Neruda

This is a fascinating collection of poems and they carry many themes that could be discussed, but I want to continue with the representation of the woman who is being addressed. Poetry about the female body is commonplace, but to see the body being addressed directly caught me by surprise, with fragments of flesh selected for praise, a single white thigh hanging in fetishized isolation, a single pair of soft hands connected to nothing. It was a little unsettling. Throughout the twenty poems bits and pieces of this woman show up, consisting of erotic anatomy (thighs, curves, lips, pubis) and points of communication (lips, eyes, hands).

The speaker asks in poem 18, “Quién eres tú, quién eres?” I also would like to know, but I can’t because she is always distant from the speaker, both when they are separated and together. Though physical separation is a source of anguish for him, he prefers that she is silent in his presence, such as in poem 16 when he says “Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente.” There appears to be something fragile between these two that an excess of words, especially her words, could break. But she will allow herself to be silenced with a touch of his lips – she is like a figure of clay whose mouth the artist can seal. We’re back to the idea raised in class that he forges her. (A word with so many definitions…)

There is a tension that runs throughout the poems between forms of distance and types of intimacy. There is a contrast between an intense desire, carnal knowledge, and possessive need and a love that is sporadic and vacillating, as is apparent on behalf of both parties in poem 20. There are also issues of distance. The speaker gives us an intimate and magnified view of her body, from “las rosas del pubis” to the “blancas colinas" of her physical landscape, but he never draws us back to give us a complete portrait. In poem 5 he begs her “No me abandones” but when she is with him in poem 16 he prefers to have space between them in the form of silence.

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Cumandá Part II

Having finished Cumandá I thought: this novel was centered around the complicated situation of inter-racial relationships (both amorous and societal) – what message did Mera hope to impart? The main point seems to be that reconciliation is possible – that the past can be overcome and that the two peoples can coexist. However, this reconciliation reveals itself as imperfect on a number of occasions. Firstly, when I began reading Cumandá, I thought that it would be about the relationship between an indigenous woman and a criollo man, about their love breaking racial boundaries. I soon realized that this wasn’t the case – Cumandá was white (and as such frequently touted as the most beautiful of the indigenous women), which meant that Carlos was attracted to her on the basis of similarity rather than difference. Beyond this, his feelings toward her were fraternal love and deep admiration, not sexual desire. So this was not the relationship I had expected, one that would have shown that strong attraction and sincere admiration occurs between races.

Secondly, the good indigenous/criollo relations in the novel seemed only skin-deep, and when the going got tough, the resentment felt by both races quickly arose. One example is when the jíbaro messenger arrives at Andoas to demand that Padre Domingo hand over Cumandá (pg. 254). At first they speak with the customary courteous language. However, as Domingo stalls for time, and it becomes clear that he is standing in the way of indigenous traditions, the messenger becomes blunt, accusatory, and threatening. Another example is when Carlos says his final farewell to Cumandá (pg. 268). He is extremely distressed by the sacrifice of Cumandá and he curses “¡Crueles, crueles salvajes!... ¡indios atroces!” It could be that he refers specifically to the jíbaros, but I get the impression that he is speaking generally.

Lastly, in one of the novel’s most significant scenes, a supposed familial and racial reconciliation occurs wherein Padre Domingo appeals to the dying Tubón for mutual forgiveness. Despite the fact that Tubón’s last words are “Ya no puedo alzarme para despedazarte, ¡quitate de mi presencia!”(pg.282), Domingo keeps cajoling him. Domingo pours promises and pleas over Tubón, so weak that he is unable to speak, and as two tears roll down Tubón’s cheek in his dying moments, Domingo joyously interprets these as agreement. A criollo kneeling over a mute indigenous person and telling him what he ought to do is hardly a symbolically appropriate scene to deliver the message that reconciliation is possible. There is no equality between races or respect for the cultural integrity of the indigenous people. Indeed, it is clear throughout the novel that the indigenous people are not perceived as equals, with romantic language presenting them as objects for aesthetic appreciation as well as condescending anthropological remarks on their nature and customs, forever subtly positing Europeans and their descendants as superior.

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Cumandá Part I

The first two chapters of Cumandá seemed to be from a nineteenth century travelogue, a type of literature that swelled upon library shelves during this time as privileged Europeans dutifully recorded their experiences in foreign lands. Typical accounts from Latin America reveal the awe felt by their writers as they described what was to them an extraordinary landscape and a population that required scientific ordering. Indeed, Mera paints an immense and majestic physical environment, like an endless organic cathedral, and conscientiously describes the different tribes and their customs. But what these chapters also share with the nineteenth century travelogue is that they are largely devoid of human characters and interactions – a strange way to begin a tale of impassioned racial strife and impossible love between youths. Travelogue writers frequently favoured descriptions of the environment over the indigenous people they encountered, the former evoking the sublime and the latter often shock and repulsion, or they made no differentiation between the two. It is interesting to note that the cover of our edition also lacks human representation – it could be a book about tropical plants.

In Cumandá, descriptions of the environment and people blend into one another, such as the anthropomorphic whispering of the river, the way love is likened to a protective bark and the organic way it sends its roots into the heart, and women said to have the qualities of certain birds. This tendency is especially true concerning indigenous people, whose character is frequently described in the same terms as the environment in which they live. The indigenous characters encountered so far strike me as static and archetypical. They can be put in two categories – punks or poets – the belligerent jíbaros and the friendly záparos – the barbaric types who tear out eyes and burn down houses and the lyric/folkloric types who express themselves in romantic prose. To be fair, the white character Carlos is just as one-dimensional as the melancholy poet archetype, and the racially ambiguous Cumandá is beginning to reveal her surprisingly strong character in the face of obstacles to their relationship. However, this book appears to be written to be easily digested by a European audience that already felt both physically and morally distant from the jungle and the people who inhabited it, and Mera doesn’t employ descriptive language or social commentary that would convince them to feel otherwise.

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Literature and the Family

Prominently shelved, scattered about, and tucked away in forgotten places all over my house is an untold number of books. They can usually be found in little clusters with some type of thematic cohesion – such as the interests of a certain individual or pertaining to a certain era – and all reveal something about my family, its members, and its secrets. Packed onto a wide set of shelves over the TV, as if enticing the viewer to higher forms of entertainment, are the classics that my mother accumulated while at university. This is the literature that she values and she revisits it multiple times to access the worlds described within. My father began collecting books later, with embossed leather covers and pages that smelled of the passage of time, which I remember hunting for together when I was a child in antique markets and thrift stores.

This is what is visible in our house, the inheritors of English literature and history pre-1960. My family lives in Canada while all of our relatives live in England – in ways that are too difficult to think about for the purposes of writing a blog, these books provide a connection, both familial and patriotic, to a life that was left behind. Down in the basement however, a dim and unpleasant place, is where books are hidden away. There are boxes of children’s books and shelves containing bestsellers and other dubious items. The children’s books are mostly mine but some are my mother’s – some we both read as children – families grow and literature perseveres. Two large boxes sent from England gather dust in a corner, they arrived years ago but for fear of provoking some unwanted emotion I don’t ask why they haven’t been opened. Sometimes I wonder about the nature of the books I know they contain, books that were written, read, and perhaps affected the course of events in a family history that I don’t even know the half of.

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