HIJA DE LAS AMERICAS:
LATIN AMERICAN THEMES IN A DAUGHTER’S GEOGRAPHY and LILIANE
Elizabeth Espadas
Wesley College
Separated by more than a decade, the focus of A Daughter’s Geography (1983) and Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter (1994), both by Notozake Shange, couldn’t be more different, despite the commonality of the nature of the parent-child relationship explored in them. The Latin American material that forms an important thread in both works is completely reflective of that difference, with that of the first work being much more overtly political, linked with the problematics of dictatorship and the liberation struggles of the early 1980s, and the second more related to the cross-cultural experiences of the 1990s. Five thematic clusters characterize both works: (a) Political and historical references; (b) the legacy of slavery; (c) language, especially in relation to creativity; (d) cross-cultural and cross-racial relationships and experiences, and (e) the arts and literature. In the second work there are also a significant number of religious references, concretely to the Virgin Mary in her various Hispanic forms. The geographic areas specifically cited are, for the most part, ones closely linked with the African experience in the Americas: Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama, but also include Paraguay and Argentina.
The poetry collection A Daughter’s Geography starts off with an epigraph, an untitled poem by Rafaela Chacon Nardi, dated La Habana, Cuba, 1982. This in itself constitutes a first “geography lesson.” Upon closer examination, the poem also reveals its Afrocuban origin, with its evocation of speech patterns (ruelto) and African-based vocabulary (nambia). The book is comprised of three poetry clusters, the central one entitled “Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography,” which is where the Latin American material is concentrated. The title poem announces the two most prominent themes: those of language and of liberation struggles. Shange links the aspirations of the Black peoples of Africa with those of the New World: “our twins/Salvador & Johannesburg/cannot speak/the same language/but we fight the same old men/in the new world” (21). She evokes the age-old struggle against the “old men” who spit on those they have enslaved, who use religion to serve their social and economic purposes, who think that the dead cannot procreate, who think they can stop people with helicopters and patrol boats, whose view of the world is still flat (21-22). The “old men” that have always existed are the same ones they’re still fighting in the liberation struggles of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Yucatan, Panama and elsewhere. And while she does not specifically name the United States, she clearly is pointing to the misguided and fruitless efforts of U.S. foreign policy in the Americas to thwart Latin American aspirations (22). The solidarity among the oppressed peoples of the world will grow, despite those efforts: “Go on over the edge old men/you’ll see us in luanda. or the rest of us/in chicago/rounding out the morning/we are feeding our children the sun” (22-23).
The second poem, “Tween Itaparica & Itapua,” treats Brazil, apparently based on a family trip there. “Itaparica is where dona flor took her two husbands” (24). She contrasts the Brazil of the favelas with the well-known tourist attractions, such as the Cristo Redentor of Corcovado, Copacabana beach, the Sheraton hotel, pointing out the irony of the case of Rocinha–the only favela with a legal city sign, where poverty is not only rampant but institutionalized. A visit to the island of Itaparica near Salvador allows her to think back on the past, on the arrival of slave ships and the labor a “bahiano africano pretu moreno mulatto” (25) that was responsible for the creation of the cobblestone street they now walk on. Itapua also has its reminders of slavery, with the church on the highest hill (“the safest place for slave owners/on crests of waves of slaves/who could not move without being seen” (25). The Brazilian landscape and music ultimately produce a sense of calm and confidence, “letting me know/ all i see is true/we are as impregnable as night/as dangerous” (26).
The theme of linguistic issues is explored in “You are Sucha Fool,” including an allusion to the multicultural reality of New York as the unnamed lover speaks “spanish like a german & ask[s] puerto rican/marketmen on Lexington if they are foreigners” (28)
–another geography lesson?
“A Black Night in Haiti, Palais National, Port-au-Prince” is a devastating look at the extremes of Haiti, the lofty ideals on which it was founded and the depressing reality, the luxuries and excesses of the privileged few in midst of starvation and misery of the masses, the assertion that there is no violence in Haiti, and that all the prostitutes come from the Dominican Republic, the begging children, half-naked women sleeping on the street, and the one-legged man all contrast with the marble horses, plumed hats and swords. Where are those ideals now, she asks, when Haiti’s in need? (36).
The poem “Hijo de las Americas” is, in my mind, perhaps the most powerful dual denunciation of racism and dictatorship in the work. Set in the Atlantic coast region of Nicaragua, “where the English left Nicaragua black & poor” (49), she decries Somoza’s violence against poets (“Somoza jailed poets killed poets maimed poets,” 49). The unidentified poet Carlos has only a few remaining poems that had been saved on scraps that could be hidden in his shoe, as his other works were burned by his friends “when the security police la guardia nacional/came looking for a free black mind” (49). Carlos’s wounds are both psychic and physical, as he suffers from the loss of his creative work and from an undescribed wound in his leg from the war that does not allow him to stand in line for his lunch, leading to the author’s resolve to get him medical assistance: “he must be able to stand up when he poets his black black language/the raggae of america libre…” (49). And it leads to her resolve to remind her “poet friends in America/to keep matches in their houses/i must remember that everywhere nothing can be taken for granted” (49). The role of poets in making future generations aware is stressed at the close of the poem, with the cautionary note that “if we burn with the poems/who shall tell the children/why” (50). The universality of the situation is underscored with the final line, resembling a dateline, simply “el salvador” (50).
The final poem of this collection, “New World Coro” lives up to its name in that it repeats prior material and themes like a refrain: the assertion of the value of black creativity and linguistic expressivity and the common struggle against the “old men” who spit on and shackle them but cannot kill their spirit: “we’re so hungry for the morning/we’re trying to feed our children the sun” (52). The peoples of the Americas are linked, from the Atlantic coasts of Nicaragua and Costa Rica, to the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico, to Haiti, to Charleston and Savannah and Chicago, and this self-affirmation defies traditional limits of “geography” as a powerful lesson about the futility of oppression.
In Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter, Shange shows another dimension of her knowledge of Latin American culture. Here, the linkages and commonalities among the “hijos de America” turn into lives that entail significant cross-cultural experiences. The geographic focus is primarily on the “borderlands:” Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico and, to a lesser degree, the Dominican Republic. While the political element is not altogether absent–Liliane’s mother had visited Cuba (34), the black struggle in the U.S. is compared to the Cuban struggle (48), Liliane and Victor-Jesus Maria hid independentistos [sic] (70, 264), etc.–the arts are the predominant reference. The novel is, in fact, a showcase for the impact of Latin American culture on the arts in America.
Music and Dance: Latin dancing (17), Celia Cruz (4), salsa dance contests (52), the mambo (55, 58), song lyrics (56, 63), Mongo Santamaria (57), Pablo “Potato” Valdez (57), the merengue (65, 287), Willie Colon (65, 214), Ismael Quinero (67), the danzon (72), Arsenio Rodriguez (129), Iris Chacon (131), Tito Puente (138), the mariachis singing “Guadalajara” (139), the bomba, etc.
Art: Adal Maldonado’s photography (74), Frida Kahlo (202), and Wilfredo Lam’s “A Bride for the Gods” (226).
Literature: Placido’s writings (36), Nicolas Guillen (39, 69), Nuyorican poets (69), Pales Matos (69), Albizu Campos (69), Jose Luis Gonzalez (69), Guillermo Cabrera Infante (226), Miguelito Algarin (227) and Jorge Luis Borges (281).
Cuisine: quesadillas (139) and sangria (139).
Shange also returns to some of her earlier themes as she makes frequent references to cross-racial relationships of various types: Jose Albero’s girlfriend is Vietnamese, Adam’s was a Chicana from East Oakland (10); Liliane flirts with Brazilians (16); Victor-Jesus compares Liliane to a Latina (68) and calls her “mi luchadora” (63); Malinche is obliquely mentioned (142); because Liliane’s mother fell in love with a white man, she was “disappeared like in Argentina” (180, 202); Victor-Jesus Maria is described as “the forever foreign brother” (279). Racial conflict is frequently alluded to or implicit: Roxie’s dreams of Cuba remind her that there are no “COLORED ONLY” (39) there; “First Haiti, then Cuba, could Mississippi be far behind?” she queries (39). Felipe is a “Spanish-speaking colored kid” (64) while Tony is a “White Latin” (263). Liliane’s friend Bernadette describes the girls’ high school sports teams as “nastiness and bickering between real white folks and new white folks, colored and Puerto Ricans to the sidelines” (158).
The social concerns evidenced in her earlier work are not absent here, although they are not foregrounded to the same extent. Certainly the focus on the common experiences that link people of color throughout the Americas remains. Victor-Jesus Maria asserts, for example, that “our visions were the same” (65) and he and Liliane collaborated in the cause of Puerto Rican independence (70, 264). Liliane’s religious feelings are as likely to include the Virgin of Guadalupe as Nossa Senhora do Rosario (131, 194) and oppressive forces are routinely compared to tyrannical forces in South America. As mentioned above, her mother was “disappeared” like in Argentina after she chose to abandon the family and Daddy is compared to a Paraguayan fascist who disappears people (270) for his role in hiding the truth from their daughter. Latin America also provides sources of liberating images, notably that of Zapata giving back land to indigenous peoples (281) as well as modern zapatistas (287). Victor-Jesus Maria tempered Liliane’s idealism with the reality of his experience:
Once Liliane tried to get me to go to Casa de Nuestro Mundo for Borinquen extravaganza: poets and performance artists from the island and all us Nuyoricans. I told her I wasn’t into being snubbed by white Latins from Ponce or San Juan whose legitimacy was founded on how well they spoke Spanish and how uncolored they were. Like most descendants of slaves from any place, Liliane was committed to the notion that slavery some other where in some other tongue was less pernicious than what she knew. I read Guillen to her, Luis Pales Matos, Pedro Albizu Campos, Jose Luis Gonzalez. I read to her in Spanish all about the scum, the vicious degradation of our people by Spaniards, criollos, and their precious mulattos. But like a child who’s gotta have her hands held in the fire to know it burns, off she went. And the Spanish-speakin’ white boys went crazy, when the splanglesh-speakin’, maybe English-speakin’, maybe not white enough mainland Ricans performed. She had to get out the way of flying chairs and fists cause the white boys, los blancos, felt their true heritage violated by the hybrid: by the colored hue of the language we created and our skins as telling and African as the bata. One more illusion lost. I just asked her why she thought I callt her mi negra. Why from me the word would never hut [hurt]: negra, mi negra, Liliane. Don’t you understand bringing’ one bloody colored Rican in the house, bathing him, nursing him, giving him money to get out of town, is not gonna free Puerto Rico. Gettin’ bullets taken outta the kimbs [limbs] of independisto’s women, that ain’t gonna free Puerto Rico. It ain’t gonna free you neither, negra, mi negra bella, when they land on your bell in the middle of the night or an O.D. or with the hell beat out of em by some more radical independistos or anti-independistos. (69-70)
And he highlights the reigning social hypocrisy when he says “Tu m’entiende that dead Aztecs are so less threatening than a live cholo” (133). Language is a liberating force, a carryover theme from her earlier work: “there was this story I toldt her one night after she was sighing–humming the way I could make her talk, that tongue, mi lengua negra” (67). Victor-Jesus Maria describes Liliane’s linguistic interests:
She was driven by some power I never understood to learn every language, slave language, any black person in the Western Hemisphere ever spoke. She felt incomplete in English, a little better in Spanish, totally joyous in French and pious in Portuguese. When she discovered Gullah and papiamento, she was beside herself. I kept tellin’ her wasn’t no protection from folk hatin’ the way we looked in any slave owner’s language, but she had to believe there was a way to talk herself outta five hundred years of disdain, five hundred years of dying cause there is no word in any one of those damn languages where we are simply alive and not enveloped by scorn, contempt, or pity. There’s no word for us. I kept tellin’ her. No words, but what we say to each other that nobody can interpret. (66)
Notozake Shange’s two works, A Daughter’s Geography and Liliane indeed offer testimony not only to the commonalities of life experiences of the peoples of color of the Americas but also of the capacity to overcome difference. Shange’s concerns take in past and present, peoples of every hue and opinion and from every geographic point. While her works point out the problems that divide, antagonize and oppress, there is also room for crossing those lines and defying the legacy of oppression.
References
Shange, Ntozake. A Daughter’s Geography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983.
—–. Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.