga" and describing with fervor her
distinctly Afro-Cuban cuisine. Compay Segundo is the peer or age-mate of
Nicolás Guillén, the poet most associated with emerging mestizo cultural identity in Cuba. With respect to these artists, negritude has become fluid rather than
the property of a genotype.
Similar to Compay Segundo, Celia Cruz uses the term “la
negra” to describe how the black woman of son
and salsa walks, “la negra tiene
timbao / no camina de lao” (“the negress has timbao / she doesn’t swerve when
she walks”). “Timbao” is the beat kept in an alternating and highly regular
pattern as quinto and conga drums speak to one another. The “letras” or lyrics
here are self-reflexive and congruent with the poetics of identity in their
modernist phase (consumerist or market capital phases), that is, reflexivity
objectifies individual behavior instead of referencing social constructions.
“La negra” walks with seductive grace! Person and stereotype, chaste sexuality,
a baroque and conservative fantasy! For all that and for all the commercial
success that has gone with her performances, Celia Cruz projects an inescapable
connectedness to African roots. She has denied practicing Santería, but in “Canto
a Yemaya” (“Song to the Mother Goddess”), she addresses the value of the
goddess’s love or caridad, praying
for the well-being of her friends and family. Her usage of Yoruba, like that of
Los Orishas, signifies Afro-Cuban
identity. Guillén implied something similar in his famous lines, “Yoruba soy,
lloro en Yoruba / lukumi /Como soy un Yoruba de Cuba (I am Yoruba, I cry in
Yoruba / Lukumi / As I am a Yoruba of Cuba) (“Son numero 6, Yoruba soy ….” Unlike Guillén though,
the expression of Yoruba identity for the Orishas and for Celia Cruz, as well
as for Bobi Céspedes, is a function of an exile that refuses to accept the
enforced distance between the cosmopolitan site of emigration and the homeland.
Emigrant experience is an inescapable aspect of Cuban identity in the current
post-nationalist phase of global capitalism. Emigrant status needs also to be
distinguished from exile of the sort that Raymond Williams, associates with the
elitism of the modernist artist. “Emigrant,” not “exile” is the appropriate
term to use when discussing the economic and political social facts that affect
contemporary Cubans in Miami or Madrid.[2]
Unlike the return of the exile, or the desire for assimilation that drives the
immigrant, the expression of emigrant desire may always be tinged with
nostalgia, a possibly melancholic cubanidad
or negritude that is also a social
fact of emergent hybrid cultural forms. Return to the homeland, if it is even
possible, will inevitably be to a place that never was, to a homeland that now
has no place for you. “Madre,” you were both mother and father to me from the
cradle, in suffering, “en esta puñetera jodida vida” that is the economic
reality of Cuba, sings Yotuel Romero of the Orishas, underlining one facet of
the title of this paper.
Among cultural critics of consumerist
cubanidad, Gema R. Guevara offers a
trenchant critique of the reinvention of Cuba by exiles like Gloria Estefan.
Estefan’s Mi tierra uses traditional
musical forms like guajiro, guaguanco and rumba to describe a utopia that never
existed but which is promised to come to the exiles on the day of their return,
that is, after the overthrow of Castro. The nostalgic assumption is that the
Revolution has put no real distance between the Cubans of Miami and those of La
Habana. Guevara’s analysis concludes, “Estefan’s popularity and the mainstream
recognition allow Americans to congratulate themselves on their appreciation of
diversity as her music furthers the political imaginary of her own community
through ostensibly nonpolitical cultural celebrations of cubanidad. (43). Guevara
also deconstructs Celia Cruz’s utopian message with respect to the imagined
return. Her nostalgia, writes Guevara, empties traditional forms of their
meaning potential and establishes an impossible identification rooted in
longing rather than history. Nostalgia of this order depends on the envy of a
future self which for John Berger is the driving engine of world capitalism.
A dialectical tension proposes itself
between the muñecas that represents an imagined reality, tinged with nostalgia
or utopian fantasies, and the muñecas that are ritual objects participating in
the identity formation of an emergent culture. The figure of the mother in the
person of the Queen of the Mountain described by the anthropologist Michael
Taussig and the ritual objects constructed by Ana Mendieta imply the presence
of continuing and continuously renewed forms of identity. Dolls used for ritual
purposes, like the funereal muñecas used
in colonial Mexico and Colombia serve a range of liminal purposes. These uses
stand outside modernist aesthetic categories and have a share in the complex
calculus of identity under what we now understand as postmodern conditions,
conditions that have an integral if not parasitic relation to the archaic. In a
form of anthropophagy, the postmodern feeds on the archaic.
Do the retablos and funereal forms
created by Ana Mendieta represent nostalgia or do they achieve a corporal
recovery of lost sacred strength? The bond between earth mother and her
daughters is foundational for cultural identity. That relation is inscribed in
the form of the Indian princess, the doll in Simon Bolivar’s raised hand.
Is she also muse to the poet or do madre and muñeca embody masculinist
constructs? Vera Kutzinski in Sugar’s
Secrets has critiqued the homosocial biases underlying the construction of mestizaje in Nicolás Guillén and other
Cuban poets. Commenting on the male-to-male bonding in “Balada de los dos
abuelos,” she writes: Guillén’s are indeed “man-making
words” ([her] emphasis). Nowhere in this masculinist paradigm are women,
especially non-white women, acknowledged as participants in and possible
producers of the very culture that inscribes its identity through them (168).
It’s generally the case that masculinist constructs of femininity have marked
the modern period in ways that have limited female productive and creative
potential, marginalizing or fragmenting her. Lucía Extebarria and Sonia Núñez
go so far as to argue that under modern era disciplinary regimes women must
question how they inhabit their bodies much as their mothers questioned the
place of woman in society. “Las mujeres de mi edad nos estamos cuestionando
cual es nuestro lugar en nuestro propio cuerpo tal como nuestras madres se
preguntaban cuál era su lugar en la sociedad” (412). This observation resonates with Ana
Mendieta’s address to physical insecurities, like violence against women, realties
sharply contrasting with her mother’s secure social standing as a Professor Of
Chemistry. Opposition to sexual violence motivated many of Mendieta’s works in
Iowa City, including those in which she smeared her body with blood or stood
naked with a decapitated white chicken, as in a Santería offering. Is there a
female figure more real than nostalgia or fetishism permits? My thought
interrogates both the “Queen of the Mountain” as she is presented in Michael
Taussig’s study, The Magic of the State,
and the bodies evoked by Ana Mendieta’s performances.
The “mala mujer” of Octavio Paz’s Mexico, “La flaca” of
Jarabe de Palo’s song of that title, “Coral negro de la Habana / tremendísima
mulata … / que sin palabras habla” exemplifies the woman, attractive in her
lack of presence, consuming her life force in drink although, enchantingly, she
dances all night and sleeps all day. She is drained of her magic and invites
abuse. La Lupe, by contrast, displays agressive force in “La
Grand Tirana.” Octavio
Paz describes the Mexican woman as “An instrument, sometimes of masculine
desire, sometimes of the ends assigned to her by morality, society and law”
(35). He goes on to fetishize the “aggressivity” of the “mala mujer,”
acknowledging the attraction of the exception, indeed celebrating the exception.
The construction of gender in Paz’s essay is masculinist. In Paz’s Mexico, as
Vera Kutzinski has argued with respect to the mulata of Cuba, woman is excluded
from the culture that she symbolizes. Additionally, in discussing mulata
identity we often occlude African and Native American identities, singing
“azúcar” with Celia Cruz, as if nostalgic for the economy of canefield and
factory.
Paz speaks of a Mexican independence forged at the expense of
indigenous and catholic traditional values, a rejection of the colonial past,
and “a necessary matricide” (126). To the contrary, she lives. The archaic
mother (victim of genocide) can today be found among indigenous populations of
Mexico (Maria Sabina) and among Afro-Cubans. Mendieta associated such mother
totems with the homeland from which she had been forcibly separated as a child
and which she could visit only rarely as an adult. In the streambed and clay
walls of the Jaruco, she made performative siluetas subject to erasure by
weather and tide. Her tie is through her African nana who practiced Santeria.
Likewise, Nancy Morejón addresses the reality of slavery in her poetry. Warping
time, the experience of embroidering the hem of the master’s gown and bearing
his nameless child becomes a possible experience for a Mendieta or a Morejón.
Morejón, evokes both the middle-crossing and the experience of being sold in
“Mujer negra.” In remembered language she finds the link to healing presence.
“Acaso no he olvidado ni mi costa perdida, ni mi lengua ancestral” (200). Evoking the possibilities of healing
presences, Mendieta fuses art and ritual in the performance and image of the
immobile body on the ground surrounded by flames. The image captures and
acknowledges irrecoverable ash, irrecoverable wholeness, after the trauma of
separation. Like a fallen swallow, “la golondrina,” Morejón mourns the sudden
death of Mendieta, mid-career (“Ana” 112-117). A yearning backwards shapes our
future. That is why the curandera surrounds the body “lying within a portal”
that is also “a death-space” under the
images of the Queen of the Mountain and the Indian, the African and the
Liberator (among other figures) with candles and other offerings (Taussig 39).
The Queen of the Mountain represents a necessary hybridity,
in her personal composition and in the distinctions among the entities that
surround her. She is for Taussig the embodiment of the state, “an impossible
being, holding dissimilar things together, bringing the back-then and
over-there slap up against the here-and-now, hovering between estrangement and
familiarization” (8). She is a mother and a Virgin, in relation to the
Liberator, she is his daughter. For instance, in her discussion of Pedro José
Figueroa’s painting (above), Simón
Bolivar, Liberator and Father of the Nation, (1809), Dawn Ades notes that
the figure of the Republic stands in relation to the ‘father’ as a ‘daughter.’
She continues, “However, she also—unlike many personifications of America which
show her as naked or lightly draped—is dressed as, and wears the pearls and
jewels of a European, and her features are at most mestizo; her gesture is
clearly derived from Christian iconography, and she presents something of the
aspect of a virgin or saint” (17). She is, as Michael Taussig might say “a
literalization of the mystique of sovereignty” (18). The Spirit Queen is,
according to one of Taussig’s sources, “not an Indian but a mestiza, hybrid child of an Indian woman
and a conquistador (sixteenth
century) and that she had had to seek refuge in the mountain until saved by the
Liberator (born in the late eighteenth century) who sent el Negro Filipe to care for her” (31). Taussig concludes his study
of the ritual and mimetic properties of the sacralized political state by
indicating that Figueroa’s painting both “anticipates her future coming” and
“anticipates her intimate and magical connection with the Liberator …
reinstigating the eternal return involved in the violent making and breaking of
stately being across the female form” (191). This mestiza coming into being
binds the archaic and the postmodern.
A future coming into being, false nostalgias aside, is
crucial for an art and poetry of healing and recuperation. That is the
continuing relevance of Suzanne Césaire’s phrase concerning the artist of the
unborn. It is the meaning for me of Ana Mendieta’s personal odyssey. What
follows as an addendum is a glimpse only of Ana Mendieta as mother/daughter,
archaic and archetypal embodiment of the land.
Addendum
Ana Mendieta’s face pressed against the glass suggests the
unformed qualities of Francis Bacon’s folded and compressed works, specifically
images from the Glass on Body.
University of Iowa, 1972. Her high voltage expressionism is a hallmark of her
postmodernism. In the works of this period, as Charles Merewether writes,
“Mendieta began to explore issues concerning social taboo and transgression,
focusing on the subject of sacrifice and crime around the body of a woman”
(89). Works of this sort, like the untitled performance in which she holds a
beheaded chicken as she stands against a white wall (1972) resonates with both
social injustice and a politicized Santería.
Concerning her relation to the sacred, she might be thought
of as hovering or shuttling between subjective and objective perspectives, as
performer and simultaneously as document maker with respect to the photographic
record of her performances. Donald Kuspit in “Ana Mendieta, Autonomous Body”
writes “Mandieta wants to reconsecrate
the body, that is, restore the sense of it as a miracle, and with that,
restore, the value lost by its reduction to a kind of machine—its
modernization, as it were. … Mendieta’s mystical body stands in opposition to
the body as conceived by science” (39). Different perspectives may have more
complimentariness than Kuspit suggests. The sacred body, like the camera is an
instrument. It is of use, after a fashion. It is surely not the narcissistic
body promoted by Revlon and Cover Girl. That point can be easily taken from the
faces pressed against glass, as well as the use of masculine hair, of feathers
or blood in other performances from her student years in Iowa. In one case,
Mendieta describes how it pleased her that the ceiba or silk cottonwood, used in
one of her performances, came to serve as a ritual site for Santeros in the
Miami area. She recalled, “The last time I saw the tree, the people had added
coconuts, chicken wing, all kinds of offerings. … they put a figure of Santa
Barbara underneath it, cut an opening in what would be the face and stuck a
shell in the mouth. They have really activated the image and claimed it as
their own” (qtd Rauch and Sura). Family servants, including her African nanny
had introduced her to Santeria as a child. Changó, owner of the bata drum and
Santa Barbara are the same, syncretically, in Santería, his thunder and
lightning associated with divine justice. A bisexual figure, Catholic Saint
with masculine characteristics. Mendieta with beard. Aggressive projection: mala mujer fused with sacred,
transgendered powers. Visiting Cuba in the 1980s, she came to understand the
sacred use of art and ritual for purposes of healing, both personal and
collective. She carved her Rupestrian sculptures into the embankments of the
Jaruco.
These images with the properties of sacred fertility figures
are simultaneously in dialog with both the environmentally based sculptures of
artists like Robert Smithson and with sacred sources of being, fusing archaic
and postmodern in a language of use for healing and revitalizing the strange
and abstract, cold and alienating forms of high modern visual discourse.
Meriwether remarks, regarding her engagement with otherness, “removing her work
into the landscape” freed her to separate the body from the self and to
challenge both the identification of woman with nature and the ways in which,
as a representation of “otherness,” she is all too often excluded from the categories
identified with constitutive power (107). Her work is both about recuperation
and the impossibility of recuperation—one reason for its primary existence as
outline or ash, vegetation that will die or mud that water will erode.
Concerning her art, Mendieta wrote, “I have been carrying out
a dialog between the landscape and the female body (based on my own
silhouette). I believe that this has been a direct result of my having been
torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the
feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I
reestablish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the
maternal source. Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth …
I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body.
This obsessive act of reasserting my ties with the earth is really the
reactivation of primal beliefs … [in] an omnipresent female force, the
after-image of being encompassed within the womb, is a manifestation of my
thirst for being.” (51).
Paragraphs in Pursuit of a
Conclusion
In the context of an argument as to the relation between the
feminine and its figuration, in which she cites differences between Derrida,
Irigary, and Kristeva, Judith Butler addresses a variety of cosmogonic
representations stemming from the notion of the ‘chora’ or ‘receptacle’ in
Plato’s Timaeus. She writes, “This
naming of what cannot be named is itself a penetration into this receptacle
which is at once a violent erasure, one which establishes it as an impossible
yet necessary site for all further inscriptions” (44). Erasure, like forclusion
(or psychic foreclosure), is primary trauma, primary to identity formation, a
concept found in Slavoj Zisek’s work (cf Butler 190) as well as in Jean
Francois Lyotard’s Heidegger and “the
jews.” Butler discusses foreclosure in relation to female castration and
the imaginary phallus, her purpose being to empower female performativity by
deconstructing gender. I am attributing to Ana Mendieta’s Rupestrian
sculptures, with their ambiguous forms, both phallic and maternal, a direct and
practical action that inscribes a powerful performativity of the sort that
Butler theorizes as “performative power” (224 f).
To continue my discussion of names and naming, at the
postcolonial level, now: for Derek Walcott, history “folds over a fishline
(305),” an image of foreclosure, erasing memory “and the foam foreclosed.” In
response to postcolonial political dislocations, he fears that personal
identity may have “melted into a mirror.” Homi Bhabha cites this poem, “Names,”
as most representative of the cultural politics of “temporal disjunction.” He
writes, “at issue in the discourse of minorities is the creation of agency
through incommensurable (not simply multiple) positions” (231). Clearly,
Walcott’s poetics are deeply hybrid, locating meaning in incommensurable
juxtapositions: “A sea-eagle screams
from the rock, / and my race began like the osprey / with that cry, / that
terrible vowel, / that I!” (306) The Anglo-Saxon “Seafarer” haunts that scream,
“gifre ond graedig /gielleth anfloga” (l. 62). Walcott, like the voyager,
associates the seabird with the soul in this peregrination per amor dei. Equally he finds meaning in the
performance of ordinary acts of naming: “moubain:
the hogplum, / cerise: the wild
cherry” (307). These acts of naming are events of the sort theorized by Roy
Wagner under the heading of “symbols that stand for themselves,” collapsing
“the tension and contrast between symbol and symbolized” (43). Events in
pursuit of an originary moment haunt new world poetics, its continual
incompleteness, dissolving into uncertain futures (not my thesis but José
Martí’s), never Europe’s Elsewhere, but
in fact a world like that of Cien años de
soledad, still so new that many things lack names: “El mundo era tan
reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre” (83). Events become names in
recycled gestures of pointing fingers or inscriptions in the mud or clay walls
of Old Man’s Creek or Jaruco, spiritual quests, fusing attraction and
repulsion, instances of “cultural integration,” according to Lucy Lippard (qtd
Guy Brett 202), forms of emergent subjectivity that can best be understood as
fluid, tinged with melancholy perhs, but not wrapped in nativist sureties and
dread of mingling multiple sources.
[1] See
Charles Bernstein, “Objectivist Blues: Scoring Speech in Second-Wave Modernist
Poetry and Lyrics,” American Literary
History 2008 20(1-2):346-368. “In "Poem Beginning ‘The,’" Louis
Zukofsky (born in 1904) writes of the temptation to assimilate into
the English literary tradition. "Assimilation is not
hard," he tells his mother, but the burden of the poem is to
register both the difficulty of resisting assimilation and the
unexpected and irreparable costs of not resisting” (348).
[2] Note
that the second album released by Los Orishas carries the title Emigrante, produced in Barcelona it
continues the exploration of cubanidad but
this time at a self-reflexive distance.
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