2 - Crisis and Transgression in the Poetry of Excilia Saldaña

Summary

In a seminal interview published by Margaret Randall in 1982, Excilia Saldaña (1946–1999) is unapologetic in her declaration of the gender/race markers of identity which she prioritizes, celebrates and nourishes in her writing: ‘I am a woman and my work carries that stamp implicitly… And I don't want to write only as a woman but as a Black woman’ (Randall 1982: 198). Though she writes from a specific race/gender location, Saldaña is nonetheless candid about the breadth of sources (gender, race, region, culture) which inform her sensibility and shape both her view of the world and the way she represents that view in a literary text. In her essay ‘Lo cotidiano trascendiente: reflexiones sobre mi obra poética’, for example, she identifies a number of White Cuban men to whom she considers herself indebted as a poet. In addition to José Martí, she acknowledges the influence of male predecessors Mariano Brull, José Lezama Lima and Onelio Jorge Cardoso, among others (2000: 8–11). Of course, the influences on and reverberations in her work extend far beyond Cuba. As Flora González notes, ‘Saldaña echoes and transforms masters from a wide range of traditions including Shakespeare, Quevedo, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Walt Whitman, Vicente Huidobro, García Lorca… and many others’ (2002: 2). In this respect Catherine Davies has discussed the cultural hybridity that is an essential feature of Saldaña's poetry. Davies discusses Saldaña's Monólogo de la esposa (1984) as an example of post-revolutionary Cuban poetry that inscribes a diversity of discourses despite the Revolution's emphasis on cultural homogenisation. For Davies, Saldaña's poem is a ‘contact zone between local and global cultures’ which uses intertextuality, among other strategies, to inscribe a ‘plurality of discourses across cultural and gender boundaries’ (2000: 205–206). Monólogo de la esposa narrates an intimate crisis of gender and sexuality in a Black Caribbean household but the poem engages with Greek mythology and enlists Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Ruben Darío, André Gide and Oscar Wilde, among others, to construct its story and attempt to resolve the crisis that generated it. In drawing on this wealth of global sources, Excilia Saldaña, as González puts it, ‘transforms existing artistic traditions by placing herself as a woman of the African diaspora at the centre of her poetic self-identification’ (2002: 5).