Chapter 13 - The Representation of Afro-Cuban Orality by Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, and Nicolás Guillén

Summary

This chapter examines the literary representation of Afro-Cuban orality by three major Cuban literary figures of the twentieth century: Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, and Nicolás Guillén. Their writing is considered in the context of wider debates about the representational value of Latin American literary portrayals of the Other and the question of the subaltern speaking, thus linking them with the late 1980s body of criticism known as postmodern ethnography. In this sense, critics tend to favor Cabrera’s self-reflective innovative representation over Ortiz’s supposedly objective detachment as traditional anthropologist. However, this chapter draws attention to the fact that both Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s studies were forms of salvage ethnography, an approach based on the erroneous belief that oral traditions need to be preserved or rescued through writing. The chapter then addresses the son poetry of Nicolás Guillén as a contrasting representation of Afro-Cuban orality in the realm of written poetry that circumvents Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s reifying approaches by drawing on the lyrics of Afro-Cuban music son. Thus, the poem "Secuestro de la mujer de Antonio" achieves an openly subjective literary reworking of an Afro-Cuban son text while recognizing its parallel existence as a legitimate Afro-Cuban literary form and foregrounding its own status as copy.