Identidades in English No 4, December 2014 | Page 77

Fig. 2b. Wifredo Lam (1942).
La Jungla. [The Jungle] Painting.
Oil on Craft paper

The iconographic antecedents were located in
certain rhetoric and poetics having to do with nationality in the collective imaginary: they involved historical figures and events regarding the
nation’s history that were tied to the level of aspirations of certain ideals that had not yet come to
fruition since the struggle for independence.
Negrista poet Ramón Guirao (1908-1949) began
to circulate Afro-Antillean poetry, the first poem
being La bailadora de rumba [The Rhumba
Dancer] (1928). Then came Nicolás Guillén
(1902-1989) with Sóngoro Cosongo (1930),
which suggested a new form of Spanish adulterated by the inclusion of African expressions
within popular pronunciation. Alejo Carpentier
(1904-1980) adapts that same modality and features the ñáñigo dialect in his experimental novel
Écue-Yamba-Ó (1933).

Fig. 2c. Roberto Diago (1952).
Elegguá regala los caminos.
[Elegguá Shows the Way]
Painting Oil on canvas

Musicians Amadeo Roldán, Alejandro García
Caturla and others experimented with Afro-Cuban rhythms in the nation’s so-called high class
music: they were protected by the legitimation
that wise man Fernando Ortíz offered (18811969).
The real (and not virtual) presence of black representation in characters with phenotypic features
that were seen as belonging to the black race
could be verified by only a few artists whose poetics were well defined: sketch artist Jaime Valls,
who focused on scenes with popular music’s
dances, people and instruments; sculptors Teodoro Ramos Blanco and Agustín Cárdenas, who
felt the European fascination with Africa and represented their totally aesthetic ideas about the
beauty of black features as part of a “Beauty of
the Other” idyll in counterpoint with the Western
canon.. (Figures 3a, 3b, 3c)

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