Writing and Bare Life: Locura and Colonialism in Matos Paoli's Canto de la locura

Abstract

Before his death in July of 2000, the Puerto Rican poet and "perennial nominee" for the Nobel Prize for literature, Francisco Matos Paoli often said that his poems were in fact very political and were not divorced from reality like those who practiced "pure poetry" in earlier generations. With very few exceptions, his Luz de los héroes (1951) being among them, it is difficult to see a direct connection between the style and mystical themes that recur in his poetry and any sort of political concern. My article shows how such a connection does indeed exist by understanding the negative power of Matos Paoli's poetic work in relation to the state of exception formed by colonial, bio-power in Puerto Rico. Though he was a poet, he was also a freedom fighter. This paper studies in particular the poem he wrote after his time in a psychiatric asylum, Canto de la locura (1962) in relation to the state of exception that reined in Puerto Rico particularly during the late 1940s and early 1950s when the "Gag Law" was imposed to quash any declarations or even symbolic gestures in favor of Puerto Rican independence. As a result of his involvement in the independence movement at that time, Matos Paoli was imprisoned along with Pedro Albizu Campos, the leader.