Nancy Morejon: Transculturation, Translation and the Poetics of the Caribbean

Abstract

Nancy Morejón:Transculturation, Translation, and the Poetics of the Caribbean Alan West-Durán (bio) In an essay published several years ago I described Nancy Morejón as the "human and poetic embodiment of the word transculturation" (West 13). Whereas most criticism on Morejón's work understandably focuses on her poetry, this article will explore Morejón as an essayist and thinker on transculturation, as seen in her book on Nicolás Guillén and other works (Morejón 1982, 2002). Morejón's knowledge and translation of Francophone Caribbean writers (Depestre, Glissant, Césaire, Laraque, Roumain) is a central but often overlooked element in understanding Caribbean transculturations.1 In addition, as a translator of Morejón, I emphasize the link between translation, transculturation, and a philosophy of listening. Transculturation is a form of historical and cultural translation that ingeniously fashions a poetics of historical understanding. Transculturation, often under historical circumstances of brutal adversity, is a practice of cultural creativity, a performative philosophical reasoning, and an act of social resistance. Through transculturation, the Caribbean, and more specifically Cuba, have created plural, sometimes contradictory, identities, and new ways of knowing. Before examining and substantiating these claims both through and beyond Morejón's work, I will supply a brief definition of transculturation. "Transculturation signifies constant interaction, transmutation between two or more cultural components, whose unconscious end is the creation of a third cultural whole—that is, culture—new and independent, although its roots rest on preceding elements. The reciprocal influence here is determining. No element is superimposed on the other; on the contrary, each one becomes a third entity. None remains immutable. All change and grow in a 'give and take' which engenders a new texture" (Morejón in Pérez-Sarduy and Stubbs 229). Morejón's definition from her Guillén book (23) implicitly defines a case of cultural equals, nonexistent under colonialism and slavery. And yet under these asymmetrical cultural and power relationships, transculturation did occur. A good musical example of this would be the danzón, a musical and dance form from nineteenth-century Cuba. Originating in the British Isles as a "country dance," it was later imported into France where it became the contredanse played on piano, flute, and violin. French colonialists brought it to Saint Domingue (Haiti), but during the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), many French and their slaves (known as "French blacks") emigrated to nearby Santiago de Cuba, the eastern part of the island. The [End Page 967] "French blacks"—and Cuban ones as well—added their rhythms as well as percussion, scrapers (the güiro is an indigenous instrument), and maracas. Not surprisingly, Spanish colonial authorities, and their supporters in the local elites, viewed the danzón as vulgar and low class (meaning black), and a dangerous example of cultural nationalism. They were right about the latter, and so Spain prohibited danzónes, especially during and after the bloody Ten Years War (1868–1878) for independence. In the twentieth century the danzón incorporated sones, and even Chinese melodies and rhythms (as in José Urfé's "Bombín de Barreto"), and finally evolved into the danzónete (with words) of the late twenties, then the danzón-mambo of the thirties and forties and the cha-cha of the fifties. So an English melody and rhythm, by way of France, Spain, Haiti, Africa, and China is refashioned in the Caribbean (twice) to produce something quintessentially Cuban. Not all examples of transculturation are that "successful," but history shows that even the sweet, mellifluous danzón is the product of slavery and its abolition, a bloody revolution that killed possibly 200,000 and brought great suffering to many more (West-Durán xviii). Fernando Ortiz (1881–1968), Cuban Ur-scholar who wrote extensively on Afro-Cuban culture, was the first to coin the term "transculturation"—that is, to make it stick—in analyzing the historical, cultural, economic counterpoint between tobacco and sugar that he claimed could be the organizing image for understanding the island's rich sociocultural brew. Ortiz analyzed transculturation as occurring in a culture that is subjugated under colonialism and slavery and that is able to incorporate, transform, and subtlety subvert...