When I got back to Rio, UNESCO in Paris had still not authorised the payment of the cruzeiros still owed to me. We left Brazil for West Africa penniless, although a French Mother Superior offered us some money. When we arrived in Dakar in Senegal, we found UNESCO had not authorised our payment there either. Fortunately, the marabout of the Grande Mosque in Dakar offered us all spoons to dip into the communal bowl of rice and peppers, which we did with an alacrity that must have startled the old man, otherwise we would have gone very hungry. We eventually got enough to pay for our stopover in Dakar and left on the first stage of our journey to the Gambia, with £37 for fifteen days. The cheapest hotel, the Adonis, owned by a Lebanese called Kamal Milky, cost three times as much for a single person. I asked a Wolof steward where Africans stayed in Bathurst. He said with their brothers. We had no brothers in the Gambia. I cabled UNESCO in Paris: ‘MUST ABANDON FELLOWSHIP UNLESS STIPEND INCREASED.’ There was no reply. ‘If the British taxpayer knew how much money was wasted by these international organisations,’ said the secretary of the UN regional advisor, ‘there would be real trouble.’ She told me of a Swede, a UNESCO expert, who had not been paid for over three months and was living on an overdraft with a 10 per cent interest rate. My case looked hopeless. ‘It’s bad enough’, she said, ‘working for an African government. But I’d sooner work for an African government’, she added loyally, ‘than work for the UN.’ I cabled home for enough money to pay off our debts to Mr Milky and borrowed £2 from the British High Commission. We had two months of Fellowship still to go, and today I was returning to England penniless.
Penniless, we caught the airport bus at the terminal in Wellington Street, near the British Information Office, where all the library chairs were full, and slowly all the heads went down over the pink Financial Times and the Oxford Atlas upside down, and Dembo went round waking the sleepers. I tipped the Gambian porters and paid for the airport bus in useless Cuban pesos. One peso equals one US dollar, I said. From now on Swissair would look after us. That night in the Hotel N’gor, Dakar, the crews of Lufthansa, Swissair and Air France were getting drunk together on the table next to us, as we ate our free alcohol-less transit passengers’ meal. They laughed uproariously at trilingual jokes. It was 24 October … United Nations Day.
Shango the Shaky Fairy
* * *
1970
Where are you now, O Shango?
Two-headed, powerful
Man and woman, hermaphrodite
Holding your quivering thunderbolts
With quiet savage malice;
Brooding over your domain,
Africa, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil,
Slavery of mind is unabolished.
Always wanting to punish, never to love.
This question was posed by Abioseh Nicol, the Sierra Leonean poet, in a poem called ‘African Easter’, and it’s a question I’ve often asked myself after my first acquaintance with Shango, that god of many parts. I am also worried to the point of madness by punishment and love. I have an oshe Shango, a Shango staff, I picked up in the country of the Nigerian Yoruba, whose god of thunder he is. Like all foot-or-so-high Yoruba wood carvings, my Shango staff is good to feel, pick up, think and worry with. I am a chronic, inveterate feeler. I was once evicted from the Musée d’Art Moderne for stroking Brâncuşi’s Le Phoque, which surely was what it was made for. Later, in the National Gallery of Prague, I discovered with the help of a Czech friend that if you carried a white stick, wore dark glasses and took someone to guide you round, you could handle the extremities of the Rodins and insinuate your connoisseur hand just wherever you wanted, even essay a bit of hesitant frottage, if you fancied. My oshe Shango, like the Yoruba twin figures (igbeji) of the same height, is a very feelable piece of wood, and it is my own. At my worst moments of tension I polish or fondle it, shove it under my oxter like a swagger stick, twirl it about like a bastard New York cop, or even waddle, to my children’s delight, with it stuck between my legs, until we all collapse in ribald laughter and my anxiety is eased. My daughter, Jane, has an appliquéd cloth I bought in Dahomey. It hangs on the wall above her bed, and when she almost lost her leg in an accident, she had to gaze at it for months during her recuperation. There is a man carrying a double axe and a ram’s head belching fire, emblems of Shango, god of the storm for the Yoruba of Dahomey as well as Nigeria. So when I went looking for Shango, to investigate his status in the socialist island of Cuba and under the military dictatorship of Brazil, Jane came with me, along with her mother and her brother Max. The unbalanced poet and the lame daughter. Jane tires easily, and when she does I carry her piggyback like an African woman, like that Shango figure in the D’Harnoncourt collection of New York, which William Fagg has called ‘one of the finest African sculptures extant’. When I carried her in this way, people stared, and I remembered that when I produced a new translation of the Lysistrata of Aristophanes into a Nigerian setting, nothing caused more raucous laughter than when the Fulani herdsman I had made the equivalent of Cinesias came to claim his wife with the baby swaddled on his back, unless it was his great red phallus they were laughing at. The actor who played the part was so embarrassed by his costume he tried to wear it back to front. I remember only two other similar moments of high excitement in largely male Nigerian audiences: one in the film version of Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, where Morel turns on his wife and throws her out of the house; and the other when Olivier’s Hamlet castigates Ophelia. Anxiety over the definition of the sexual scope and role creates this humour, and its related despairs and prejudice. In this field Shango has had more experience than old Tiresias, and in crossing the Atlantic to the New World, has come to acquire more drag and quick changes than Danny La Rue.
To search for Shango in Cuba is to search for that Africa I came to know and love. To search for Africa is to discover and create Cuba. Shango is just one of many, but one of the most powerful, and certainly the most widely travelled, of the orishas in the Yoruba pantheon, which is every bit as rich if not richer than that of the Greeks. In the middle passage, in the dark hold of the slaver and in the slave barracks of the sugar plantations, Shango, the thunder god, the king, who, in one version of his legend, is human and hangs himself in the forest, becomes Santa Bárbara in that syncretism of the Catholicism of the Spanish colonist and the orishas of the Yoruba, who were shipped over to Cuba in their thousands after the extermination of the gentle Taino and Siboney Indians. Santa Bárbara is the patron saint of artillery, arsenals, powder magazines, and is invoked against lightning (quand le tonnerre tombera, Ste. Barbe nous préservera) because when her wicked father, the king of Nicodemia, struck off the head of the virgin for refusing to renounce newfangled Christianity, lightning struck him dead. In Cuba she was an army patron too, but her black devotees address her in Lucumí, that form of the Yoruba language still used in the island cults like a liturgical Latin, as Changó (Shango). He/She/It is central to the understanding of cubanidad. And true cubanidad is as much an effort of the revolutionary as the 1969/70 sugar harvest of 10,000,000 tons. Nicolás Guillén, now president of the Union of Artists and Writers, wrote of Cuba in 1931:
… esta tierra mulata
de africano y españól
(Santa Bárbara de un lado,
del otro lado, Changó)
One on either side, like a coat of arms, the black god and the white virgin. But they are one and the same person. A concept like the Trinity, only there are (for the moment) only two, and certainly more complex, and perhaps more kinky, but in the end fuller of potential salvation. A mulatto country, a mulatto culture, and much of this notion can be found in the apostle Martí’s idea of cubanidad. Though now the official report to the United Nations in 1968 can say that ‘the real Cuban culture is, and cannot but be, mulatto’, and though now, when the Soviet fleet made a courtesy visit to Havana in July 1969, the hands that held the Cuban flags on the posters that greeted them were of two shades of brown only, it needed the Castro revolution to make the recognition of t
his visibly obvious cultural fact about Cuba respectable. About some aspects of the mulatto religion, however, the revolution is decidedly uneasy.
It is true that in the period clearly defined in Ramón Guirao’s anthology Orbita de la poesía afro-cubana, 1928–1937 (Havana, 1937), there existed a movement known variously as poesía afro-cubana, poesía negra or negrista. Of its various practitioners only one, Marcelino Arozarena, was actually black, and only Guillén himself mulatto. It was, like many similar movements – ‘gaucho’ poetry in South America, ‘Maori’ poetry in New Zealand – basically white, cultivated, urban and primitivistic. Its verses chime with rumba dancers and the onomatopoeia of the sun-dried gourd maraca. It owes much to the movement in Europe which brought to such artists as Picasso, Braque, Derain and Vlaminck the knowledge of African masks; and to the theories of Leo Frobenius, mentor of Spengler, dabbled in by both Pound and Lawrence, and whose ideas were much prevalent in the Hispanic world after the translation of Schwarze Dekameron into Spanish in 1925, and after the master himself had toured Europe and had been well expounded in the Revista de Occidente, a Madrid journal, very influential with Cuban intellectuals of the time. It is a movement wide enough to include Tarzan of the Apes, and what is behind it is what the Allied Supremacies of Africa declared in their Proclamation in the equally symptomatic novel of Charles Williams, Shadows of Ecstasy, that ‘the great age of the intellect is done’. Europe, cerebral Europe, trapped in its grey matter, is done for. The two poems that initiated the movement in Cuba in 1928 are both by white poets, Ramón Guirao and José Z. Tallet, and they are both about a negress dancing the rumba, mildly sexotic, with surface sound effects as awful as Vachel Lindsay’s Congo or, even worse, Edith Sitwell. It was Africa in the head. Now, we mustn’t say, said Guillén, Afro-Cuban but Afro-Spanish.
Today’s Cuban poets, who are again turning to the Yoruba myths ‘in a revolutionary context’, dismiss the old 1930s Afro-Cuban stuff as ‘pintoresquismo’. They make an occasional exception: say, for Regina Pedroso, who was half Chinese, and who very appropriately complained in her poem ‘Hermano negro’:
Are we nothing more than rumbas … and carnivals?
And the new ‘Afro-Spanish’ poets, Miguel Barnet, Pablo Armando Fernández, whose book Libro de los heroes (1964) J. M. Cohen credits with giving modern Cuban poetry a new beginning, Nancy Morejón, Excilia Saldaña and Rogelio Martinez Furé also make an exception for ‘Nicolás’ their president. Guillén’s Motivos de son appeared two years after the start of the Afro-Cuban movement in 1930. This poetry is also marred by facile onomatopoeia like:
Tamba, tamba, tamba, tamba,
tamba del negro que tumba;
tumba del negro, caramba,
caramba, que el negro tumba:
yamba, yambo, yambambe!
But what was to distinguish Guillén from the exoticists pure and simple was his Marxism, his commitment to causes outside the poetry, where it was obvious that the exploited negro was more than rumba and carnival.
In the preface to his next volume of poems, Sóngoro cosongo (1931), subtitled poemas mulatas, Guillén says that the spirit of Cuba is ‘mestizo’, and it is his own awareness of his dual origins that was to produce some of his best poems, like ‘Balada de los dos abuelos’ from West Indies Ltd (1934), where he calls together his white Spanish ancestor and his black slave ancestor and presents them in a synthesis of anguish and celebration:
Los dos del mismo tamaño,
ansia negra y ansia blanca;
los dos del mismo tamaño,
gritan, sueñan, lloran, cantan.
The two are on the same scale,
black anguish and white anguish;
the two are on the same scale,
they shout, they dream, they weep, they sing.
The components of what Jean Price-Mars called the ‘ajiaco’, the goulash of Cuba, stirred together by colonial oppression and foreign investors. His poems move beyond Cuba to the rape of Abyssinia by Mussolini and to the activities of the Mau-Mau in Kenya. It is the sustained anti-colonialism which made him the obvious choice for president of the Writers’ Union of the new Cuba. Although the critic Cintio Vitier praised Guillén’s ‘afro-cuban’ style as being produced, unlike that of his contemporaries, desde adentro, ‘from the inside’, the one failing the new Cuban poets attribute to him is his only superficial knowledge of the negro culture of Cuba. Unlike themselves, he doesn’t know the cults from the inside. And in all the poetry of rumba and maraca of the 1930s Shango himself makes only a rare appearance, once in a shrine before yet another rumba dancer (this time that of Emilio Ballagas), whose navel gazes on the god like a solitary, adoring eye, and apart from when he is set beside Santa Bárbara, again in Guillén, when his power is invoked to protect Stalin:
Stalin, Capitán,
a quien Changó proteja …!
(1937)
After the revolution most of this was to change. An editorial in the important journal Casa de las Américas, in a special issue devoted to Africa en América, proclaimed in 1966, ‘now we are more Cuba, we are more Africa’. But only seven years before, Lydia Cabrera, one of the few researchers, apart from the great Fernando Ortiz, dedicated to the collection and description of Afro-Spanish folklore and culture, complained in her study of the secret society Abakuá of Efik origin that it was perfectly acceptable to be an Indianist in Cuba because there was none left, but to delve into the rich complexities of negro culture was considered ‘antipatriotic’ and a ‘subversion of national dignity’. This is thankfully no longer so – up to a point. Caballero Calderón said of the whole search for national cultures in Latin America, ‘para crear es necesario conocer’, ‘to create it is necessary to know’, something that applies equally to the creation of national cultures in independent Africa. If Guillén did not know the Yoruba cults from the inside, the new poets do, and there is that intimate connection between sociological research and creativity that Calderón thinks essential. Miguel Barnet (b. 1940), for example, worked for five years in the Havana Institute of Ethnology and Folklore, as well as doing a perhaps over-edited and directed Oscar Lewis-type job on the 108-year-old runaway slave Estaban Montejo’s El Cimarrón. He writes poetry which often invokes the Yoruba orishas and includes chants in Lucumí. In two slim pamphlets, La piedra fina y el pavorreal (1963) and Isla de Guijes (1964), there appear Oggun, Eleggua, Oya, one of Shango’s wives, Osain and Shango himself. He dedicates his first book to Tonde, a santero of Palmira in the Las Villas province of Cuba, ‘in memory of my first visit to a lucumí temple’. Impatient with the pintoresquismo of the Afro-Cuban poetry (so-called) of the 1930s, Barnet began travelling, researching and living with santeros in Palmira and Jovellanos in Matanzas, in order to know and create Cuba, correct the imbalance that an education in a North American college had given him. Rogelio Martínez Furé (b. 1937) is a translator of Yoruba poetry through the English of such collectors as Ulli Beier, and also a compiler of the stories and songs of Yoruba origin in Cuba. His book of translations, Poesía anoníma Africana (Instituto del Libro, 1968), is immensely popular among the poetry-reading public and with other poets, and like most popular books in Cuba, is unobtainable in bookshops. He has a similar background of Institute of Ethnography and Folklore, was a founder of the Conjunto Folklorico of the National Theatre, and was responsible for the introduction of the study of African art in some of the colleges. To know is to create. ‘We use the myths’, said one or the other of them to me at different times, ‘in a revolutionary context.’
The orishas become modern Cubans. Eshu, say, can be a bastard and bugger things up. They are boozy orishas and lecherous orishas, like Cubans, though they’d be hard put to it to be boozy these days. And Shango, well Shango is a guerrilla like El Che.
And that made me recall the righteous indignation of the nineteenth-century Herald correspondent James O’Kelly, after his travels in Mambiland, as he called the island in the first stages of becoming Cuba Libre in the 1870s:
Th
e planters grow enormously rich, and become millionaires at the expense of the tears and misery of the wretches who toil for their benefit. That such a system can be permitted to exist among men pretending to be civilized is an outrage on the common conscience of mankind. When one sees the representatives of this abomination kneeling before the altar of the God of the Christians, he must regret the thunderbolts of the grand old gods of the past, who, the poets tell us, smote in their indignation such criminals.
And about eighty years later along came Shango El Che. Down from the mountain, where all the orishas dwell, and from where they are summoned to the aid of the revolution by such poets as Pablo Armando Fernández:
Duermen en la tierra de los antiguos mitos,
doce presagios de los ríos, doce
augurios de la primavera.
Cuando despierten serán guerreros
de olvidada tradición. Sus memorias inauguran
el tiempo señalado por los poetas.
Caballos y leones misteriosos en la casa
de Orisha,
doce rayos invisibles que cambian el signo
de los meses.
They sleep in the land of ancient myths,
twelve omens of the rivers, twelve
portents of spring.
When they wake up they will be warriors
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 5