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Homage to Alejo Carpentier, and: Skin, and: Cuban Triolet, and: Parable of the Seeds

2023; Saint Louis University; Volume: 56; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/afa.2023.a903605

1945-6182

Orlando Ricardo Menes,

Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez

Homage to Alejo Carpentier, and: Skin, and: Cuban Triolet, and: Parable of the Seeds Orlando Ricardo Menes (bio) Homage to Alejo Carpentier On this Columbus Day one thousand milesfrom where his caravels cast anchors of greed & soon plowedour Edenic islands to sugar’s Babylon, I sing to you,Don Alejo, who redeemed our islands’ historywith a pen dipped in myths so often maligned & misalignedby colonial bigotry. When Europe’s hordesgoose-stepped to the kettledrums of blood war,you heard the animist songs of Mother Africaso stubbornly alive in the creoles & the pidgins of the folkwho survived the cane fields & the barracoons.Praise you, our master fabulist de lo real maravillosowho dreamt Castilian altars altered by the batá drums,the smoke of marabú, the palm-fat candlesof Acrá that burn to gold at dusk when the baobab batstake to the sienna skies of Damballah Weddo. When you set sail from France to escape the Nazis& visited Haiti for the first time, the duendes of Voduntouched your mouth as Yahweh did to Isaiah& revealed that wild trees are spirits of bark & phloem,that Mawoo is the moon that mounts the sunto birth the stars, that the salt rains of Our Lady Oyácan heal the penuries of a European mindsickened by old supremacies of blood purity—this world of ours so stippled, dappled, freckled, splotchedwith impurities that bless all things to hallowedness. Skin in memory of the Cuban poet Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (aka Plácido), 1809–44 The tobacco flower so white and free of dusk,yet its leaves so brown they eclipse the sun,and you, my Placido, another contradiction,an octoroon orphaned at birth, so light the nunsthought you white till your hair began to kink,then the abbess’s pen decreed you colored,and you would learn to walk fast in shadows,doff your hat at all white men, poor or rich,murmuring “your mercy” with eyes downcast. Poeta mulato, they called you, more brassthan bronze but never trigueño, the colorof young wheat, reserved for Spanish blood.By day you made hair combs of tortoise shell,so popular with the ladies who wear mantillasand twirl their fans in lacquered carriages, [End Page 113] then by candlelight you taught yourself to craftottava rimas with borrowed books, bartered ink,all kinds of encomia too for the planter classyou’d recite for a few coins at the governor’s balls. The girl you loved, a veguera, tobacco grower,Canarian stock, was tanned to oak or cinnamon,yet still a trigueña and by Spanish law white,so marriage impossible, friendship suspicious.“Why can I not be wheat or vanilla,” you pleadto God. “Isn’t that my birthright, so closeto being white the angels cannot tell me apart?Inside me night does not exist, all darknessdies to light, my mind’s whiteness so cleanit is a moon reborn when the cyclone season is gone.” The law is adamant, so says God through the priest,the lawyer, the soldier: It is not skin skinbut soul soul that makes whiteness whiteand black can never transmute to perfection.What Africa tinges remains tinged for eternity.Black skin is thick as hide, impermeable, obduratewith sin, and can never admit the light of God,unlike white skin so thin, gossamer—moth-winged—that it crackles like an angel’s under moonlight. Cuban Triolet for Federico García Lorca With sweet tobacco, black hens, dark rumThe sick & the broken pray to San Lazaró.Cocks call, shrines glow, wheelchair girls comeWith sweet tobacco, black hens, dark rum.Crutches conga, slings sing, prostheses drumFor good health, more dollars, the death of woe.With sweet tobacco, black hens, dark rumThe sick & the broken pray to San Lazaró. Parable of the Seeds A planter in Brazil, owner of a thousand hectaresIn the reign of Dom João VI, orders his slavesTo sow one thousand seeds of imperial palmAlong the cobbled road to his mansion O Colosso.Plant them straight as God’s gaze, he...