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Two Returns to the Native Land: Lydia Cabrera Translates Aimé CésaireEmily A. Maguire

In the review of an exhibit by her friend and compatriot the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, published in the Havana newspaper Diario de la Marina in 1944, the writer Lydia Cabrera speaks in an ironic way of the influence of their native land on Lam’s work: “En este sentido, los dos años de destierro en Cuba—desterrados son todos los que habiendo conocido a Francia no pueden volver a ella; si no vuelven, ‘desterrados’ serán toda la vida—han sido en extremo beneficiosos, quizás deter-minantes.” (In this sense, the two years of exile in Cuba—exiled are all those who, having known France, cannot return there; if they do not return, they are exiles for life—have been extremely beneficial, perhaps defining.)1 Cabrera’s description, while acknowledging the importance of Cuba in Lam’s formation as an artist, inverts the positions of Lam’s native and adopted countries so that France becomes the true place of (artistic) origin. The painter’s return to Cuba is shown simultane-ously as a homecoming and an exile, an experience that locates France as the site of a possible lifetime of nostalgia. Cabrera is not speaking for Lam alone; the unapologetically Francophilic tone of her description is largely due to her own parallel experience as a Cuban expatriate in France. One can read an implicit “us” in the “exiled are all those who,” as well as what might be an affec-tionately tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the lure of France as a center for expatriate artists

1 Lydia Cabrera, “Wifredo Lam,” Diario de la Marina, 20 January 1944, in Páginas sueltas, ed. Isabel Castellanos (Miami: Universal, 1994), 263. Unless otherwise identified, all translations are mine.

 Two Returns to the Native Land: Lydia Cabrera Translates Aimé Césaire 126 |

and writers. Like Lam, Cabrera left Havana in the 1920s for Europe (Paris), and like the painter, she found in the French capital an environment that supported both her first attempts at writing and her growing interest in Afro-Cuban culture. At the outbreak of the Second World War, both Cubans were forced to leave Europe and return to the Caribbean, where they discovered that their experi-ence abroad had altered their understanding of home. They found themselves separated from the avant-garde artistic communities of the French capital and in many ways socially and creatively isolated in their home country.

Connected by this journey of homecoming and exile, which Cabrera’s narrative portrays as a process of artistic self-formation, these two desterrados (exiles) would go on to collaborate on another kind of Caribbean homecoming. In 1943 they published a Spanish translation of Aimé Cés-aire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; hereafter Cahier), with Cabrera’s translation of Césaire’s text and illustrations by Lam.2 Narrating the perspective of a Martinican who returns to the island after time spent abroad, this translation introduced the concept of Negritude, elaborated by Césaire in this poem, to a Cuban and Spanish-language readership.3 It was also, as A. James Arnold points out, the first time the poem had been published in book form; it had first appeared in the journal Volontés in 1939.4 The 1943 translation was the first and only collaboration between Césaire, Cabrera, and Lam, and its publication connects, in both concrete and symbolic ways, a Pan-Caribbean avant-garde spirit that these three individuals articulated to varying degrees.5

As other scholars have noted, the collaboration between Césaire, Cabrera, and Lam was significant not simply for bringing together three Caribbean artists but also because of the impor-tant role these individuals played in shaping ideas of blackness and racial identity in the region.6 If Césaire’s poem heralded the birth of an anticolonial black identity, Lam was one of the first Cuban painters to mix avant-garde aesthetics and Afro-Cuban themes. Cabrera, already the author of a collection of experimental Afro-Cuban stories, Cuentos negros de Cuba (Black Cuban Tales; 1936), went on to produce some two dozen ethnographic monographs and fictional texts focused on Afro-Cuban culture.7 All three of these intellectuals, and Césaire and Cabrera in particular, contrib-uted to what Brent Hayes Edwards calls the discourse of black internationalism. Yet they came to

2 The translation also featured an introduction by the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, a gesture that served to connect Césaire’s text—and, by extension, the translation—to André Breton’s surrealist project.

3 Although the term négritude was coined by Césaire, the word first appeared not in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) but in the third issue of the journal L’Etudiant Noir in May–June 1935. For more on the genesis of the term, see Christopher Miller, “The (Revised) Birth of Negritude: Communist Revolution and ‘the Immanent Negro’ in 1935,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 743–44.

4 See A. James Arnold, “Césaire’s Notebook as Palimpsest: The Text before, during, and after World War II,” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 3 (2004): 133. In 1947, André Breton, who by that time had “discovered” Césaire, helped publish the poem in volume form in New York. In 1956, Présence Africaine published the version frequently considered “definitive.”

5 Césaire did go on to publish one of Cabrera’s short stories, “Bregantino, Bregantín,” in the 1944 issue of Tropiques, a gesture indicative of his continued admiration for Cabrera’s work but not a collaboration per se. See A. James Arnold, Modernism and Négritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 94.

6 See Lourdes Arencibia Rodríguez, “Aimé Césaire y su traductora Lydia Cabrera: Dos formas de asumir lo antillano,” Anales del Caribe (2008): 28–39; and Amy Nauss Millay, Voices from the Fuente Viva: The Effect of Orality in Spanish-American Narrative (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005), 45–48.

7 Cuentos negros de Cuba was actually published first in French—like Césaire’s poem. It appeared as several separate sto-ries in Cahier du Sud, in 1934, and in book form as Contes negres de Cuba, in 1936. It was not published in Spanish until 1940.

42 • November 2013 • Emily A. Maguire | 127

it from strikingly different perspectives. Césaire was a black Martinican who had been educated in France on scholarship; Cabrera came from a family of white, upper-class Havana intellectuals; while Lam, raised in rural Cuba, drew from both his African and Chinese heritage in his artwork. Their parallel journeys of uprootedness and return are characterized by what Edwards identifies as a kind of décalage, an unevenness or break existing in these formative cultural encounters: “In this sense, décalage is proper to the structure of a diasporic ‘racial’ formation, and its return in the form of disarticulation—the points of misunderstanding, bad faith, unhappy translation—must be considered a necessary haunting.”8 I see Cabrera’s translation of Césaire’s iconic text as a disar-ticulation: both a gesture of connection and understanding, and an expression of nonequivalency and fundamental difference.

According to Walter Benjamin, a knowing translator seeks to reproduce the “echo of the origi-nal” in the translation, to let something beyond mere linguistic information come through. In “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin argues that “a translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife,” from a text’s continued presence in the world.9 It is this “afterlife” of Césaire’s poem—specifically, how Cahier begins to live for Cabrera and in the broader Cuban context, that I propose to examine. How does the two writers’ position as doubly “uprooted,” their nostalgia that in its rejection of the conditions of homecoming is a kind of nostalgia for displacement itself, redefine this textual journey? If translation, as Maria Tymoczko reminds us, comes from the linguistic root “to carry across,” what is “carried across” into Cuban literature through Cabrera’s translation?10 Can her decision to translate Césaire’s text shape the way that we read Cabrera’s own work?

Suzanne Jill Levine observes that translation is a journey of reconciliation: “[It] is a route, a voyage if you like, through which a writer/translator may seek to reconcile fragments: fragments of texts, of language, of oneself.”11 The voyage of Cahier’s translation in this way parallels the voy-ages of the writer and translator themselves. Connected as they are by exile/uprooting, ambivalent returns to the native land, and links to surrealism, it is possible to see Césaire’s text—and the translation of it—as expressing elements of Cabrera’s own experience. Yet Césaire’s explicitly political text articulates a voice for a masculine black subject—and posits a space for the literary creation of that racialized self—very different from the identity championed in racial dialogues of the time in Cuba, where writers tended to view cubanía (Cubanness) as multiracial and hybrid in nature. By translating Césaire’s experience of postcolonial uprootedness and homecoming for a Spanish-speaking readership, Cabrera intimates a connection between the postcolonial context of Martinique and Cuba, and between négritude and cubanía. At the same time, as a white woman of privileged background, Cabrera is not Césaire, and her texts are not a reaction to the experience

8 Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 14.

9 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 71.

10 Maria Tymoczko, “Post-colonial Writing and Translation,” in Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, eds., Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1999), 19.

11 Suzanne Jill Levine, “Translation as (Sub)Version: On Translating Infante’s Inferno,” in Lawrence Venuti, ed., Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (London: Routledge, 1992), 85.

 Two Returns to the Native Land: Lydia Cabrera Translates Aimé Césaire 128 |

of colonialism. Just as Cabrera’s translation of Cahier is a symbolic moment of encounter in the shaping of black internationalism in the Caribbean, in many ways it fails to move beyond the hopeful gesture of that moment. It can thus equally be viewed as a discursive disarticulation that ends not in the creation of dialogue and understanding but in one of the failed opportunities that Edwards acknowledges are basic to the intercultural meetings shaping international discourses of blackness.

To Leave Only to Return: The Productivity of Distance

Reflecting on his own first return to the Caribbean in a 1968 interview translated into and published in Spanish, Césaire affirms the autobiographical nature of Cahier: “Eran los primeros contactos que reanudaba con mi país después de diez años de ausencia, y me encontraba realmente asaltado por un mar de impresiones y de imágenes, y al mismo tiempo muy angustiado ante las perspectivas de Martinica.”12 (That was the first contact I reestablished with my country after ten years of absence, and I found myself truly assaulted by a flood of images and impressions, and at the same time very distressed when faced with Martinique’s situation.) As with Cabrera’s description of Lam, the difficult trajectory of the return in Césaire’s poem (as in Césaire’s experience) is what provides the distance necessary for a productive re-visioning of the homeland. If Cahier’s poetic speaker has spiritually transformed himself by the end of the poem, he owes his rebirth in large part to the visual shift brought about by this journey.

The poem opens as the day is just coming into being, in the clarity that arrives after the total dark of the night and the shadowiness of the dawn. While in later versions of Cahier the poem begins with an encounter between the speaker and a policeman, the first lines of Cabrera’s translation, from the 1939 edition, instead focus on Césaire’s description of the Caribbean islands as abject and diseased:

Au bout du petit matin bourgeonnant d’anses frêles, les Antilles qui ont faim, les Antilles grêlées de petite vérole, les Antilles dynamitées d’alcool, échouées dans la boue de cette baie, dans la poussière de cette ville sinistrement échouées.

Al morir el alba, de frágiles ensenadas retoñando, las Antillas hambrientas, las Antillas perladas de viruelas, las Antillas dinamitadas de alcohol, varadas en el fango de esta bahía, siniestra-mente fracasadas en el polvo de esta ciudad.

At the end of the wee hours burgeoning with frail coves, the hungry Antilles, the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dynamited by alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay, in the dust of this town sinisterly stranded.13

12 The interview, with the Haitian writer René Depestre, took place at the Congreso Cultural de La Habana in Havana, Cuba, in January 1968. See Aimé Césaire, Poesías, ed. and trans. Enrique Lihn (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1969), xviii.

13 Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal / Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, in Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, trans. Clayton Eschleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 34; Aimé Césaire, Retorno al país natal, trans. Lydia Cabrera, in Lydia Cabrera, Páginas sueltas, ed. and trans. Isabel Castellanos (Miami: Universal, 1994), 231; Césaire, Cahier / Notebook, 35.

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The emphasis on “dying” in Cabrera’s initial Spanish phrase—“al morir el alba”—while a departure from the original, seems apt, since this moment marks the death of old ideas and illusions to make way for the creation of a new self and a new way of seeing the world. While specific vocabulary later in the poem will be more indicative of a Martinican context (in particular, the use of morne for small hill, which Cabrera retains from the original French), this first stanza views the islands together. Neither the city nor the speaker’s own island location are revealed; the pattern repeated by the islands here, to reference Antonio Benítez-Rojo, is not culture but the repeated occurrence of island life as a series of social problems and repressions—alcoholism, illness, isolation: the effects of colonialism.14 Césaire links the islands of the Caribbean through these shared circumstances. The speaker’s distance allows him to articulate this overview of the colonial experience as a dystopic portrait and to identify it as a colonial experience.

In a personifying gesture that identifies the islands themselves as victims of these social prob-lems, colonialism is likened to a physical sickness, an affliction experienced by victims who are unable to voice their suffering. The stanza repeatedly emphasizes the unsaid—the martyrs who do not bear witness: “Une vieille misère pourrissant sous le soleil, silencieusement; un vieux silence crevant de pustules tièdes.” (“Una vieja miseria pudriéndose silenciosamente bajo el sol; un viejo silencio reventado de postillas tibias.”) (“An aged poverty rotting under the sun, silently; an aged silence bursting with tepid pustules.”)15 When the poem’s speaker approaches the urban landscape of the town, the crowd there is similarly unable to communicate, simultaneously “si étrangement bavarde et muette” (“tan extrañamente habladora y muda”) (“so strangely chattering and mute”). The speaker identifies himself as Antillean when he speaks of “l’affreuse inanité de notre raison d’être” (“la aterradora inanidad de nuestra razón de ser”) (“the awful futility of our raison d’être” [emphasis mine]),16 but he differentiates himself from the island’s other inhabitants through his gaze—he has separated himself sufficiently to see things for what they are—and through the ability (and agency) to voice what he sees.

This change in perspective, which initiates the coming to consciousness at the heart of Cahier, is only made possible thanks to a leave-taking and the subsequent return. The text, however, is not merely the documentation of the return but the return itself, where poetic language—the speaker’s voice—offers itself as a tool of liberation: “Je viendrais à ce pays mien et je lui dirais: ‘Embrassez-moi sans crainte[,] . . . Et si je ne sais que parler, c’est pour vous que je parlerai.’ ” (“Volvería a este país que es mío y le diría ‘Abrázame sin temor. Si tan sólo sé hablar, por tí hablaré.’ ”) (“I would go to this land of mine and I would say to it: ‘Embrace me without fear[,] . . . and if all I can do is speak, it is for you I shall speak.’ ”)17 Beginning with the portrait of the islands’ social ills, the poem announces the speaker’s intention to return (a return which must come out of a leaving), and then

14 In La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva postmoderna (Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1996), Benítez-Rojo uses chaos theory to propose an idea of the Caribbean as a whole. While the islands of the Caribbean are not exact copies of one another, he argues that they are the varying expressions of a similar set of social, cultural, historical, and geological factors.

15 Césaire, Cahier / Notebook, 34; Césaire, Retorno al país natal, 231; Césaire, Cahier / Notebook, 35. 16 Ibid., 34; 231–32; 35. 17 Ibid., 44; 239; 45.

 Two Returns to the Native Land: Lydia Cabrera Translates Aimé Césaire 130 |

performs a double return, a physical trip to the island in the present and a spiritual recuperation of the speaker’s African cultural heritage. The two returns enact a triple transformation: that of the speaker and, through him, that of the country itself and that of his people. In omitting the word notebook from the Spanish title, Retorno al país natal (Return to the Native Land), Cabrera empha-sizes the power of the spatial shift but diminishes the importance of the text—and language—as the tools for enacting this return.

“Cubanized” from a Distance

As a reader of Césaire’s poem, Cabrera understood how leaving produces a change in perspective. In an interview, she describes the effect of distance on her own perception:

En mi caso, mi país, Cuba, empezó a interesarme en Francia, creo que eso puede sucederle a todo el que se aleja de su tierra natal: hay una especie de redescubrimiento de lo que está lejos. Tengo un recuerdo muy específico . . . : estudiando la iconografía del Borobudur, el templo de Java, hay un bajorrelieve en que aparece una mujer con unas frutas tropicales en la cabeza. Me dije: ¡Pero si esto es Cuba! Y claro, a la distancia había crecido en mí ese recuerdo ilusio-nado, esa especie de nostalgia, entonces inconsciente, que se siente fuera del país propio. Iba descubriendo o mejor, redescubriendo, lo que nunca puede verse de cerca.18

(In my case, Cuba, my country, began to interest me while in France. I think that this can happen to anyone who leaves his native land; there’s a kind of rediscovery of what is far away. I have a very specific memory . . . : studying the iconography of Borobudur, the Javanese temple, there’s a bas-relief that shows a woman with some tropical fruit on her head. I said to myself: “But that’s Cuba!” And of course, from the distance there had surfaced in me that excited memory, that kind of nostalgia, then unconscious, that one feels when outside one’s own country. I was slowly discovering, or rather, rediscovering, what one can never see up close.)

While this passage in no way articulates the emotional anguish (or political ferocity) of Césaire’s text, it does mark a shift in Cabrera’s gaze. Her experience as a foreigner in France affected how she viewed Cuba, both while in France and on her return to the island. The nostalgia she describes, her desire to recognize and even re-create Cuba in her current surroundings, functions as a lens that ultimately came to focus on an aspect of Cuban culture—Afro-Cuban culture and, specifically, religion—that she might not otherwise have discovered.19

For Cabrera, as for Césaire, leaving the Caribbean produced a more or less permanent shift in point of view. Mireille Rosello observes that Césaire’s narrator does not resolve his exile by return-ing home: “Texts which ‘come from’ the islands and which ‘return’ there are stricken not by Exile but by a series of exiles; they suffer from an impossible departure and return, they are marked by

18 Lydia Cabrera, quoted in Rosario Hiriart, Más cerca de Teresa de la Parra: Diálogos con Lydia Cabrera (Caracas: Monte Ávila, 1980), 123.

19 Cabrera began writing Cuentos negros de Cuba while in France. One could argue that her “rediscovery” of Afro-Cuban cul-ture (a process that, at least in the quote above, occurs through multiple levels of othering) was influenced by the vogue for things African that was at that time gripping the French capital, but her interest in Afro-Cuban culture and religious practice became a lifelong vocation.

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the ambiguity of an eternal movement of ‘detours.’ ”20 We can see in this observation an echo of Cabrera’s “they are exiles for life.” Cabrera admits she did not plan to return to Cuba: “Luego he observado que a los cubanos que iban a Francia, les ocurría lo que a mí, se ‘cubanizaban.’ ”21 (Then I observed that the same thing that had happened to me happened to other Cubans who went to France; they became “Cubanized.”) This process of Cubanizing—born out of homesickness—could be what Svetlana Boym has called “restorative nostalgia,” which attempts to cure the experience of melancholy through a “restoration of origins.”22 Of course, the Cuba that Cabrera began to create in France through the stories that would become Cuentos negros was another kind of detour, for it was not a faithful recreation of the community she had known but her own stylized rendering of an Afro-Cuban worldview.23 This detour follows Boym’s observations about restorative nostalgia: “Dis-placement is cured by a return home, preferably a collective one. Never mind if it’s not your home; by the time you reach it, you will have already forgotten the difference.”24 For Cabrera, however, this displacement was articulated in the form of a profound cultural shift that was not abandoned once she returned to her supposed origins.

Cabrera became Cubanized outside of Cuba, only to return to a country that was neither the one she had left nor the one she had imagined from France.25 As she later observed, “¡Ojalá me hubiese quedado! ¡Cómo había cambiado Cuba! Era otro país.”26 (Would that I had stayed! How Cuba had changed! It was another country.) Like Césaire, Cabrera found Paris liberating, and she, too, returned to a community in which she was embedded in a network of racial, class, and gender codes. Césaire’s time abroad had temporarily distanced him from Martinican colonialism; Cabrera in Paris began her first serious relationship with a woman, Venezuelan writer Teresa de la Parra, returning to Havana only after de la Parra’s death from tuberculosis.27 Yet Cabrera’s statement reveals how different her return was from that of Césaire’s speaker. Cabrera laments what has been left behind (in Europe), but most especially how Cuba has changed. She does not question Cuba’s social or political makeup but rather desires a return of the status quo (or of what is nostalgically remembered as such). Césaire’s speaker, in contrast, reacts to the misery that has not changed but that he now sees with new eyes.

There is no nostalgia in Césaire’s poem. Europe in no way provides a refuge; racism (and the self-hatred born of that racism) is everywhere. One of the strongest illustrations of the effect of the

20 Mireille Rosello, “ ‘One More Sea to Cross’: Exile and Intertextuality in Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” Yale French Studies, no. 83 (1993): 177.

21 Lydia Cabrera, quoted in Mari Rodríguez Ichaso, “Espiritísmo, hechicería, y Santería por Lydia Cabrera,” in Vanidades continental (Miami: Cuban Heritage Collection, Miami University, n.d.).

22 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Perseus, 2001), 42–43.23 While Cabrera credited Afro-Cuban family servants (and the folktales they had told her) as the inspiration for her stories,

while in Europe she took one brief trip back to Cuba in 1930 to carry out some preliminary ethnographic investigations. See Páginas sueltas, 207–18.

24 Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 44.25 Gerardo Machado, the Cuban dictator whom Cabrera admired, was ousted in 1933. When Cabrera returned home in 1937,

the country was in the midst of a period of political and social instability that would only end with the coming to power of Fulgencio Batista in 1940. It should also be noted that Machado was a friend of Cabrera’s family.

26 Lydia Cabrera, “De mis recuerdos: Alexandra Exter,” Mariel 1, no. 1 (1983): 26–27. 27 For an analysis of Cabrera’s relationship with Teresa de la Parra, see Sylvia Molloy, “Disappearing Acts: Reading Lesbian

in Teresa de la Parra,” in Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith, eds., ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 230–56.

 Two Returns to the Native Land: Lydia Cabrera Translates Aimé Césaire 132 |

speaker’s journeying on his understanding of his internalized repression is his reaction to a black man he finds himself sitting next to in a tram car. While he first identifies the man as “comique et laid” (comical and ugly; emphasis Césaire’s), the actual description is full of pathos:

C’était un nègre grand comme un pongo qui essayait du se faire tout petit sur un banc de tramway. Il essayait d’abandonner sur ce banc crasseux de tramway ses jambes gigantesques et ses mains tremblant de boxeur affamé. Et tout l’avait laissé, le laissait. Son nez qui semblait une péninsule en dérade et sa négritude même qui se décolorait sous l’action d’une inlassable mégie. Et le mégissier était la Misère.

A nigger big as a pongo trying to make himself small on the streetcar bench. He was trying to leave behind, on this grimy bench, his gigantic legs and his trembling famished boxer hands. And everything had left him, his nose which looked like a drifting peninsula and even his negri-tude discolored as a result of untiring tawing. And the tawer was Poverty.28

The speaker’s reaction is followed by a recognition of the (self-) betrayal he has just perpetrated—“My cowardice rediscovered!”29—as he recognizes the racism behind his rejection of the man. One of the central steps in the poem’s birthing of a positive black subject is the recognition of these small but consistent betrayals, as well as the acceptance of these rejected selves that make up the communal self who will be reborn.

Cabrera may have recognized in Césaire’s poem the desire of an “exile for life” to change the (colonial) society to which he has returned. But Césaire’s poem goes beyond an exploration of the dialectics of exile and return, since it stages the return to an African-derived self as a return to the earth, a return to an essential identity. As Arnold observes, the 1939 version of the poem “deals with the death and rebirth of a man who speaks in the name of his people.”30 The speaker defines the poem as a “virile prayer”;31 the spiritual incantation the text performs is profoundly racialized and gendered as male: “Ma négritude n’est ni une tour ni une cáthedrale / elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol / elle plonge dans la chair ardente du ciel.” (“Mi negrura no es una torre ni una catedral / se hunde en la carne roja del suelo / se hunde en la carne ardiente del cielo.”) (“My negritude is neither tower nor cathedral / it takes root in the red flesh of the soil / it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky.”)32 Cabrera translates négritude as simply “negrura” (blackness). In this, she fails to capture the deep significance of the term, for the positive black identity that the speaker incarnates through the text, more than simply a new term for blackness, is intimately connected to the (rebirth of) the land itself. As the poem documents and condemns concrete experiences of racism and colonialist oppression—through both its imagery and the speaker’s actions, it posits the ultimate liberation as a mystical discovery of self through a new language: “Et le grand trou noir où je voulais me noyer l’autre lune c’est là que je veux pêcher maintenant la langue maléfique de la nuit en son immobile verrition!” (“Y en la gran cavidad negra donde quise ahogarme la otra luna, allí quiero pescar ahora la

28 Césaire, Cahier / Notebook, 62, 63. 29 Ibid., 63.30 Arnold, Modernism and Négritude, 134.31 Césaire, Cahier / Notebook, 69.32 Césaire, Cahier / Notebook, 68; Césaire, Retorno al país natal, 250; Césaire, Cahier / Notebook, 69.

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lengua maléfica de la noche en su cristalización inmóvil.”) (“And the great black hole where a moon ago I wanted to drown it is there I will now fish the malevolent tongue of the night in its motionless veerition!”)33 The descent into the abyss produces a dark new language.

Race in Her Native Land

Even as it chronicles the creation of a transnational black identity, Cahier, published when Mar-tinique, as an overseas department, was under the French Vichy government, is a reaction to a specifically colonial context. To understand how Césaire’s poem might have been viewed within the Cuban context, it is necessary to give a brief overview of just how different the positive black self that Cahier posits was from contemporaneous representations of race in Cuba. In contrast to Martinique, Cuba in 1943 had been independent for forty years (although it could be argued that US intervention had produced a new kind of colonialism), decades in which the new country’s intel-lectuals and political leaders had been actively engaged in shaping a national identity. As historian Alejandro de la Fuente notes, a concern for national unity frequently superseded any discussion of race: “This foundational discourse recognized the existence of different races but included them within an encompassing notion of Cuban-ness that was supposed to supersede racial identities.”34 Cuban discourses of race, from the late nineteenth century onward, generally acknowledged the Afro-Cuban presence only as part of a mixed, heterogeneous population.

On a more concrete level, postindependence political discourse in Cuba revealed that race was a thorny—and unresolved—issue. Cubans of all races had fought in the War for Independence, yet early writing on race frequently emphasized the need to “whiten” Cuba. A move toward consolidat-ing an Afro-Cuban political voice through the formation of the Independent Party of Color in 1908 was brought to an end in 1912 when attacks on the party degenerated into what both observers of the time and historians characterize as a race war.35 Following the Guerra del ’12 (the War of 1912), social life (at least in the elite sectors of society) became increasingly—if unofficially—segregated. As middle- and upper-class black Cubans, discouraged (if not outright banned) from upscale social establishments, went on to form their own social clubs and sports teams, they frequently disavowed markedly Afro-Cuban musical styles or religious practices.36

In a certain way, Afro-Cuban culture found its greatest acceptance during this period in the arts. Representations of black Cubans and Afro-Cuban culture began appearing in poetry by writers such as Emilio Ballagas, Ramón Guirao, and José Zacarías Tallet as early as 1928. Yet while this so-called negrista poetry does indeed highlight certain African-derived elements of Cuban culture,

33 Ibid., 84; 260; 85. Verrition is Césaire’s neologism. In translation, Cabrera captures the crystalline quality of the word but misses the sense of movement, which Eschleman and Smith emphasize.

34 Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 28.

35 Alejandro de la Fuente observes that the opinion at the time “was that Afro-Cubans themselves had broken the fragile boundaries of Cuban racial democracy” (ibid., 76). See also Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

36 De la Fuente, A Nation for All, 157–59. See also Alejandra Bronfman, Measures of Equality: Social Science, Citizenship, and Race in Cuba, 1920–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

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it can be distinguished from Césaire’s poetic project in that for the most part it does not attempt to articulate a black-speaking subject. As Luis Duno Gottberg notes, the majority of these poems are concerned with visually superficial aspects of Afro-Cuban culture.37 Vera Kutzinski, going even further, argues that writers used Afro-Cubanism as “a fokloric spectacle” that attempted to create a portrait of Cuba’s “uniqueness” but did not attempt to represent or address the issues of real black Cubans.38

Cuban writers employed elements of Afro-Cuban culture to signal Cuba’s uniqueness, but they shied away from identifying Cuba as black. Afro-Cuban culture was frequently invoked to more generally characterize Cuba as a hybrid nation, and metaphors of hybridity appear frequently in texts from the first half of the twentieth century. In his poem “Balada en blanco y negro” (“Ballad in Black and White”), Emilio Ballagas uses café con leche as a metaphor for Cuba’s racial mixing, describ-ing the meeting of milk and coffee as a “rich American mixture.”39 Nicolás Guillén, in the preface to his poetry collection Sóngoro cosongo (1931), speaks appreciatively of Cuba’s racial “cocktail.”40 Perhaps the most famous metaphor for Cuban hybridity is Fernando Ortiz’s characterization, in a 1939 essay, of Cuba as an ajiaco, a kind of Cuban stew: “Mestizaje de cocinas, mestizaje de razas, mestizaje de culturas. Caldo denso de civilización que borbollea en el fogón del Caribe.”41 (Culinary mixing, racial mixing, cultural mixing. A dense stew of civilization bubbling on the Caribbean stove.) In the Cuban stewpot, blackness dissolves in the constantly evolving process of racial (and then cultural) blending.

Of the afrocubanista writers who published in the 1920s and 1930s, Nicolás Guillén is notable both in being Afro-Cuban and in featuring speaking subjects in his work who can be identified as black. The twelve poems in his Motivos de son (Son Motifs; 1930) are structured around the Afro-Cuban-derived son rhythm and narrated by first-person poetic voices that speak a street vernacular. “Negro bembón” (“Thick-Lipped Black Man”), the collection’s first poem, centers significantly on the problematics of racial identity, as the speaker jokingly chides the negro bembón for refusing to allow himself to be identified as such. Guillén says of Motivos de son, “Cada uno trata de ser un cuadro breve, enérgico y veraz del alma negra, enraizada profundamente en el alma de Cuba.”42 (Each one tries to be a brief, energetic, and true portrait of the black soul, profoundly rooted in the soul of Cuba [emphasis mine].) However, as much as Guillén is interested in black subjectivity, he seldom recognizes a black Cuban identity outside the context of Cuba as a racially mixed nation. Earlier in the same essay, he observes, “Aquí todos somos algo mulatos en lo íntimo, y no está distante el día en que también lo seamos a flor de la piel.”43 (Here we are all somewhat mulatto inside, and the day is not far off when we will also be so on the surface of our skin.) This statement can almost be

37 “Se trata de una mirada epidérmica, centrada en lo exterior, en el gesto, en el sonido exótico, en el pigmento.” Luis Duno Gottberg, Solventar las diferencias: La ideología del mestizaje en Cuba (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2003), 89.

38 Vera Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 145.

39 Emilio Ballagas, “Balada en blanco y negro,” in Obra poética (Havana: Arte y Literatura, 1970), 231–32.40 Nicolás Guillén, Obra poética (1972; repr., Havana: Arte y Literatura, 1985), 96.41 Fernando Ortiz, “La cubanidad y los negros,” Estudios Afrocubanos 3, no. 1 (1939): 6.42 Nicolás Guillén, “Presencia en el Lyceum,” Prosa de prisa, vol. 1 (Havana: Arte y Literatura, 1975), 37 (emphasis mine).43 Ibid., 36.

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seen as arguing against the articulation of a separate black subjectivity, since it implies that racial difference can no longer be recognized any way but visually.

Guillén most explicitly points to a separate black identity in Cuba in the journalistic essays that he wrote between 1929 and 1931. “El camino de Harlem” (“The Road to Harlem”); “El blanco: He ahí el problema” (“The White Man: There Is the Problem”), and “La conquista del blanco” (“Winning Over the White Man”), among others, speak critically of racial discrimination against black Cubans, and all end with an appeal for mutual understanding and racial integration. In these essays, how-ever, a black Cuban is singled out as black (rather than exclusively Cuban) through the experience of racial prejudice. In “El blanco: He ahí el problema” Guillén observes, “Junto a su condición de cubano, el hombre oscuro arrastra su condición de negro, que limita a aquélla, y la verdad es que la ley no le niega ningún derecho, pero que el blanco le reconoce muy pocos.”44 (Together with the condition of being Cuban, the dark man drags with him his black condition, which limits the former, and the truth is that the law does not deny him any rights, but the white man accords him very few.) Race here is portrayed as something that fetters, an impediment to be left behind. Taken with his discussions of poetry, Guillén’s journalism reveals the paradoxical nature of his views on race: he wants to see Cuban society as moving toward complete cultural and phenotypical hybridity, yet in order to denounce existing racial prejudice, he must acknowledge that social divisions (and separate racialized identities) exist.

If the hybrid discourse championed by Cuban writers such as Ortiz and Guillén stands in contrast to the rebirth of a black self from the ashes of racial oppression that Césaire conjures, the work that Cabrera published before her translation of Cahier occupies a position somewhere between these two poles. Cabrera is not interested in elaborating discourses of racial hybridity. Cuentos negros assumes a racial identity both through the title and, in the Spanish version, through the preface written by Ortiz, in which he speaks of Cabrera as merely the “faithful translator” of what he takes to be Afro-Cuban folktales (rather than Cabrera’s own literary creations).45 These stories do not address race directly; rather, as they take place within an Afro-Cuban milieu, they make blackness the location of enunciation. A racialized identity is communicated through the presence of Afro-Cuban linguistic and religious elements, as in stories such as “Walo-Wila” and “Bregantino Bregantín,” which refer to Afro-Cuban orishas (gods), and feature dialogue in lucumí, the Yoruba language spoken in Cuba. Cabrera also allows race to be inferred from social context, as in the story “Los compadres” (“The Buddies”), in which the Afro-Cuban identity of the two protagonists, Evaristo and Capinche, is implied through their identification as former slaves. Indeed, the title Cuentos negros, the most racially explicit aspect of the text, suggests that it is the racial or cultural identity of the potential readers against which the texts place themselves.

The speaker in Cahier uses his rage at colonial oppression and internalized racism to forge a new identity, one that will, it is implied, shape a new reality. Cabrera’s stories, in contrast, do not evidence a strong desire to change the status quo. When not set in a mythical timeless past (or

44 Ibid., 10.45 Fernando Ortiz, “Prejuicio,” Cuentos negros, 7–8.

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present), the concrete details of time and place often set her stories in Cuba’s colonial era (the nineteenth century). Rather than critiquing the colonial period (and implicitly slavery), the stories seem to refer back to it as a point of origin. Although some stories do contest racially inflected power dynamics, this contestation is subtle. In “Taita Hicotea y Taita Tigre” (“Uncle Turtle and Uncle Tiger”), for example, the wily Turtle is identified as a practitioner of Afro-Cuban religions who uses his powers to trick Tiger and his children. The presence of Afro-Cuban religion—and Turtle’s use of it—lends a racial dimension to the story that connects the subversion of authority typical of the trickster tale to a more profound subversion of racial subjugation.

Cahier’s political drive and scope thus most directly differentiates Césaire’s work from Cabre-ra’s. Unlike his Cuban contemporaries, concerned with creating a narrative for the new Cuban nation, Césaire is reacting to the colonial experience of Martinique. The black identity created by the poem’s speaker springs from this political context, is created through his anticolonial struggle. The self that the speaker of the poem comes to articulate and recognize consistently identifies as black, African in origin but Caribbean through the historical experience of slavery and the plantation system. Césaire writes from the context of Martinique, but his recuperative vision of Negritude is at the very least Pan-Antillean, at its broadest applicable to any racialized experience of colonial oppression.46

What Is Carried Across: The Effects of Translation

Whether Cabrera completely understood the full anticolonial dimension of Césaire’s poem is unclear. It must be recognized that the appearance of Cahier in Spanish did not noticeably affect racial discourse in Cuba, which continued to mine the possibilities of hybridity. That leaves us with the question of the importance of Cahier for Cabrera herself.

If we can read echoes of Césaire anywhere in Cabrera’s own writing, I believe it is most notice-able in her ethnographic work, which maintains a similar emphasis on the performative nature of the text and the generative power of language. El monte (The Bush; 1954), her first ethnography of Afro-Cuban religious practice, begins the first chapter by inviting the reader to enter el monte in what could be seen as a physical rather than a textual way: “El negro que se adentra en la manigua, que penetra de lleno en un ‘corazón de monte,’ no duda del contacto directo que establece con fuerzas sobrenaturales que allí, en sus propios dominios, le rodean.”47 (The black man who goes into the bush, who penetrates the “heart of el monte,” is in no doubt about the direct contact that he establishes with the supernatural forces that surround him there in their own domain.) Just as Cés-aire’s poem performs an act of creation, Cabrera’s narrative physically creates el monte in the text by allowing the reader to follow the man into the forest. Cabrera’s ethnographic work communicates a respect for the power of the land that borders on the supernatural tones of Césaire’s poem. In her

46 One need only look at the work of African Negritude writers such as Léopold Sédar Senghor to see how Césaire’s idea was applied (and transformed) in a non-Caribbean context.

47 Lydia Cabrera, El monte, igbo, finda, ewe orisha, vititinfinda: Notas sobre las religiones, la magia, las supersticiones y el folklore de los negros criollos y del pueblo de Cuba (Miami: Universal, 2006), 13.

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discussions of Afro-Cuban spirituality, there is never an attempt to completely elucidate the spiritual sublime. On the contrary, there is always something untranslatable in the cultural translations her ethnography offers. While she does note the adoption of Afro-Cuban religious practices by white Cubans, Cabrera never identifies these cultural practices as anything other than Afro-Cuban. And the generous space she allots in her texts for direct quotes from her informants (who are almost always identified as black) creates a space for the expression of Afro-Cuban voices, even if this cannot fully be seen as giving those informants agency.

Ruminating on the complicated relationship between translation and creative writing, the Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia observes that a translation paradoxically both is and is not the prop-erty of the translator: “What [the translator] does is move to a new language a kind of experience that does and does not belong there. . . . Translation is a strange exercise in appropriation.”48 If translation is, as Piglia argues, a form of appropriation, can we say that Cabrera has “appropriated” anything from Césaire? If we are generous, Cabrera’s act of translation can be read as her desire to introduce Césaire’s Negritude, this recuperative black subjectivity that insists on its blackness, into an environment where the dominant racial discourse was most interested in closing the space within which a black Cuban subject might exist. That gesture speaks to the new perspective on race that Cabrera, the “exile for life,” brought back with her from her own travels. One could say that that first journey enacted another voluntary uprooting from which she never returned, since her life’s work became researching, documenting, and writing about Afro-Cuban cultural practices.

Seen in a less generous light, however, it could be argued that Cabrera herself did not fully understand or make use of the potential for reading Césaire within a Cuban context. She had occasion to mention her translation of Césaire (and Césaire’s work in general) in “Notes on Africa, Negritude, and Contemporary Yoruban Poetry,” an article (with accompanying poetry translations) she published in Spain in 1975. In this essay, Cabrera gives a brief history of the African slave trade and surveys early slave narratives and abolitionist novels. She then makes an abrupt jump to Cés-aire, whom she describes as “nacido en una de las ‘Africas negras’—la Martinica” (born in one of the “black Africas”—Martinique) and “el poeta negro que más influyó en el mundo de expression francesa” (the black poet who most influenced the French-speaking world).49 While she mentions her translation of Cahier, she does not mention the reception of or reaction to the Spanish version, saying nothing about the translation other than that it occurred. Indeed, apart from a brief mention of Afro-Cuban music (rumba and son), Afro-Cuban culture does not figure in the article. No con-temporary black poets or writers in the Spanish Caribbean are mentioned, and Cabrera draws no connections between the poets she profiles and her own work. In Cabrera’s mental map, “black Africa” (through Negritude) has been expanded to include Martinique, but in her own outline of the black Atlantic, it is as if Cuba were not there at all.

48 Ricardo Piglia, “Writing and Translation,” in Daniel Balderston and Marcy E. Schwartz, eds, Voice Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 64.

49 Lydia Cabrera, “Notas sobre Africa, la négritud, y la actual poesía yoruba,” in Páginas sueltas, 473, 478.