Beneath the Spanish
Page 2
Cuban Taino Cacique Meets Spaniard and the Translator
Tobacco clay flute pipe,
smoke rising into blue firmament,
the guaraguao, the Taino
eagle glides in the sky,
A focused eye details colors of chicken
Feathers, its food down bush earth
on path by a bohío,
Vanilla mixes with tobacco smoke
cohoba nose rush
Shaman inhales snuff bone pipe
burps sudden,
calls to other shamans of the
Key door soul
tells them a strange scent
Novo in the air lingers,
not the blue nature of salt which is the sea
a mirror posted toward
the sun,
something here unique,
trance makes him dance,
Maraca shaking his achiote tinge
flesh, the coloring taste for mosquitoes
keep away,
the nostrils eat space
and tropez upon an alien whiff.
Bohiques call for council
with Cacique,
the elder feather resides
In the rectangular large hut of palms
A center with precious mineral
Cemi sculpted rocks,
the middle, centro, above an oval
Hole for the air,
for the incantation to fly to the stars
Ride the turtle above the clouds.
they inform Guanabanex could be some-
thing in the atmosphere,
Across aires of mountains
but the sodium taste,
Warning could be sea creature,
We just want to speak what the cohoba
tells us
could be a beast,
Your majesty, you have been informed
by the seniors of the
guayaba fragrance, the spirit keepers,
know that something comes
from way out the water
vast like big higuera bowl,
I feel the language noise
trapped in impossible syllables
to utter animal breaths
below the Spanish below
the Arawak
the native pala dental my
Jaw releases me: SOUND.
Later huge boat showed up
in the bay
Like a mirage dream,
or is it there,
naked girls swam
out
Andalucians used to the
djellabas and hijabs
of the peninsular Muslim girls,
long dresses upon castellanas,
majas.
Almost fainted at the
sight of naked nalgas,
swimming swift through the water
bushes open to the air,
Shuma-shame not,
but to the natives
if they had bracelets
or seashell earrings
they were dressed,
The body is everybody
anyone is one any
body flesh akin-to skin
Open air
in the humidity
of the humanity
yuca con yucayeye.
Living. Circular Collection.
People in the boats
what are they,
look how they have
metal heads,
already men taking off
some of the apparel
in the hot new air.
What inferno is this?
Columbus sends translator
with sailor
Go make contact,
speak.
Whom where this
go see Kangaskhan
Where going are we?
find path
some people gathered
along the beach staring
At the drama rolling,
smaller boat comes in
two men get out,
The oar navigator stays
Behind starring at nalgas,
natives take the two strangers
in land,
Meet the cacique chief,
a welcome to whatever
it was,
thing that showed up
wood from big water afloat,
from a where gone in time
and space.
Welcome to my hut
they fed them
dance for them,
gave them feathers,
they tasted cassava bread
next morning, pineapple
slices,
walking feet
dancing toes,
a new kind of flamenco
in a circle
with the sun with the moon,
maraca of night
conch seashell of awakening, morning
passing plaza crowd,
Yusuf translator had never heard words
such sounds,
females talking like sweet
songbirds, Asia must be,
China we are
Calcutta must be near,
these are the Indians of legend,
The error persists
still recounts, oye Indio
Benga-desh, ben aca
We are all in the now,
all now we are all,
Eat me so that I can eat you.
no India Indios. Tainola.
This Caribbean nuevo mundo
ingredients found,
my abuela,
India loca,
guitar birth infant out Laud
La’ud out india zither
(Speaking of Indians)
zither/guitar. . . .
We are the spoken boleros,
Our North African stanza,
Iberia de Marcolino pan y vino,
Mediterranean mellow yellow,
Morena Arab eyes and buttocks
Nigerian chocolate the sculpture
Orisha alphabet of the Lucumi,
Caribe becomes.
Here tis’ wees
fabrica of rhythms
history of flavors
who are we not?
Taino/Spain, Africa
Standing face to face
Naked we are
Voices of
Humid loud silence.
Cadence
Printing on the tumbadora skin,
Codes.
Dance Formation
Taste.
Santo Domingo/Puerto Rico
New Dance Commences
Just a short ferry hop from Puerto Rico to Santo Domingo. We are the same people, the same native Tainos, the Spaniards, the jumble they were, los Africanos, from Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, deeper Congo, Cameroon, they used them for labor. The Tainos were slaves as well, who started dropping like flies sprayed with TNT, soon after the conquest. The lost natives are hidden within our gestures, eyes, skin tones, our guayaba of eternity, our cigar of smoke. Güiro scratcher and maracas still with the modern salsa sounds. Spanish maladies like measles did them in, immediately they put them to work in the gold mines, which is what the visi tors wanted. Slavery was the economy of the whole ancient world, no one got spared from forced labor, work, given food, a cot to sleep, some gong alarm, sound trumpet get ’em up early to move muscle. Most peoples, all regions of the human planet, can say that their ancestors were slaves, from blond regions of Europe, to immense Asian spells, chocolate Africans to auburn-hair eastern Europeans enslaved. In all wars defeat meant the women and girls had to become concubines to the victors. That’s the way of the world, the strong prevail. It’s the mathematics. If you play with fire you gonna get burn.
Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico islanders have similar cuisine. Similarities in the historical mofongo/Mangú. The yucca which was here with the Tainos, the guayaba originated perhaps in Central America, worked its way through the whole Caribbean, way before the Spaniards showed up. The plantain and the bananas, whic
h more likely originated somewhere in Asia and brought to Africa early, ah sabor, they must’ve mushed the potassium in African villages already as in Santo Domingo Mangú and Puerto Rican Mofongo, the other islands mush it up as well. The ñame from Nigeria came over along with the plátano to join the yuca to eventually be bathed in Spanish Virgin Olive Oil. Olives from some Mediterranean regions, valleys in Andalusia. Aceituna to taste the color, Olivos partitioned in dream valleys depth of our souls the Havana of nightlife. Tobacco Mafioso charm nights, Chicago thieves blend with Batista gangsters, Corporations. They are so pretty, the cabaret girls legs high thrown, that famous leg rising of the Caribbean buttocks of universal renown. The Caribbean Habana, San Juan vacation, picture pretty cards while mountain inside belly’s hunger hurt, howl, like some animal inside there? Santo Domingo imprisoned by Trujillo for way too long. People lost. Poverty is one thing, but then these mosquitoes too. Sucking upon rusty barbwire, islands of hungry hunger. All the pictures I’ve seen of the 40s period of the island show men bone-skinny with white panama sombreros and those old pra-pras straw hats. Flaco. Proximity the bone. What a contrast to today, whence so much food, Caribbean grease has joined with American fast food grease, everybody is sick bloated obese diabetic island infirmary, cardíaco sanatorium. The bad habits of the popular merged with American plasticity, generations imprisoned. Fresh air of pineapple-guayaba might instigate awareness to find yourself somewhere in the maze of a tropical spectacular. Other Caribbean countries have more turf for agriculture, but in Puerto Rico local farming has collapsed. Occasionally local gandules on the road, a station wagon parked before you enter a mountain road, jíbaro with straw hat barking, in a box he has the pigeon peas-gandules, some ñames in a burlap sack the size of tree trunks, but each year less and less. Santo Domingo with Trujillo crimes.
El Señor Pedro Mir, poeta nacional, had to jump to Cuba, stayed there over a decade, while Trujillo the magician performed his acts of disappearance; they worked—it was real magic. People did disappear. Not a scent of your underwear could be traced in the hot humid air. The poet Pedro Mir, we should know is the essence of the Caribbean, born of a Cuban father to a Puerto Rican woman in San Pedro de Macorís, Santo Domingo, you cannot get more Caribbean than that, plus how American emerging in the principio of the new world. Hispaniola was the original settlement of the Europeans, if we could call the Spaniards that came here Europeans; for sure we got invaded by two Kingdoms, the Kingdom of Aragon and the Kingdom of Castilla. The peninsula was a cubist painting in formation, the peninsulares not even in full control of their own territory, its culture mestizo, as the Moorish Muslims were still lingering with their higher culture, it was mestizo of language too, the Arabs were in Spain when the language was still adolescent. The Arabic smoked through the Latin: Spanish like a chick popped its head out of the eggshell. It was how those Spaniards were when they despaired into the blue Caribbean Sea. An unformed formation, a in progress. Who knows what fantasies they entertained? A rumor persists through historical texts that one thousand Moras (Moroccan women who came to Puerto Rico with the first wave of the conquistadors) worked as hetemas, house workers, it has given us a substantial blend of Berber and Arabic blood as the years churn. Just look about—where am I, Marrakesh or Caguas? Hispaniola one of the first names before Santo Domingo, place of the newly arrived Hispanos, La Nueva Isabella origi nal name of Santo Domingo capital, in honor of the reigning Queen Isabel of Castilla. Pedro Mir, taking a great wind from Walt Whitman, was at the crossroads of las antillas hispanas when he wrote “Contracanto a Whitman,” you cannot be more centered American than that. Santo Domingo the locale of the original city was in a different place across the river, just like the original settlement in Puerto Rico, which was called Caparra; it too jumped to a more ample bay and was baptized Puerto Rico as Juan Ponce de León got poetic: Puerto Rico city in the rich port. Puerto Rico city was on the island of San Juan Bautista, but years later the names were switched. America is a region accustomed to these transformations. Reversions, forgeries, revisions, thieves, swindlers. We have exhausted stretched dismantled exploded the Spanish language. Our Spanish way beyond the peninsular borders accommodates novo flavors for the tongue. It’s the language that was and still is on 104th street Spanish Harlem, I recall it was like a disfigured scratch, almost broken record, eating beans in the corner restaurant where now stands a Tex-Mex restaurant. As Latin American nations became independent of Spain, the local pro-Spanish crown bourgeois kept moving to lands where they were still in control, till finally Cuba y Puerto Rico. Cuba mamboed out of its colonial status in the early twentieth century, Puerto Rico, ay, bendito. La cream de la reactionary crap. The last car of the Spanish train, the Spaniards started in the Caribbean and finished where they started as well. The current migratory problem in Santo Domingo is a phobia that has to be put to rest, or to merengue. The current popu lation of Puerto Ricans on the island does not deserve that immense tropical beauty that paints through the length of our immense smallness. Our eyes glide out from mountaintops, flying like Guaraguao falcons; if we didn’t love it to possess it, love dissolves and vanishes. In danger we are of becoming a patch of moisture in the Caribbean.
Ay Bandito, Qué Vaina
The earth came out
of a Calabasa
As the word was in it
floating on water
moisture precipitates image,
Qué calor,
so spoken it sang,
heard speaking tree,
as walked dressed
In flesh caoba,
rocks speech at reach,
tune into my bone,
chisel on stone clay notebook,
Cuneiform tablet inside,
The maracas pencil orality
of remembered places,
the night stars,
the hammock, yucayeques
like beehives, a river crab
Came to my feet to talk
with its mouth legs
trembling like castanets.
It told me something
I obey the enchant canto,
a tree go see out there where,
across the water again place.
Tainos were motion,
nomads of the aquatic-foliage,
sun speaking into the guanine
gold upon chest.
Tainos were roam-mantic, nomads
listening to everything spoke,
a turtle gives a lecture
upon its belly, drawn paintings
the history of the sea.
If there is Vaina in Cayacoa
I’ll walk water upon
to Caguana,
Magua casaba with guava jelly
Guarionex smoke from clay pipe.
Naguas dancing
my caligrafía grifa
calligraphy,
guayacán knife chisel soft clay,
circle life symbolic energy
combustion, the waves repeat
tongue
Below the navel button
Bacaloa
Huge curves.
Today mi negrita
is half Taina, a portion Roma gypsy,
splinter from Nazarid kingdom moros
con mucho africoco in the tumbao.
The merengue is foreplay
the Christians pass law to ban it,
now Sevillanas
Mangú plátano
the most in mofongo chew.
The islands were factories
to pull out gold, silver
Now empty carcass,
The sun smiling torture
Upon us.
Back in the metropolis
The gold buys new ships
Sail to the Philippines,
Paid for the marble stairs
of Segovia.
Now we just potassium
Plátano
Guava fruits native
vanishing growing
sugar gone
Chewed gum
/> Juice spent.
Waves of migrations,
Tsunami
Washington Heights
old bajo Manhattan,
nomad blood drifting
the tribal spirit portable
homes,
Taino settlements were
stepping stones, two more
Moons we pick up and go,
the wind is pushing,
It’s what speaks chiseled
onto stone,
That’s the biblioteca
a line of rocks
motion energy movement,
rippling. A language of Stone Waterfalls.
pushing on rocks eating
’roz con gandules,
desert bichuela candy sweet.
Betances and Hostos
wanted an Antillean Federation,
A necklace of islands
Cuba Santo Domingo Puerto Rico
Antillas hispanas,
If freedom were a dance
We’d all be in paradise
exhausted from so much guayaba
long time ago.
The real wood hits rock:
Ay bendito Puerto Rico
Americans and all going toward
the infierno directo.
Mi qué Vaina.
Atlantis/Mu
Having read Plato back in 1968 in a Berkeley, California, that has totally transformed, it was the age of the hippies, a phenomenon that I observed from the distance of my diddy-bop Latin from Manhattan slick attire. Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan, the Mamas and the Papas. The Beatles had already bolted from some other planet called Liverpool. The song “California Dreaming,” by then José Feliciano was happy with the lyrics, accompanied my West Coast fantasy. The disease of reading infested me very early, kid around eleven, twelve years old, reading and swollen imagination. One foot in the streets, the other dragging through poetry. In California hung out and achieved cannabis haze blend maintaining a rush and scope of eye for trouble, habit from New York barrios. I had come to live in Berkeley from Spanish Harlem New York. I had been living in the top of a theater called the Gut Theater, run by a Colombian theater enthusiast Enrique Vargas, we had been doing theater in the streets of El Barrio. I had also during those years been involved with a reading tutorial school there in the neighborhood, it was through a program run by Colombia University students. We were high school students teaching younger kids how to read, doing poetry with them, and singing songs. We didn’t know what we were doing, we were learning as we went along. Arriving in California young as I was I had already transit through the streets, the Afro-American-Puerto Rican civil rights movements, remember endless rent strike organizations and marches in downtown City Hall. I was mambo fast and California was slow speed for me. Berkeley was full of rock music, which my ear could never get tuned into, but I had brought with me the records of Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri so that I could stay in tune with the clave of the salsa rhythms, the music of my upbringing in Latin Manhattan. Some years before going west, which was in 1968, I was a youngster flying the streets of the Lower East Side. I started reading early, the language skill came to me with minor effort as if it were already inside and all I had to do was give it a tap to open it, it sailed smoothly through me as inside I was struggling to keep the phonetics of my first language, the Spanish, in practice, atop of which I pasted the English grammar. The two languages bumping into each other. By the sixth grade I was reading way above my level, I was at a high school grade level. I was eating any book that came into my hands. I discovered the Broadway/Fourth Avenue book row stores in the early sixties, which was New York’s old book row right there in walking range of my Lower East Side tenement building. There were many stores still in business, books were outside on shelves and tables, paperbacks were something like three for fifty cents. I went to work helping some friends that had jobs in a laundry making deliveries to the Stuyvesant and Peter Cooper middle-class projects and made money from the tips and each day came home with two to three dollars, the next morning up early took an enthusiastic walk toward the west side to Broadway, curiosity smirk across my face as I pranced over to peruse among the shelves of the bookstores. Did I go to one of the original Barnes & Noble bookstores right off Union Square Park? I had heard of some writers from the reading of school literature textbooks, Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, other writers some older friends were whispering to me about, also I had made friends with some of the neighborhood beatniks that were living in the tenements alongside the Puerto Ricans, and talking with them and looking at their bookcases I learned of more writers. I gave myself up to discovery, picking up books after reading the first few pages. One of the North American beatniks told me about The Catcher in the Rye so I started reading Salinger, also Mark Huckleberry Finn Twain in real inexpensive editions that I found thrown around in these big wooden boxes outside the bookstores, the books were put into brown grocery bags like you get at the bodegas, and it was good this way because I didn’t want the guys on the corner, my street friends, to know that I was reading books. I was that way, a loner, though I was social and friends with everybody on the block, I was never part of any clique, my friendships were passive, even fleeting, I spent hours reading, thrown on an old sofa that me and a friend of the building took up to the roof, sat there hidden upon the roof of the sky-light staring toward the Empire State and the Chrysler Building, which was momentary scenery as I raised my glance from whatever worlds I was reading about. At first I did not read poetry books that much, poetry was something that I lived. Early on in my house (apartment) my mother’s brother Carlos would occasionally recite poems from the oral tradition of Latin America, I remember in particular “El Brindis del Bohemio,” it always made me cry. I was affected by language as a kid. Those family recitations and the lyrics of the boleros that my mother listened to, the family sang together, those were my first sense of words as expressive emotion, my introduction to poetry. My early readings were history and narratives; I could not yet reach poetry locked in books as lectura. Taking walks further up Fourth Avenue I ended up at the Jefferson Bookstore across from Union Square Park in my youthful zest for knowledge. Years later I learned that the Jefferson Bookstore was owned by the Communist Party. They would have sale books spread on tables in the fashion of the other Broadway book row stores; it was here that I first purchased the poems of Lorca, the Spanish poet, in English translations, the Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet, and Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet who eventually would win the Nobel Prize. I took all these books to the tenement building where my family lived and escaped up to the roof and on top of the world disappeared from reality. My father and mother having divorced some years earlier, I felt totally without structure; it was my father who had a firmness that mother and her family lacked, alone and without direction I escaped into language. I went up to the twelfth grade in high school but never bothered to get my diploma, feeling independent knowledge for me was in the reading of books and in conversations with many different types of people. Making friends with poets and writers, I was already starting to do my thing. New York was a world of turmoil, chaos, many of my street friends had fallen to heroin, I went a lot to the Ortiz Funeral Home on Third Street, to see and mourn dead friends. Street violence was a spontaneous jump that could engulf you when you least expected, the world was collapsing all around me, it sharpened my resolve to escape out of New York. To a place where I could read and write hidden from the humongous animals of the New York streets. Herb Kohl, who I had met in my East Harlem High School days, informed me from Berkeley, California, where he had by then established for himself an opportunity to work with young people doing poetry workshops. Thus upon an evening of 1968 my friend who is really like my cousin by now, David Henderson, the poet, “Mayor of Harlem,” gave me a ride to the airport and go west young man, something was calling. A trip that changed my life forever. In Berkeley I stayed first with Herbert Kohl; I remember once walking up the hill to where he lived, my footsteps under a tree distu
rbed a giant white owl that was in a trance upon a branch, it fluttered its white wings, I can still see those wings so bright. There was so much to see and to know, so much to eat, tela to cut, excited meeting Chicanos/Mexicanos, and over in the Mission District of San Francisco, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, flavorful Mexican food, the beans were crush-smashed, a familiar flavor to me for I grew up eating pinto beans as well, this refried version was like an accent upon the flavor. On Telegraph Avenue, I met Fred Cody, owner of Cody’s Books, met Moe Moskowitz of Moe’s Books, who was next door, and spoke much to him about our shared New York. He was a Jewish guy from the city, his accent reminded me of the Lower East Side people I met in the 50s, Moe sitting back at the entrance next to the cash register always smoking his cigar. Books have always saved my days and nights. In New York looking out windows of snowfalls and five below zero outside, hot tenement brick ovens of radiator vapor, my hands holding trees squeezed down to paper, ink words dancing mind mambo. In California long stretches to get anywhere, Cannabis sativa influenced reading of text, sometimes stream of consciousness abrupt halt coming back realizing I had read the same paragraph four times over, get the tempo nailed down and proceed; many books I read in this period I have in recent years had to reread. It was through the shelves of Moe’s Books and Shambala Booksellers next door that I became interested in the occult, went loco reading Le Plongeon, John Bennett, Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, from India The Ramayana, James Churchward talking about some Mu, who?, continent out in the Pacific now sunken; stumbled upon Plato’s Timaeus and Critias. Speaking and hanging with Chicano/Mexicano friends I was informed of Aztlán and details of Maya, Azteca esoteric theories; the connections between worlds has always fascinated me, and overall the antiquity of humanity, which is being pushed back in time by recent research. Egypt, where the Greek Solon went to hear about Atlantis from the priests.