Home and the Ruins of Language: Victor Hernandez Cruz and Miguel Algarin's Nuyorican Poetry
Journal article by Carmelo Esterrich; MELUS, Vol. 23, 1998
Journal Article Excerpt
Home and the Ruins of Language: Victor Hernandez Cruz and Miguel Algarin's Nuyorican Poetry. by Carmelo Esterrich I have a small fence that surrounds my fair home where I propose and propound where I invent and discover. Tengo una verjita, que rodea mi lindo hogar, donde propongo y pongo, donde invento y encuentro. --Miguel Algarin, "Donde / Where" Y tampoco importa el lenguaje de metaje tantos verbos y adjetivos que? and neither does it matter the language of goalage so many verbs and adjectives what? --Victor Hernandez Cruz, "Grafo-Mundo" "Nuyorican"(1) writing has always been caught in the critical crossfire between two national spaces--Puerto Rico and the U.S.--and between their literary and linguistic borders? Because of this conflict, Nuyorican writers have created an apparent instability in their own writing as one of their literary concerns, trying either to carve out a space for their writing or to create a new space. It is in poetry that this crisis of space and language has been most deeply problematized, and yet where a possible alternative lies for these writers. The question of belonging to one tradition or the other (or the decision not to belong to any one tradition) is, in this case, entangled with the concept of home that Nuyorican poets have developed. In many instances, that home is necessarily Puerto Rico--the Nuyorican poet positions him/herself as, in some way, coming from the island. What results from this positioning is a fusion of images that conflates the concept of home with the imagery of the island. The relation that the poets have with that home/island is ambivalent, a sort of love-hate relationship towards a space that nurtures and frustrates them at the same time. This ambivalence is sometimes translated as an idealizing project--home turns into a space of ecstasy and love, a tropical Arcadia. Moreover, the poets have an equally important relationship with language. Their writing reveals the battle of choosing one language over the other, or of deciding to create a new language springing from both English and Spanish. The Nuyorican conflict within poetry includes both the representation of home and the selection of a language that recreates home and its corresponding identities. It is the purpose of this essay to trace a certain tendency that two Nuyorican poets--Miguel Algarin and Victor Hernandez Cruz--manifest towards home and language.(3) While, on the one hand, the home/island appears in some cases to remain intact and unperturbed within an idealized imagery that reproduces a series of fantasies,(4) language, on the other hand, is forced through phonetic, morphological and syntactical deformations that eventually produce a new language composed of the ruined remains of the two standard languages. This double gesture leads these Nuyorican poets into an apparent preservation of home combined with a brutal mutilation of the so-called "original" languages. The relationship that exists between these poets and home can be better understood if we approach it through the psychoanalytic structure of incorporation. In post-Freudian psychoanalysis, the mechanism of incorporation, along with the concept of the "crypt"--originally formulated by Ferenczi but later developed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok--denies or refuses to recognize a loss and creates a scenario or fantasy that veils that loss. Incorporation is usually set in opposition to introjection, which is a process through which the loss becomes filled with a substitute object. Incorporation, on the other hand, can be seen as a device to refuse substitution for that loss; incorporation is triggered when "mourning ... cannot be admitted" (Abraham and Torok 9). The subject refuses to recognize the loss of his/her pleasure object, thus avoiding any feeling of mourning. What follows is the insertion of the object into a fantasy, in order to deny its loss. The fantasy is repeated again and again in an attempt to confirm the presence of the object, when what is really happening is the covering up of the fact that the object is lost forever. This process is, of course, kept secret, since the subject depends on that secrecy for the survival of the object within the fantasy, and also because the revelation of the process would indicate that a process of negation had occurred: |
[T]he only recourse that remains open to him [the subject] is to contradict
the fact of his loss with a radical denial, by pretending to have nothing
to lose. It will therefore be out of the question for him to betray to
others the grief that has struck him.... Grief that cannot be expressed
builds a secret vault ...
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