\" Swimming in Olive Oil \" : North Africa and the Hispanic Caribbean in the Poetry of Víctor Hernández Cruz

$Page 1: \" Swimming in Olive Oil \" : North Africa and the Hispanic Caribbean in the Poetry of Víctor Hernández Cruz$
“Swimming in Olive Oil”: North Africa and the HispanicCaribbean in the Poetry of Víctor Hernández Cruz

Marisel Moreno

Hispanic Review, Volume 83, Number 3, Summer 2015, pp. 299-316 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania PressDOI: 10.1353/hir.2015.0028

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‘ ‘ Swimming in Olive Oil ’ ’ : North Africaand the Hispanic Caribbean in thePoetry of V ıctor Hernandez Cruz

Marisel MorenoUniversity of Notre Dame

Our mother country is not just Spain but also Morocco,North Africa. . . . We are all swimming in olive oil.

—Vıctor Hernandez Cruz

abstract This essay examines selected poems from The Mountainin the Sea by US Puerto Rican poet Vıctor Hernandez Cruz, who sets outto complicate Puerto Rican, Spanish, and US notions of cultural identity. Itdemonstrates how Hernandez Cruz is tropicalizing the Maghreb throughthe juxtaposition of and interplay between languages (Spanish, English, andArabic), as well as imagery linked to Morocco, Spain, Puerto Rico, and NewYork. It also shows how the subversiveness of the collection reaches a newdimension through its depiction of the North African presence within thegeopolitical borders of the United States in our post-9/11 context.

In his introduction to The Mountain in the Sea (2006; henceforth simplyMountain), US Puerto Rican poet Vıctor Hernandez Cruz states, ‘‘I hope I

I would like to thank the anonymous readers for their generosity in taking time out of theirbusy schedules to provide detailed and nuanced suggestions that allowed me to strengthen myarguments.

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am translating cultures, as I always feel southern Spain, Andalusia, on myway home to the Caribbean or on the way home to north Africa. These arethe places that color my poems; I crisscross them and melt the many fusionsthat history has knitted through these regions’’ (1). These words highlight thecontinuity between this collection and some of his previous poetry, inspiredby the links between Spain and North Africa, while at the same time theyserve to emphasize Mountain’s focus on the latter. Doris Sommer com-mented on this connection between North Africa and Spain in HernandezCruz’s earlier collection, Red Beans (1991): ‘‘The poet keeps his eyes and earsopen for the most primeval vestiges of the region’s complex diasporic ethno-history to make the invisible heritage visible, concentrating on the tracesof Andalusian Islamic traditions left in the Spanish folk songs’’ (891). Herobservation serves as a reminder that Hernandez Cruz has been writingpoems about this topic for over a decade. However, Mountain is the firstcollection where the links between North Africa and Spain become a unifyingconcern. One of my arguments is that this book marks a shift in HernandezCruz’s poetics, a point that is even more evident after the publication of hislatest collection, In the Shadow of Al-Andalus (2011; henceforth Shadow).

Spain, the Caribbean, North Africa, and the United States are intricatelyconnected in the poems of Mountain, partly as a result of the layered andmultiple migrations that have shaped the worldview of this poet. HernandezCruz was born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York. As a young adult, hemoved to San Francisco and eventually resettled in Puerto Rico. He has spentthe last decade shuttling back and forth between Puerto Rico and Morocco,his wife’s homeland. His latest stage in Morocco has undoubtedly marked ashift in his poetics, even if some of the themes he addresses were alreadypresent in his previous works.

As possibly the only US Latino poet writing in the aftermath of 9/11 fromNorth Africa—or anywhere in the Arab world for that matter—HernandezCruz is uniquely positioned to examine and ‘‘translate’’ these cultures for hisaudience, as he has done in his most recent collections, Mountain andShadow. My critical intervention seeks to shed light on the former, whichwas his first book-length attempt to complicate Puerto Rican, Spanish, andUS notions of cultural identity in our post-9/11 era—a text that has remainedvirtually neglected by literary critics. Focusing on ‘‘The Medina Poems’’and the series ‘‘Island Waves,’’ I demonstrate how Hernandez Cruz istropicalizing—to borrow the term from Frances Aparicio and Susana Chavez-Silverman—the Maghreb through the juxtaposition of and interplay between

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Moreno : ‘‘SWIMMING IN OLIVE OIL’’ j 301

languages (Spanish, English, and Arabic), as well as imagery linked to fourmain referential points: Morocco, Spain, Puerto Rico, and New York. Theapparent ‘‘disorienting effect’’ that this mixture of languages and imagescreates destabilizes notions of cultural identity by emphasizing what he callsthe ‘‘points of cultural confluence’’ that link North Africa, Europe, the Carib-bean, and the United States (Mountain 2). What does it mean that one of themost important and recognized contemporary US Latino poets is drawinginspiration from the Arab world and publishing poems in the United States,where Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiments have intensified since 9/11? AsI will demonstrate, the subversiveness of the collection reaches a new dimen-sion through its depiction of the North African presence within the geopolit-ical borders of the United States in our post-9/11 context.

A Post-Nuyorican, Transinsular Poetry

The apparent ‘‘disorienting effect’’ that tends to characterize The Mountainin the Sea reflects some recent transformations in the theoretical approach tomigration and diaspora studies, namely, the emergence of transnationalism1

in the 1990s as a model that takes into consideration ‘‘the experiences oftransmigrants, people who migrate from a country of origin to a host oneand maintain cultural, emotional, or physical connections to the residenceof origin in the host country’’ (Heredia 4). The mobile livelihoods that char-acterize transmigrant populations, such as Puerto Ricans,2 have undeniablydestabilized concepts such as sending/receiving and home/host societies.While the poems in the collection represent a new direction in diasporanPuerto Rican poetry by virtue of their focus on the connection between theCaribbean and the Maghreb, they also serve to bring a historical perspectiveto the topic of transnationalism, which is often seen as a modern phenome-non. As Hernandez Cruz puts it in his introduction to Mountain, ‘‘If we readthe history of the world, we realize that human culture is migration and

1. I subscribe to Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton’s definition oftransnationalism as ‘‘the processes by which immigrants build social fields that link together theircountry of origin and their country of settlement’’ (1).2. Puerto Ricans, it could be argued, are one of the most transnational societies to date—a conse-quence of the island’s colonial status, which grants its population a high degree of mobilitythrough its US citizenship status, in addition to the technological advances that have made travel-ing and relocation possible for most.

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fusions, that no regions or peoples could be who they are without the contactand assistance from others’’ (1).

Those familiar with Hernandez Cruz’s poetry are likely to recognize in thiscollection some of his trademark poetic moves, which tend to create an effectof disorientation in his readers. In an interview I conducted with him in2007, he spoke about this tendency: ‘‘I’m constantly taking things out ofcontext, and that is an element of my poetry. I’ve put palm trees in NewYork City, I’ve put mango seeds growing out of a policeman’s head, and I’veput snow in Puerto Rico.’’ While this propensity to ‘‘take things out ofcontext’’ and ‘‘confuse’’ might be overlooked as an idiosyncratic emblem ofhis poetry, the underlying sociocultural dynamics that inspire these images,in fact, reflect complex processes taking place within Puerto Rican and otherdiasporic communities across the globe.

The blurring of home/host categories, as the poetry of Hernandez Cruzexemplifies, results from their limits in reflecting the ‘‘complex, multidirec-tional dynamic specific to [the] diaspora cultural experience’’ (Flores 17). Inthe case of US Puerto Rican cultural production, as exemplified in Mountain,the increasing movement and far-reaching dispersal of this population hasrendered problematic certain location-specific categories such as the label‘‘Nuyorican’’—originally a pejorative term that was reappropriated by NewYork-based Puerto Rican poets in the 1970s, including Miguel Algarın andMiguel Pinero, to mark a distinction between themselves and poets from theisland. Critics such as Edna Acosta-Belen, the late Juan Flores, and FrancesAparicio have pointed out the restrictive nature of the label. As MaritzaStanchich observes, the ‘‘broader trajectories, more complex genealogies, andvaried class and political stances’’ of Puerto Ricans outside the island havestretched the limits of ‘Nuyorican’ as an identity marker (113). The term‘‘post-Nuyorican’’ has thus emerged as a provisional yet broader category,‘‘not grounded in an aesthetics, poetics and politics of the barrio’’ that istraditionally associated with Nuyorican literary production (119). I echo asimilar notion when I propose the concept of a transinsular Puerto Ricanliterature, a term that ‘‘signals the existence of a broad, complex, and hetero-geneous body of literature that is unified, albeit precariously, by the authors’self-identification as Puerto Rican, understanding this term not as a staticcategory but as one that assumes multiple manifestations.’’ As a concept thatencompasses ‘‘both the literature produced on the island and that producedon the US mainland’’—and, as I have argued in a previous work, evenbeyond, ‘‘departing from the recognition of existing contact zones between

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them,’’ transinsularity provides a theoretical optic through which to examinethe poetry of Hernandez Cruz (Family Matters 26).

Mountain exemplifies both the contemporary ‘‘post-Nuyorican’’ ethosthrough its move beyond the metanarrative of the Nuyorican experience,and the transinsular model by illustrating the complex and increasinglyheterogeneous character of US Puerto Rican literature. As mentioned above,this collection amplifies certain themes that were already present in his previ-ous works. As those familiar with his poetry already know, throughout his40-year-long literary career, Hernandez Cruz has forced us to reexamine thecontours of US Puerto Rican literature. His multiple migrations to NewYork, California, Puerto Rico, and Morocco, have complicated assumptionsthat would pin him down to one specific literary tradition. A case in point isthe fact that he tends to reject the label ‘‘Nuyorican’’ despite having been acontemporary of that group and having shared thematic, linguistic, andstructural concerns with Nuyorican poets. In his interview with Bruce AllenDick, Hernandez Cruz declares: ‘‘The poets of the so-called Nuyorican PoetsCafe I came into contact with a few years later. By then I was established inCalifornia. My association with them was minimal’’ (59). Yet while thoseearlier works were produced in English/Spanglish and were more in align-ment with the earlier stages of Nuyorican poetry, his return migration toPuerto Rico signaled linguistic and thematic shifts that gave his poetry amore Hispanophile direction.

His multiple relocations from Puerto Rico to the mainland and back to theIsland—where he began for the first time to publish poetry in Spanish—havecontributed to the blurring of linguistic and territorially-based boundariesbetween insular and US Puerto Rican literatures. Aparicio similarly notesthat his decision to publish in Spanish ‘‘is making Puerto Rican literatureson the island and on the mainland less clearly differentiated, while it alsorepresents a challenge to the traditional homologies between the PuertoRican literary canon and the Spanish language’’ (‘‘Writing’’ 79).

These boundaries have become even more indistinct due to the fact thatfor the last decade, Hernandez Cruz kept dual home bases in Puerto Ricoand Morocco. The experience of living in North Africa has had a profoundimpact on his poetry, as evidenced in Mountain and Shadow. Without adoubt, his incursion into the Arab world, as seen through the eyes of a PuertoRican living in Morocco, not only attests to the diversity of diasporic PuertoRican experiences, but also adds another dimension to the issues of culturaland linguistic fusion that have traditionally permeated his works. As I will

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demonstrate in the following section, Mountain destabilizes notions ofcultural identity by exposing the intertwined histories of North Africa, Spain,the Caribbean, and the United States, through the blending of languages andimagery.

Tropicalizing the Maghreb

With the publication of Tropicalization (1976), Hernandez Cruz coined aterm that eventually gained currency among Latino/a cultural and literarycritics. This collection, described as a ‘‘rigorous evocation of Manhattan’sebullient Latino life in the 1950s and early 1960s’’ was written from ‘‘thevantage point of 1970s California,’’ where the poet lived for several years(Sommer 891). Spatial and temporal dislocation, or what Urayoan Noel callshis ‘‘respatializing and retemporalizing impulse’’ (8), while by no means newin his poetics, does seem to acquire a central role from this stage onward. ByLingual Wholes (1982) comes to mind as a case in point, where the use ofthree epigraphs (including quotes by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe andArab Andalusian scholar Ibn al-Arabi) serve to ‘‘capture [Hernandez] Cruz’sexpansive diasporic poetics, which encompasses sub-Saharan Africa, south-ern Spain and North Africa, and Caribbean and Latin American syncretism’’(Noel 90).3 Without a doubt, Hernandez Cruz has been tropicalizing theglobe through his poetics, always informed by his personal migratorydisplacements. In the end, as Michael Dowdy reminds us, ‘‘[Hernandez]Cruz’s view of deterritorialization multiplies cultural encounters anddisperses fragments, which he sees as the core elements of cultural innova-tion’’ (172).

3. As Noel’s observation indicates, Hernandez Cruz’s poetry encompasses sub-Saharan Africa andNorth Africa. His earlier works focused more on sub-Saharan Africa, and drew on cultural, histor-ical, and ethnic aspects (especially music and the violence of the Middle Passage), in order toemphasize the centrality of blackness to Puerto Rican and other Afro-Caribbean cultures, as hispoem ‘‘African Things’’ illustrates. It is important to draw a distinction between this earlier sub-Saharan inspired poetry and the North African-centered Mountain when analyzing this latter bodyof work, to avoid the pitfall of conflating North Africa with all of Africa. In this later stage,Hernandez Cruz’s production seems to have moved away from the black radical tradition thathad informed his earlier works. While this shift in focus might be considered somewhat conserva-tive by some—in the sense that it does not foreground blackness nor the violence associated withthe racial mixture that took place as a result of slavery—it could be argued that this move is stillradical due to the fact that it highlights Arab and Muslim influences in Western society.

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As stated above, the term tropicalization has been adopted and redefinedby critics, among them Aparicio and Chavez-Silverman, who have defined itas ‘‘to trope, to imbue a particular space, geography, group, or nation with aset of traits, images, and values . . . These intersecting discourses are distrib-uted among official texts, history, literature, and the media, thus circulatingthese ideological constructs throughout various levels of the receptor society’’(8). They add that ‘‘Pratt’s concept of the ‘contact zone,’ that is, ‘social spaceswhere cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other often in contexts ofhighly asymmetrical relations of power’ (34), also inform [their] postcolonialreading and writing of tropicalizations’’ (2). Aparicio and Chavez-Silvermandifferentiate between hegemonic tropicalizations—which take place ‘‘from aprivileged, First World location’’—and retropicalization, which they tie to‘‘transculturation from below’’4—and ‘‘emerges from the cultural produc-tions, political struggles, and oppositional strategies deployed by some USLatinos/as’’ (12). They conceptualize it ‘‘precisely as a tool that foregroundsthe transformative cultural agency of the subaltern subject’’ (2). Re-tropicalizing tendencies often represent a subversive strategy that is the prod-uct of cultural agency, achieved through the transformation of images ‘‘intodiscursive weapons of resistance’’ (12). Language and imagery thus emerge askey elements of the notion of retropicalization, as Aparicio demonstrates inher own analysis of Hernandez Cruz’s poetry. Here, I follow her lead in orderto examine the role that tropicalization continues to play in this poet’s mostrecent works.

Language, as Aparicio suggests, is one of the central mechanisms behindthe tropicalizing tendency found in contemporary Latino/a texts. Even in thecase of texts written in English—which includes the majority of US Latino/atexts—‘‘a close reading of their lexicon and syntax reveals the underlyingpresence of Spanish in most of their works,’’ she explains (‘‘On Sub-Versive’’201). In cases where Spanish terms are used, she proposes that such worksbecome ‘‘Subversive also in a literal sense: the Hispanic and Caribbeansubtexts that permeate Latino fiction and poetry are only present to thosereaders who can recognize the underlying intertextuality veiled by the Other

4. This concept is tied to John Beverley’s ‘‘transculturation from below,’’ ‘‘by which subalternLatino and Latina subjects and communities struggle to attain power and cultural authority in thecirculation of cultural discourses. This struggle for discourse—for symbolic hegemony—is,certainly, also a struggle for social, economic, and cultural power’’ (qtd. in Aparicio and Chavez-Silverman, 12).

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language’’ (202). This leads her to conclude that in Hernandez Cruz’s poetry,his ‘‘tropicalized English’’ serves to advance a new politics of Puerto Ricanidentity grounded on transnationalism and transculturalism. While theworks analyzed by Aparicio are mostly written in English and interspersedwith Spanish words and phrases, the poems in Mountain complicate thispattern by featuring not one, but two Other languages—Spanish andArabic—that are likely to pose a double linguistic barrier for the averageAnglo-American reader. Constant references to cawah (coffee), jellabas, alif(first letter of the Arabic alphabet), madrasah (school), mufti (an Islamicscholar), Ibn Arabi and Averroes (respectively, an Arab Muslim mystic and aMuslim philosopher from medieval times), to name just a few, are all Arabicsubtexts that are likely to remain obscure for those not familiar with ArabMuslim history and culture. If the presence of Spanish terms—one of theaspects associated with the notion of tropicalization—can be read as a formof subversion, how does the incorporation of Arabic terms and cultural refer-ents play into that subversion? What we see is that the double linguisticbarrier that results from the incorporation of Spanish and Arabic wordsamplifies the subversiveness of the collection, if we follow Aparicio’s line ofthought, to produce an even more dynamic tropicalization from below.

In addition to the incorporation of Arabic terms, a central preoccupationthat emerges in Mountain has to do with emphasizing how languages reflectprocesses of ‘‘cultural confluence.’’ This is especially significant in the case ofthe Spanish language, which was deeply influenced by the Arabic lexiconand syntax—among other influences—during the 800 years of Arab Muslimoccupation of Al-Andalus. As Hernandez Cruz stated in an interview, ‘‘TheSpanish language was made by Christian Arabs, by Christians living withinMuslim-Arab territories: Sevilla, Granada, Murcia, Malaga, during the 8th,9th, and 10th centuries. So Spanish is ‘lactado,’ nurtured, while Spain isunder a heavy cultural, linguistic influence from Muslim Arabs who werecoming from Morocco.’’ Eventually, as he reminds us, that Spanish was later‘‘spiced up with some native words from the Caribbean, and finally withsome African words’’ (Hernandez Cruz, Interview with Moreno), referringto the influence of languages spoken by both the indigenous inhabitants ofthe Caribbean and the African slaves, as a result of European colonization.In the poem simply called ‘‘1’’ in ‘‘The Medina Poems’’ section, the speakerreflects on the experience of hearing Arabic in Morocco and trying to makesense of this new language that surrounds him:

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Listening to the sounds of Arabicmelting in my afternoon earswalking through the medina’s nougat taste,Amina’s hands are my handsSlowly the awareness of significancecomes, syllables that bring hints,a flavor in the word (1–7)

As these verses suggest, the speaker is able to recognize sounds and slowlybegins to decipher meanings, first through syllables, and later throughphrases, as the following verses suggest: ‘‘Concentration / of the ears a silentgrowing / words that link into phrases’’ (19–21). His knowledge of Spanishallows him to recognize sounds, which, despite being fragmentary anddevoid of full meaning, represent the possibility of communication. Theexperience of recognition reminds us that this is possible because, as the poetputs it, the Spanish language is ‘‘also Arab’’ (Interview with Moreno).

Without a doubt, language constitutes a key instrument through whichHernandez Cruz’s poetry reveals multiple layers of cultural fusion. However,it is the use of imagery and cultural referents tied to these Other languagesthat actually drives the subversive tropicalizing effect in the poems in Moun-tain. As Noel has indicated, ‘‘The poetics of tropicalization decontextualizesand defamiliarizes, but it also bridges seemingly distant physical and psychicgeographies’’ (13). The disorienting effect that may result from the way inwhich the poems (con)fuse imagery associated with San Juan, New YorkCity, and Moroccan cities forces the reader to recognize the perhaps not-so-evident links between the Caribbean, Spain, North Africa, and the UnitedStates. In destabilizing notions of Puerto Rican identity, Hernandez Cruz’spoems also call into question notions of Spanish and US identities. In fact,one of the most subversive aspects of the text is that it boldly reclaims boththe Spanish and Arab roots of Caribbean Latino/a identity—a sort of‘‘reverse invasion’’—when one considers the anti-immigrant and xenopho-bic climate that characterizes post-9/11 US society.5

In order to better understand how Mountain successfully challenges domi-nant notions of cultural identity from a transcontinental and transhemi-spheric perspective, it is necessary to first look at how this is achieved in

5. Wolfgang Binder refers to the implied ‘‘reverse invasion’’ that he observes in Hernandez Cruz’sTropicalization, where ‘‘Caribbeanization’’ is being pushed north (111, 115).

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relation to Puerto Rican identity. Since Puerto Rico became a US territory in1898, notions of identity have tended to be imagined and constructed alonga Puerto Rican/Anglo-American axis—especially in pro-independencecircles. For those who were invested from early on in Puerto Rico’s strugglefor independence, such as the intellectuals of the generacion del treinta, estab-lishing a distinct national and cultural identity in opposition to Anglo-American identity became a fundamental task.6 They relied, as subsequentgenerations have done, on a tripartite conceptualization of Puerto Ricanidentity that encompasses Spanish, Taıno, and African origins. The emer-gence of this hegemonic conception of national cultural identity was crystal-lized during the 1930s, and later became institutionalized in the 1950s underthe governorship of Luis Munoz Marın.7 At its core was the myth of racialdemocracy and harmony between the so-called three roots of Puerto Ricanculture. The myth sought to create a sense of unity by glossing over the racialand social inequalities that existed in that society. In the process, the Spanishelement was openly privileged above the indigenous and African ones,reflecting the ideology of blanqueamiento that has marked most Latin Ameri-can nations since their inception. Throughout most of the 20th century,official discourses on national identity in Puerto Rico were cemented onhispanofilia—which Jorge Duany describes as ‘‘the cult of all things Spanish’’(19)—and, some would argue, continue to be so today. The denial of black-ness and its counterpart, the privileging of whiteness, are discourses thatcontinue to inform notions of race, ethnicity, and national identity in PuertoRico and elsewhere.8

One of Mountain’s most daring and significant contributions to this narra-tive is to challenge the very foundation of this construct, that is, the alleged

6. The generacion del treinta refers to the Puerto Rican intellectual elite that coalesced during thatdecade and whose members are ‘‘regarded as the chief architects of the Puerto Rican nation’’(Moreno 12). Some of its key figures include Tomas Blanco, Antonio S. Pedreira, and VicenteGeigel Polanco. As I have observed elsewhere, ‘‘[f]or the members of this group, the definition ofPuerto Rican identity became the primary issue of their nation-building project’’ (12).7. Luis Munoz Marın was the first elected Puerto Rican governor of Puerto Rico. While he wasgovernor (1948–1964), he launched the modernization campaign Operacion Manos a la Obra, alsoknown as Operation Bootstrap, which eventually led to massive migration to the continental USbetween 1946 and 1964.8. A significant portion of Puerto Rican studies scholarship addresses the topic of blackness froma range of disciplinary perspectives, including the work of Arlene Torres, Jossianna Arroyo, JuanFlores, Yeidy Rivero, Yolanda Martınez-San Miguel, Eleuterio Santiago-Dıaz, Frances Aparicio,Jorge Duany, Angel Quintero Rivera, and my own, among others.

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‘‘whiteness’’ (Europeanness) of the Spanish element. As Hernandez Cruzputs it, ‘‘Our mother country is not just Spain but also Morocco, NorthAfrica. Our food and our rhythms from that side are from both coasts of theMediterranean Sea. We all are swimming in olive oil’’ (Interview, Poet’s Truth64). The poet problematizes traditional discourses of Puerto Rican identitythat have relied on the myth of Spanish ‘‘whiteness’’ (Europeanness) in orderto construct a Puerto Rican identity that, while being a product of mestizaje,has always privileged the Spanish (i.e., white) influence above its indigenousand (North and Sub-Saharan) African ancestries. This tendency to empha-size the white/European/Christian character of Spain—and hence of itscolonies—has been a cornerstone of nationalist discourses since the earlytwentieth century. The historical erasure of North African roots is evident inthe rhetoric of Pedro Albizu Campos, one of Puerto Rico’s key nationalistleaders, who went so far as to directly deny the Arab/Muslim influence inSpain: ‘‘La grandeza que Albizu veıa en Espana lo llevo a minimizar las aport-aciones de los pueblos arabes a la historia y cultura espanola’’ (Ferrao 51).

Thus, in declaring North Africa to be a long lost ‘‘mother country’’—forthe Hispanic Caribbean and Latin America—Hernandez Cruz decidedlyshakes the foundation of Puerto Rican identity. Africa, but more specificallyNorth Africa, strikes back. If official discourses of cultural identity through-out most Latin American countries have generally tended to undermine—and sometimes blatantly deny—the African influence that resulted from theinstitution of slavery, a historical perspective makes it clear that the Africaninfluence is intrinsic even to the supposedly white/European element. Inother words, Hernandez Cruz’s statement challenges the tendency, at least inPuerto Rico, to overlook the fact that most of the Spanish conquistadors whosettled there came from the Andalusian region, and were of North Africandescent.

The claim that ‘‘We’re all swimming in olive oil’’ is of particular signifi-cance because it defies centuries-old notions of Spanish identity that havesought to erase the North African influence from Spain’s own project ofnational construction. In fact, Hernandez Cruz’s poetry acquires a sense ofurgency when one takes into account Spain’s current highly anti-immigrantclimate, which has largely resulted from the influx of North African (mostlyMoroccan) immigrants in the last few decades. As Daniela Flesler explains inher book The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroc-can Immigration (2008), the tendency to conflate the historical figure of the‘‘Moor’’ with that of today’s Moroccan immigrant has revived the anxiety

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associated with both Spain’s sense of it own ‘‘Europeanness’’ (21) and thehistorical trauma of ‘‘not only experiencing the return of the colonized butalso that of its medieval colonizers’’ (9). Flesler contends:

[T]he current rejection of Moroccan immigrants is related to the fact thatthey are the one group most directly implicated in the question of Spanishidentity in relationship to Africa . . . Historically, the term Moors refers tothe North African Muslims of mixed Arab and Berber origin thatconquered the Iberian Peninsula in 711. In Spain, the term contains consid-erable affect. It is extended to signify any Arab or Muslim, and it has highlynegative connotations. (3)

And it is precisely the connection to Africa that the architects of the Spanishnation have sought to erase in the process of seeking symbolic membershipin Europe.

Because European views of Spain have tended to conceive of it as ‘‘being‘impure’ in racial, cultural, and religious terms due to its connection tooriental and African elements,’’ Spain has gone to great efforts to combatthose images of itself as ‘‘barbaric, uncivilized, and more akin to Africa thanto Europe’’ (Flesler 20). Of course, ‘‘Spain’s ‘impure’ contact with Africa andIslam’’ is the product of a long history of violence and colonization betweenSpain and North Africa. The characterization of modern day Moroccans inSpain as ‘‘Moors’’ thus evokes a history that posits them as ‘‘invaders’’ andthe ‘‘traditional enemies of Christian Spain’’ (3). Despite the fact that Araband Muslim influences are an integral part of the Spanish social and racialfabric, the discourse of exclusion from the nation has reached new heights inrecent years and has brought to the fore what Flesler refers to as the ‘‘histori-cal ghosts’’ related to the centuries of invasion, conquest, convivencia, andexpulsion associated with North African and Spanish histories. Amidst thecomplex and precarious position of North Africans in modern day Spain,Mountain emerges as a collection that, in stressing the links between theCaribbean and the Maghreb—as the poet states in the introduction—alsoserves to challenge Spain’s exclusionary identity discourses.

To be sure, the juxtaposition of the Caribbean and the Maghreb—‘‘two ofthe most fused mestizo human societies’’ according to the poet (1)—facilitatean exploration of cultural confluences thus far unparalleled in US PuertoRican or island letters. But more than that, it allows us to contest Spanishhegemonic constructions of identity (whiteness, Europeanness) that have

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sought to erase African influences prior to the transatlantic African slavetrade. This is primarily achieved through what I refer to as the tropicalizationof the Maghreb—a constant in the collection achieved through the evocationand fusion of imagery associated with these localities. For instance, the poem‘‘Island Waves 2’’ effectively captures the cultural confluence that character-izes both the Maghreb and Puerto Rico. According to the poetic voice, ‘‘San-turce is like the Maghreb / in the Caribbean, / The peoples could exchangeplaces / as you will see they are the same faces’’ (1–4). Facial features andcomplexion speak of a shared cultural origin, one that has its seeds in theyear 711 AD, when the Muslims conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula.Centuries of transculturation eventually reached a climax in 1492, the yearthat marks the final expulsion of Muslims from their last stronghold ofGranada and the ‘‘encounter’’ with the so-called New World. Therefore, evenwhen there are no explicit references to Spain in the poems, it remains ever-present because, as Hernandez Cruz reminds us, ‘‘The European culture thatcame to the Spanish-speaking Americas was the Spanish culture of the Medi-terranean coasts, and this culture had been under Islamic Moroccan influ-ence for many centuries’’ (Interview, Poet’s Truth 56).

The links between Puerto Rico and Morocco, the Caribbean and NorthAfrica, encompass more than the genetic makeup of their populations.Sights, sounds, smells, and tastes—all senses speak to that shared history.The juxtaposition of these two distinct yet similar worlds is evident in thefollowing verses:

Camels parked at La Plaza del Mercado,Mercado,Salsa Fest. In Marrakech medina.In both spaces bodies are rattlinglike nervous twitches,An endless parade of legs,a bubbling that climbs walls.Passion fruit juice and minttea exchange glasses. (9–17)

The transposition of images associated with Morocco (camels, medina, minttea) into the Puerto Rican context (Plaza del Mercado, salsa, passion fruitjuice) serves to create a dreamy landscape in which cultures are conflated,thus forcing us to ask ourselves whether this poem is about Puerto Rico,

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Morocco, or both. The last verses successfully convey a sense of confusionwhen the poetic voice concludes: ‘‘That’s why going home / is finding a sofafor the memory, / North Africa, / the Caribbean / Confused’’ (39–43). Thefusion of these localities leaves one wondering if what we’re witnessing isindeed the tropicalization of the Maghreb or perhaps the Arabization of theCaribbean. In the end, what really matters is that the strong links betweenthese cultures serve to unveil a history that has been mostly glossed over byofficial national and cultural identity discourses on the island and in Spain.

In the section titled ‘‘The Medina Poems’’—medina being the old sectionof an Arab city in North Africa—Hernandez Cruz continues to juxtaposeNorth African and Caribbean imagery. Sounds, rhythms, and music—allcentral elements of his earlier poetry—become again a privileged site ofcultural fusion. In poem ‘‘5,’’ the poetic voice’s disorientation stems from hispuzzlement upon listening to Caribbean rhythms from his hotel room in themedina:

Afternoon sky and sardines

Mediterranean breeze

Reading poets from the Caribbean

the cadence of poem dances.

Over the murmur of

the medina merengue from Santo Domingo

I jump from hotel bed

running out to the street

Thinking a carnival had come (9–17)

Momentarily perplexed by the sound of the merengue, the literature that hadalready mentally transported him to the Caribbean, and a range of sensorialexperiences that takes him back to the tropics, the poetic voice finally realizesthat he is still in Morocco. Here, the metaphorical ‘‘melting of cultures’’underscores a sense of historical continuity between North Africa and theCaribbean, via Spain.

Thus far I have demonstrated how Hernandez Cruz’s The Mountain inthe Sea exemplifies retropicalization, given that the poems subvert dominantnotions of Puerto Rican cultural identity by destabilizing both the PuertoRican/Anglo-American binary and the Spanish-Taıno-African triad that hasemphasized the ‘‘whiteness’’ of Spanish influence. However, I would like to

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argue that perhaps the most subversive aspect of the collection is its depic-tion of a ‘‘reverse invasion’’ achieved through the recuperation and celebra-tion of the Arab/Muslim North African influence within the geopoliticalborders of the United States. The poems give a positive spin to what hasotherwise been labeled the ‘‘brown threat,’’ that is, the ‘‘post-9/11 discoursesthat construct Latina/os and Middle Eastern Muslims as dangerous to theoverall social and economic well-being of the country’’ (Rivera 45). As Chris-topher Rivera contends, the parallel racialization of Latinos and Middle East-ern Muslims has often led to the conflation of these groups in US society.Not only are they perceived to be physically similar, but they both encapsu-late the threat of ‘‘otherness’’ (46). He adds, ‘‘in the post-9/11 Americanimagination, fears about terrorism and illegal immigration coalesce throughmedia and public discourse in such a way that Latina/os and Middle EasternMuslims are constructed as posing a Brown Threat’’ (47). While not equatingthem, he suggests that both groups are perceived as ‘‘invading’’ theUS—either as terrorists or ‘‘illegal immigrants’’—and thus have experienceda backlash during these times of rising ‘‘Latinophobia and Islamophobia’’(Rivera 62).

This perceived conflation of Latinos/as and Middle Eastern Muslims in USsociety crystalizes in ‘‘Medina Poem 8,’’ where bodies and spaces blur thelines between the US (New York) and Morocco:

In a profound caveI was in North Africa dreamingwith the Lower East Side ofManhattanDreams don’t obey geographyMaybe some face I walked bywithout noticing later I recalledthe mestizo air the way theymix Berber–Mali blood theway Puerto Rico mixes Bantu andSpanish all to become the samefeatures of a history.9

9. The Berbers are a highly heterogeneous indigenous group from North Africa. Today, people ofBerber descent are found in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Mali, and Niger. Mali is a West Africancountry that was part of three empires (the Ghana, Mali, and Songhai Empires) that controlledtrade in the Saharan region. ‘‘Bantu’’ is an umbrella term used to refer to close to 500 ethnic

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In this poem, the poetic voice is establishing a parallel between the processesof hybridization that took place in Africa (the mixture between the Berberand Mali) and in Puerto Rico (the mixture of Spanish and Bantu), and whichled to the type of mestizaje the speaker recognizes currently in the Lower EastSide. Implicitly, the poem suggests that Puerto Ricans, as Caribbean peoples,are descendants of all of these groups; the Berber–Mali influenced the Span-ish, and the Bantu were brought to the Caribbean as slaves.

The ‘‘disorienting effect’’ has thus been pushed to a new limit because, asthe speaker tells us, ‘‘Dreams don’t obey geography.’’ Readers are now left toponder the connections between North Africa and the Lower East Side ofManhattan. Clearly referring to one of the Puerto Rican enclaves in NewYork—the result of another layer of migration—the poetic voice is able totrace the links between two apparently disconnected locales through thepeople who inhabit those spaces. People’s mestizo features—whether inMorocco or the Lower East Side—evince a shared history; in this case, onethat unites North Africans with Caribbean Latinos/as in the United States.And this is how, with the stroke of a pen, Hernandez Cruz’s verses confronthead-on both the Islamophobia and the Latinophobia that has emerged as aresult of the ‘‘brown threat.’’

As readers, we are forced to recognize that centuries of migrations,displacement, and colonization were necessary in order for the speaker toask himself: ‘‘What are the girls I went to / high school with in SpanishHarlem / doing walking around Morocco?’’ (‘‘Medina Poem 1’’). The lyricalvoice suggests that the connections go beyond the features people share.These are present in the sounds, rhythms, and music that permeate thoselandscapes, an inferred idea in ‘‘Medina Poem 2,’’ when the speaker observes,‘‘The Bronx comes melodious to Rabat’’ (13). The implicit centuries-longtrajectory—from North Africa to Spain, from Spain to the Hispanic Carib-bean, from the Caribbean to the United States—speaks to the complex,multilayered, and continuous process of movement that has characterizedthe history of humanity and that will continue to define it in the future. AsHernandez Cruz puts it, ‘‘Humanity has always been peoples of the sea,waves of migration, languages built on each other: we are more Spanishbecause of the Arabs, and the Arabs more brilliant because of the Greeks; all

groups in sub-Saharan Africa who speak Bantu languages. The Bantu were one of the three mainAfrican populations brought to Puerto Rico during the slave trade.

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of us more scientific because of the Arabs and the Asian Indians’’ (1). Moun-tain’s focus on the connections between the Caribbean and the Maghreb thusreminds us that, as Flores puts it, ‘‘transnationalism is really nothing newbut has characterized regional and world relations in many prior periods ofsocial history’’ (21).

In the midst of the heightened anti-immigrant sentiment that character-izes contemporary US society, Hernandez Cruz’s collection celebrates thepositive aspects of the centuries-old cultural fusions that link these groups.The poems remind us that, ‘‘[t]he traces of Spain’s Muslim past thus createan undeniable historic link between present day Latina/os and Latin Ameri-cans and people of the Islamic world’’ (Rivera 48). By underscoring thehistorical continuity of Caribbean Latinos/as to North Africa, the poemspartake in the tradition of cultural ‘‘resistance to anglification’’ (Aparicio)that underlies US Latino/a identity discourses. Given the current social andpolitical climate—characterized by the maligning and demonizing of theArab Muslim world in the West—Hernandez Cruz’s poetry is positioned asan instrument of reconciliation in order to bridge these two apparentlydisparate worlds. His collection underscores connections by serving, in hiswords, ‘‘as a bridge over the motion of the water.’’ The Mountain in the Searefuses exclusionary understandings of cultural and national identities inorder to envision, from apparently discordant histories, a dynamic sense ofnew world belongings.

References

Aparicio, Frances. ‘‘On Sub-Versive Signifiers: Tropicalizing Language in the UnitedStates.’’ In Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad. Ed. FrancesAparicio and Susana Chavez-Silverman. Lebanon, NH: UP of New England/Dartmouth, 1997. 194–212.

———. ‘‘Writing Migrations: Transnational Readings of Rosario Ferre and VıctorHernandez Cruz.’’ Latino Studies 4.1–2 (2006): 79–95. Online.

Aparicio, Frances, and Susana Chavez-Silverman. Introduction. In Tropicalizations:Transcultural Representations of Latinidad. Lebanon, NH: UP of New England/Dartmouth, 1997. 1–18. Print.

Binder, Wolfgang. ‘‘Our Puerto Rican Territories in the North, Or Poetry as CulturalInfiltration: The Case of Vıctor Hernandez Cruz’s Tropicalization of New York.’’ Cross-ing Borders: Inner and Intercultural Exchanges in a Multicultural Society (1997): 103–18.Print.

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Dowdy, Michael. Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globaliza-tion. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2013. Online. Accessed: 14 Jan. 2015.

Duany, Jorge. The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in theUnited States. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002.

Ferrao, Luis Angel. ‘‘Nacionalismo, hispanismo y elite intelectual en el Puerto Rico de ladecada de 1930.’’ In Del nacionalismo al populismo: cultura y polıtica en Puerto Rico.Ed. Silvia Alvarez-Curbelo and Maria Elena Rodrıguez Castro. Rıo Piedras, PR: Hura-can, 1993.

Flesler, Daniela. The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary MoroccanImmigration. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2008.

Flores, Juan. The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeno Tales of Learning and Turning. NewYork: Routledge, 2009.

Heredia, Juanita. Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-First Century. New York:Palgrave, 2009.

Hernandez Cruz, Victor. The Mountain in the Sea. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 2006.———. Interview. In A Poet’s Truth: Conversations with Latino/Latina Poets. By Bruce

Allen Dick. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2003.———. Interview with Marisel Moreno. Institute for Latino Studies Oral History Project.

University of Notre Dame. April 18, 2007. Audiovisual recording.Moreno, Marisel. Family Matters: Puerto Rican Women Authors on the Island and the

Mainland. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2012.Noel, Urayoan. In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam. Iowa City:

U of Iowa P, 2014.Rivera, Christopher. ‘‘The Brown Threat: Post-9/11 Conflations of Latina/os and Middle

Eastern Muslims in the US American Imagination.’’ Latino Studies 12.1 (2014): 44–64.Schiller, Nina Glick, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton. ‘‘Transnationalism: A

New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration.’’ In Towards a TransnationalPerspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered. Ed. NinaGlick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton. New York: New York Acad-emy of Sciences, 1998. 1–24.

Sommer, Doris. ‘‘Vıctor Hernandez Cruz.’’ In Latino and Latina Writers. Ed, Alan West-Duran. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004.

Stanchich, Maritza. ‘‘Towards a Post-Nuyorican Literature.’’ Sargasso 2 (2005–2006):113–24.

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Documents

\" Swimming in Olive Oil \" : North Africa and the Hispanic Caribbean in the Poetry of Víctor Hernández Cruz