Self‑sufficient Songs

Book review: Breaking the Silences, 20th Century Poetry by Cuban Women, 1982, ed. & trans. by Margaret Randall, $6.95, Pulp Press Box 3868 M.P.O., Vancouver, Canada V6B 323.

This review title I take from the Russian Formalist poet Velimir Xlebnikov. He called for a poetry that would "bridge to the self‑sufficient kingdom" where "tragedy" would refer only to events in books, "war" would be a term quickly fading in the memory, and "Babel" an anachronism. My title, then, points toward a utopian vision that is operative though not, of course, realized in this anthology edited and translated and with an introduction by Margaret Randall. But this animating utopian vision concerns the transformation of the language, what any serious poet attempts, and is a directional that can be heeded since it is not totally self‑imposed by this reader. Witness this poem by Digdora Alonso:

You'll soon know your name is Vanessa

and then

that Vanessa is the name

of a brilliant butterfly.

Then you'll learn other words

atomic bomb

napalm

apartheid

and we'll have to tell you

what those words mean as well.

Vanessa asks me what a beggar is

and absent‑mindely, thumbing the pages of a book,

I say:

"someone who asks for alms."

Then she asks again,

more insistently,

"what is asking for alms?"

I put down my book and look at her

I look at her long

I look through my tears

I kiss her and kiss her again

and she doesn't understand why.

My granddaughter doesn't know what a beggar is,

my granddaughter doesn't understand asking for alms.

I want to run through the streets

congratulating everyone I see.

I want to go out into the streets

knocking on all the doors

These poems, with the original Spanish, the prose autobiographical statements from the 25 Cuban women poets ‑‑the title is "Breaking the Silences," the; poets are both Cuban and women‑‑ plus the introduction by Randall provide a testimony for us, North American writers and readers, to gauge the levels of our discourse about poetry, especially political poetry, and offer to us the opportunity to break through the stereotypes that imprison the language we use to talk about and superficially to criticize the poetries and societies (Cuba and Nicaragua) now threatened with armed intervention by our government. Perhaps a more appropriate quote for this review is another from Xlebnikov, "The tree that forms a hedge itself produces flowers," for in this volume are a diversity of voices that unites around the inescapable political dimensions of experience imposed on the Cuban poet by the reactions to change from U.S. politicians. Here is a short poem by the youngest writer in the book, Chelly Lima, 27, a member of the Union of Young Communists, and a "product" of revolutionary Cuba:

Margart Randall has given us the opportunity to read a range of poetry characterized by not only sex and politics but by an excellence that makes my choice of poems painful because of the number I must exclude ‑‑25 slips of paper mark the poems I would like to quote. The liberal media in our country ‑‑including the small press, witness the recent American Book Review and The Exquisite Corpse in their attacks on Nicaraguan poets and especially on Ernesto Cardenal‑‑ try to convince us that artistic value is always a casualty in a revolutionary context. Margaret Randall demonstrates that poetry can thrive even in a society born midst the threats of financial ruin through international monetary policy manipulations, invasion by U.S. mercenaries, CIA plotted assassination attempts, and, ultimately more important, a media that attempts to subvert every positive image projected by that society's artists.