Nicholas Guillén, Cuban Poet(1902-1989)
poetryDon't Know No EnglishAll dat English you used to know,
Li'l Manuel,
all dat English, now can't even
say: Yes.
'Merican gal comes lookin' fo' you
an' you jes' runs away.
Yo' English is jes' strike one!
strike one and one-two-three.
Li'l Manuel, you don't know no English
you jes don't know!
You jes' don't know!
Don't fall in love no mo',
Lil Manuel,
'cause you don't know no English,
don't know no English
Wash WomanUnder the explosive sun
of the bright noon-day
washing,
a black woman
bites her song of mamey.
Odor and sweat of the arm pits:
and on the line of her singing,
strung along,
white clothes
hang with her song.
CaneNegro
in the cane fields.
White man
above the cane fields.
Earth
beneath the cane fields.
Blood
that flows from us.
Blues
I die if I don't work
and if I do, I die.
Either way I die, I die,
either way I die.
Yesterday I saw a staring man
staring at the setting sun,
yesterday I saw a staring man
staring at the setting sun:
the man was very serious
for he could not see.
Ay, the blind live sightless
when the sun sets,
when the sun sets,
when the sun sets.
Yester'day I saw a child at play
pretend to kill another child,
yesterday I saw a child at play
pretend to kill another child:
there are babes who play
like men at work!
Who will tell them when they're grown
that men are not children,
that they are not,
that they are not,
that they are not?
I die if I don't work
and if I do, I die.
Either way I die, I die,
either way I die.
Sweat and LashLash,
sweat and lash.
The sun woke up early
and found the barefooted Negro.
Naked his beaten body
in the field.
Lash,
sweat and lash.
The wind went by screaming:
What a black flower in each hand!
Said the blood to him, Let's go!
Said he to the blood, Let's go!
He left all bloody, barefooted.
Trembling, the canefield
opened a way before him.
Afterwards, the sky grew silent,
and under the sky a slave
deep-dyed in the blood of the master.
Lash,
sweat and lash,
deep-dyed in the blood of the master;
lash,
sweat and lash,
deep-dyed in the blood of the master,
deep-dyed in the blood of the master.
Chop it With the Cane Knife!
The sun bakes you skin and limb,
and nothing's in your cart,
your coughing brings up blood and phlegm,
your coughing brings up blood and phlegm:
thirty cents a day's your part!
Chop it with the cane-knife, chop!
Chop it with the cane-knife, chop!
When they chew this sugar-cane
with it they'll be chewing you,
just like in the days of Spain,
just like in the days of Spain,
now the Yankee's trampling you!
Chop it with the cane-knife, chop!
Chop it with the cane-knife, chop!
Havana's far, so far away,
where your President resides
with the flag of Cuba, say,
with the flag of Cuba, say,
in his limousine he rides!
Chop it with the cane-knife, chop!
Chop it with the cane-knife, chop!
The cry of protest you give out
won't reach that far from here:
but if you'll let me, I'll shout,
but if you'll let me, I'll shout,
and I'll make them hear.
Chop it with the cane-knife, chop!
Chop it with the cane-knife, chop!
Your cane-knife tears and slices, strips
the toughest thing beneath the sky.
Your freshly laundered clothing drips,
your freshly laundered clothing drips
so take it out of the tub to dry.
Chop it with the cane-knife, chop!
Chop it with the cane-knife, chop!
Your dinner's bad, your lunch is bad,
you live bad, yes,its bad.
Your only pay's an I.O.U.
from the overseer when its due.
Chop it with the cane-knife, chop!
Chop it with the cane-knife, chop!
Two KidsTwo kids, twigs of the same tree of misery,
together in a doorway on a sultry night,
two beggar kids covered with pimples
eat from the same plate like starving dogs,
food cast up by the high tide of the tablecloths.
Two kids: one black, one white.
Their twin heads are alive with lice,
their bare heads are close together,
their mouths are tireless in the joint frenzy
of their jaws,
and over the greasy sour food
two hands: one white, one black!
What a strong and sincere union!
They are linked by their bellies and the frowning night,
by melancholy afternoons on brilliant paseos,
and by explosive mornings
when day awakens with alcoholic eyes.
They are united like two good dogs,
one black, one white.
When the time comes to march,
will they march like two good men,
one black, one white?
Two kids, twigs of the same tree of misery,
are in a doorway on a sultry night.
That Kind of Soldier, Not MeI don't want to be a soldier,
then they won't need to send me
to jump on kids and Negroes
and folks with nothing to eat.
That kind of a soldier, not me!
Look at that horse charging
with the soldier on his back
with eyes full of hate
and mouth full of gall
and sword ready to kill
an old man or a woman.
That kind of soldier, not me!
Oh, the cold troop trains at dawn
on fierce rails of blood
running full speed
to break a strike
or close in on a sugar mill.
That kind of soldier, not me!
Oh, blindfolded eyes
that can't see because they're blindfolded.
Oh, hands that are tied
that can't reach out because they're tied.
Oh, poor soldier-slaves of some colonel.
That kind of soldier, not me!
If they ever gave me a gun,
I'd give it to my brothers to use,
to my fellow soldiers to use.
But they won't give me a gun
because I know what it's for.
That's why they won't give me a gun,
nor you, nor you, nor you.
What soldiers we would be
on horses without reins.
That kind of soldier, that's me!
A soldier who doesn't care
about a sugar mill that isn't his,
or about bossing folks around
like a tin-horn barracks king,
or about tearing the hide
off some cane field,
meaner and harder
than a slave-driver.
A free soldier, a soldier
no longer at the service of slavers.
That kind of soldier, that's me!
If you don't give me a gun,
I'll find one myself--
since I know what it's for!
Little Song for the Children of the AntillesOn the sea of the Antilles
floats a boat of paper:
floats and floats the boat boat
without a pilot.
From Havana to Portobelo,
from Jamaica to Trinidad,
floats and floats the boat boat
without a captain.
A black girl in the stern
and in the prow a Spaniard:
floats and floats the boat boat
with those two.
They pass islands, islands, islands,
many islands, always islands;
floats and floats the boat boat
without stopping.
A chocolate cannon
fires at the boat,
and a cannon of sugar sugar
answers.
Ah, my sailor-boat
with your hull of paper!
Ah, my black and white boat
without a pilot!
There goes the black girl black girl
close close to the Spaniard;
floats and floats the boat boat
with those two.
from
Cuba LibrePoems by Nicolás Guillén
Published: Anderson & Ritchie
Translated:
from Spanish by Langston Hughes and Ben Fredric CarruthersGuillen: Man Making Words (1972) / Songoro Consongo (1931) / Tengo (1964) / El gran zoo (1969)
BiographyNicolas Guillen was born on in 1902. He was an Afro-Cuban poet, writer, journalist, and social activist. From Camageuey, Cuba, he was the sixth child of Argelia Batista y Arrieta and Nicolas' Guillen y Urra, both who were of mixed African-Spanish decent.
Guillen's father introduced him to Afro-Cuban music when he was very young. His father, a journalist, was assassinated by the Cuban government. As he and his brothers and sister finished school in pre-revolutionary Cuba; they encountered the same racism black Americans lived with prior to the 1950's. Guillen began writing about the social problems faced by blacks in the 1920, his first poems appeared in Camaguey Grafico in 1922.
This was followed by his first collection of poems, Cerebro y Corazon (Brain and Heart). In 1926, Guillen became a regular contributor to the Sunday literary supplement of Havana's Diario de la Marina and in 1929 published El Camino en Harlem, an article that condemned Cuba's racial structures. During the same year, Guillen interviewed Langston Hughes in Havana, he deeply admired Hughes and they became lifelong friends.
In 1930, he created an international stir with the publication of Motivios de son, eight short poems inspired by the Son, a popular Afro-Cuban musical form, and the daily living conditions of Cuban blacks. Composed in Afro-Cuban vernacular, the collection separated itself from with Spanish literary cannon and established black culture as a legitimate focus of Cuban literature. It was as if Guillen had touched on something that the people of Cuba could recognize as having been on the tips of their tongues waiting for Guillen to articulate it.
Like Hughes, he believed that black artists must be free to "express our individual dark-skinned selves without shame." Guillen was as much a political activist as a poet, in 1937 he traveled to Spain as a delegate to the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture. In an address before the congress he condemned fascism and reaffirmed his black roots
In 1940, he ran for mayor of Camaguey and in 1948, Guillen was a senatorial candidate for the Cuban Communist Party; both campaigns were unsuccessful. He truly identified with the plight of blacks beyond his native Cuba, this is reflected in his Elegias (1958). Upon his return to Cuba in 1959, Fidel Castro awarded him the task of designing a new cultural policy and setting up the Union of Writers and Artist of Cuba, of which Guillen became president in 1961. During the next two decades, he wrote and published a number of collections of poetry including Tengo (1964), El gran Zoo (1967), La rueda dentada, and El diario que a diario (1972), and Sol de Domingo (1982). Guillen died in Havana in 1987.
Guillen: Man Making Words (1972) emphasizes the mature works of Guillen, one of an international group of poets of the African Diaspora, which includes Leopold Sedar Senghor and Aime Cesaire in the francophone literature, and Langston Hughes and Leroy Jones in the African-American tradition.
Like his contemporaries, Guillen combined modernist and surrealist influences on poetic form and content--including a valorization of "Africanity"--with revolutionary political engagement in the construction of a new society, one that comprised exposure of the social discrimination, prejudices, and poverty which plagued Africans of the Diaspora, and revindication of the beauty of Africaness--physically, linguistically, musically, and culturally.
In encouraging revolt against the existing order, Guillen encouraged Afro-Cubans to pride of race and place. By connecting this revolt to International Socialism he wove a cosmopolitan interconnectedness for an otherwise disenfranchised people. Rooting this interconnectedness in the rivers, bars, cities, regions, and heroes of Cuba, Guillen created a new vision of Cuban culture on which to ground social and political change.
In these selected works of the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen--ranging from his early sound experiments through his more overtly political poetry to his final works--the Afro-Cuban experience of everyday life and its socio-historical and contemporary political underpinnings are constants. From slavery on to the natural and urban settings of Cuba, to the international places and communities of poets, politicians and activists shaping contemporary Cuban life, to the twinned invasions of Cuba by soldiers and tourists, and to the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Guillen portrays a life where everything, including love, is colored by suffering and rebellion
Like the other poets of revolutionary decolonization Guillen pointed the way to constructivist postmodernism and planted the seeds of contemporary postcolonialism. His poetry is thus an important page in the literary theorization of these movements.
Original titles and dates of Guillen's publications (in Spanish): Primeros Poemas 1920-1930 (1930), Motivos de son (1930), Songoro Consongo (1931), West Indies Ltd. (1934), Cantos para Soldados (1937), Sones para Turistas (1937), Espana (1937), El Son Entero (1947), Elegias (1958), La Paloma de Vuelo Popular (1958), Tengo (1964), Poemas de Amor (1964), El gran zoo (1969).