[In the following essay, Jackson discusses Guillén's rejection of the white literary aesthetic and his development of a black sensibility in his works of the late 1920s and early 1930s, focusing on the volumes Motivos de son, Sóngoro cosongo, and West Indies, Ltd. Jackson maintains that Guillén "represents the major turning point for literary blackness in Latin America. "]

Nicolás Guillén, … had his "white" stage, but … has lived long enough to pass through it and to go on to become the premier black poet writing in Spanish. Guillén's earlier poetry was definitely non-black and largely inconsequential, of interest to contemporary readers only as illustrations of his early expertise and technical domination of traditional Spanish verse forms, particularly those in vogue during and just after the literary reign of Ruben Dario, and as contrast they illustrate, as well, how far he has come in the blackening process he underwent from Cerebro y corazón (1922) to Motivos de son (1930). Before this metamorphosis, Guillén's literary output in the twenties, with only a very few exceptions, followed European models. Literary historians who want to "deblacken" him or turn him into a nonblack poet can find ample evidence in these adolescent poems to support their view which, as best expressed by Luis Iniguez Madrigal [in his introduction to Guillén's Summa poética, 1976], is that Nicolás Guillén is not—nor has he ever been—a black poet in language, style, or theme. Madrigal has another view, namely, that Nicolás Guillén is not even a predominantly social poet, but one who writes primarily on "other" themes. Madrigal can find some evidence in these early poems to support both his views, as Guillén's pre-Motivos de son work is dominated by such universal or colorless themes as love, death, nature, religion, and other abstract head and heart ("cerebro y corazon") subjects.

But a turning point came early in Guillén's literary career when he decided to focus his attention on the true black experience in the New World, starting with his native Cuba, where he saw the black as the one most affected by imperialist exploitation and other evils. Refusing to continue to go the way of [Panama poet] Gaspar Octavio Hernandez, Guillén abandoned the white muse he had followed in his youth and infused his literature with a black sensibility which has permeated his work for more than forty years. A similar black sensibility,… characterized the originality of the black Colombian poet, Candelario Obeso, who had set his sights in the same direction. But Nicolás Guillén represents the major turning point for literary blackness in Latin America. The appearance of his Motivos de son in 1930, an authentic literary happening, was upsetting, unsettling and controversial, partly because they broke momentarily with traditional Spanish verse expression and partly because they dealt with authentic black characters, but largely because they brought to literature a new and genuine black concern, perspective, and poetic voice, which even some blacks misunderstood.

The Motivos de son had a strong impact on black and white Cubans alike. White readers, after getting over the initial shock of seeing authentic blacks in literature, were pleased to see them appear because, on the surface, Guillén in Motivos de son seemed to highlight the comic and picturesque side of the black locked into an uneducated happy-go-lucky lower class image. Black readers were quick to react negatively against the Motivos de son largely for the same reason. They were not pleased to see the negro bembón given center stage in literature nor were they pleased to see what appeared to be the perpetuation of stereotyped images of the black. Both groups, however, soon came to realize that Guillén's Motivos de son went far deeper than racial insult and superficial entertainment. For one thing, both groups began to see in them the unmistakable call to black pride. It was soon recognized that the Motivos de son incorporated into formal poetic structure distinctive oral forms from the musical heritage of black people, but popular song and dance forms (the son) that were familiar to all Cubans. Black and white Cubans came to understand that Nicolás Guillén was using black talk and black rhythms to set escape motifs like wine, women, and song against a harsh background of unemployment, poverty, prejudice, and misery while making, in effect, a subtle plea for black pride and racial identity as well as for more awareness of social inequities, and of the growing presence of the United States in Cuba.

Although many critics prefer to hasten through this black period in the poet's development, moving on to what they think are his less racial stages, we cannot overestimate the importance of Guillén's work in the late twenties and early thirties. In these years Guillén laid the groundwork that gave his later work meaning and direction, rejecting the white aesthetic whether adhered to by whites, mulattoes, or blacks. It is also during this period that he first declared the black to be as Cuban as anyone else. Guillén attacked in particular during this period the black's own propensity to abrogate his rights by forfeiting them to white Cubans who, though not always backed by law, were willing to take advantage. To Guillén the black's own black phobia, that is his own fear of being black and of identifying with his son, his rumba, and his bongó, was the first obstacle to overcome as he sought ways to restore value to a people long denied it. Rejection of the white aesthetic and a plea for black recognition are really the keys, paradoxically, to his theory of mulatez, of a mulatto Cuba. In essence this theory represents the elevation of the black to the level already occupied by whites. Guillén's desire to write Cuban poetry, and not black poetry, is really the culmination of that elevation since Cuban poetry after Guillén can never again mean solely white or European poetry. Moreover, Guillén's subsequent rejection of the term Afro-Cuban paradoxically is the most problack statement he could make. To him the term "Cuban" already includes the "Afro," for the term has come of age and been elevated to the highest degree. Without the black, in other words, there would be no theory of mulatez; instead, there would only be white poetry in Cuba. Guillén, then, forces the black man into social recognition, and the white Cuban's acceptance of that theory is in effect a compromise.

Guillén's blackening process, his metamorphosis from a white escapist poet to a black poet, represents a rejection of the white aesthetic in general. More specifically, though, his defiant turnabout can be seen as a black reaction to poetic Negrism, which was a local movement staffed by white intellectuals largely in the Caribbean whose interest in things black in the late twenties and early thirties coincided with the black as nouvelle vogue in Europe and America. Rather than associate Guillén with poetic Negrism, we should see his dramatic conversion to blackness in the late twenties and early thirties as a reaction against this white literary fad that was sweeping the world, one Guillén himself defined [in his Prosa de prisa: 1929-1972, 1975-76] as

circumstantial tourism which never penetrated deeply into the human tragedy of race, being more like excursions organized for photographing coconut trees, drums and naked Negroes, whilst there existed the seething drama of the flesh and blood Negro bearing the scars of whiplashes, a Negro now fused with the whites to produce an indelible mulatto imprint on the Cuban social scene.

Guillén writes with characteristic sarcasm in "Pequeña oda a un negro boxeador cubano," the white man

By drawing directly from the black experience and by giving black reaction to that experience in the Motives de son, Guillén pits the black as speaker from his own environment against the superficial interest in blacks, thus revealing a closeness to the subject, scene, or emotion depicted in each poema-son not found in poetic Negrism. It is this closeness, together with Guillén's understanding of his subject, that gives the Motives de son their startling authenticity and Nicolás Guillén the title of authentic black poet.

Guillén lost little time in reaffirming that his conversion to blackness was not a passing fancy. One year later, in Sóngoro cosongo (1931), his second volume of black verse, he again set himself apart from the negrista craze. In the Prologue to this volume Guillén formulates in unequivocal terms a black credo justifying his new ethnic orientation. He writes, "I am not unaware of the fact that these verses will be repugnant to many persons, because they deal with issues concerning Negroes and the people, but that does not matter to me. Rather, I am happy." Although in this same prologue Guillén talks about "Cuban color" and calls his poems "mulatto verses," we should again remember that this is his way of forcing acceptance of the black as this prologue repeatedly makes reference to the "African shot-in-the-arm" the black presence represents in Cuba. The poems in this volume almost without exception continue to deal with the black experience in Cuba. Just as the semblance of self-mockery and black insult had helped gain respectability among the white literati for the Motivos de son, so too does his use of the term mulatto (which gives the white a share in blackness) for his black verse, help protect Sóngoro cosongo against white backlash.

If anything, the black racial nature of Guillén's poetry intensifies in Sóngoro cosongo. The language changes a bit, becoming less colloquial, and the form moves closer to recognizable Spanish verse. The emphasis, though, is the same: black pride, the black experience, and black types continue to dominate his poetry. Guillén continues to introduce the Cuban reader to the black world. But unlike the Motives de son where the black is largely the speaker and singer, in Sóngoro cosongo the black, for the most part, is spoken about. The Motives de son, in other words, is closer to black speech and black song (son) in poetic form, while Sóngoro cosongo is closer in several poems to the Spanish romance or ballad form, but with son elements. Sóngoro cosongo represents growth as Guillén includes variations on the son form while enlarging the black world he is introducing by bringing in black folklore, superstitions, even negative types. The black world of the time he represents was not always a pleasant one, but his point is clear: the black has arrived and literature must recognize this fact.

Perhaps the best illustration of this point can be seen in "Llegada" ("The Arrival"), the poem that, significantly, opens this volume. In this lead-off statement which ostensibly describes the arrival of the black as slave to the Island, Guillén repeatedly writes as refrain "¡Aquí estamos!" ("Here we are!") as the poem develops into yet another expression of black racial affirmation. "Pequeña oda a un negro boxeador cubano," which Guillén first published in 1929, one year before the Motives de son, has the same turning-point impact. This poem, like "Mujer nueva" whose black woman figure "trae la palabra inédita" ("brings new knowledge"), is a strong call for racial pride and black identity. To be sure, "Pequeña oda a un negro boxeador cubano" can be read on several levels: (1) as a poem about a black boxer; (2) as a poem where the black boxer acts as symbol for all blacks in struggle; and (3) as a poem about a struggle between nations, more specifically, about impending conflict between Cuba and the United States. But it is the final verse of that poem, where the poet exhorts the black to "hablar en negro de verdad" ("speak in real black talk")—a phrase that certainly refers to more than just black dialect—that underscores the authentic blackening of the poet in this early period. From the black fist of the boxer in "Pequeña oda a un negro boxeador cubano" to the black fist of the slave rower in "Llegada," who has now exchanged his oar for a knife, "apto para las pieles bárbaras" ("appropriate for foreign skins"), there is really very little distance. These three poems, "Pequeña oda a un negro boxeador cubano," "Llegada," and "Mujer nueva," and others in Sóngoro cosongo are very black indeed even though they do not contain any of the phonetic speech characteristic of his Motives de son.

In 1934 Guillén published West Indies Ltd., a volume widely hailed as his first volume of social (as opposed to racial) protest poetry. But it is in this volume in which Guillén widens his perspective or attack that he, at the same time, deepens the blackening process begun in the late twenties, crystallized with Motivos de son in 1930, and continued in 1931 with Sóngoro cosongo. It is evident that Nicolás Guillén focuses as well on the dispossessed white, "Dos niños: uno negro, otro bianco … ramos de un mismo árbol de miseria" ("Two children: one black, one white … two branches from the same tree of misery"), to illustrate yet another victim, like the black, of United States imperialism in the Antilles, but it would be a mistake to accept that Guillén's concern for the black in this volume is only a symbolic one. The poet continues to depict specific black figures and black folklore, and he also continues his program of instilling black pride in those blacks like Sabás—in a poem of the same name—who continue to go about with their hands out begging rather than shaking the strong black fist, the "puño fuerte elemental y puro" ("fists, pure, unadorned and strong"), of "Nocturno en los muelles," and the "puños los que me das / para rajar los cocos tal como un pequeño dios colérico" ("fists that you give me to slice open coconuts like a small angry god") of "Palabras en el trópico," the lead-off poem in the West Indies Ltd. collection. Guillén perhaps more insistently than in his two previous volumes of black verse makes himself the focal character in many of the poems as time and again he emphasizes his own black identity. In "Palabras en el trópico," the poet speaks of his "dark body," his "curly hair." In "Adivinanzas" "the black" becomes "I." Either he or other blacks like "I, Simón Caraballo the black" in "Balada de Simón Caraballo" or "The blacks, working" in "Guadalupe W.I." are the stars. Most importantly in "West Indies Ltd.," the long poem that gives the collection its title, it is clear that Guillén's concerns have moved beyond Cuba, but it is equally clear that the poet of black pride admonishing Sabás is the same poetic voice speaking at times in the sarcastic tone of an intelligent observer and at other times through the son sung at intervals throughout the poem by Juan el Barbero. This is a point the poet does not want the reader to miss, as he closes this poem with the words, "This was written by Nicolás Guillén, antillano, in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-four."

Despite Guillén's ever-widening circle of concerns that he has pursued throughout his long career, he has never left the black man behind or out of his poetry. In one of the few published studies of its kind, Constance Sparrow de Garcia Barrio [in Blacks in Hispanic Literature, 1977] recently traced Guillén's creation of new black characters through his later poetry that includes poems, for example, on such contemporary black figures as Martin Luther King and Angela Davis. In Tengo (1964), Guillén, significantly, speaks specifically as a black man in praise of Castro's Cuba where some allege, including Guillén himself, racial identity is no longer important. Throughout his career it has been his insistence on elevating the black that has given his poetry the extra dimension and excitement that makes him a "classic poet" who "has a clear understanding of his art and an absolute control of his technique, as well as something to say" [Arturo Torres Rioseco, in The Epic of Latin American Literature, 1959]. It is this "something to say" that distinguishes his Motivos de son and his later poetry from his earlier nonblack work and that sets his verse off from the negrista poetry of his white contemporaries. It is also this "something to say" that had a profound effect on Fernando Ortiz, the white Cuban specialist on things black, whose racist research had provided source material and orientation to white negrista poets prior to Guillén's appearance and domination of the Cuban literary scene in the late twenties and early thirties.

Guillén not only turned himself and negrista poetry around but his theory of mulatez seems to have been instrumental in turning Ortiz away from a rather clinical examination of the black largely as isolated criminal and slave and more toward the integration of blacks and whites in Cuba, the essence of Ortiz's well-known concept of cubanidad, which he developed in the forties. Rather than saying, as G. R. Coulthard has done [in Race and Color in Caribbean Literature, 1962], that "Guillén's work in many respects appears as an artistic transposition of the ideas of Ortiz," we should be saying that Ortiz's later work reflects Guillén's ideas on matters of race. Before Guillén's conversion to and insistence on blackness in Cuba, Ortiz was known in part for his Glosario de Afronegrismos (1923), a collection of African words and words that sound African that, because of their rhythmic quality, proved useful to the negrista poets. He was known also for what can be called his "unholy trinity," a series of works on "el hampa afrocubano": Los negros brujos (1906), Los negros esclavos (1916), and "Los negros curros," a lecture he gave in 1911 whose title he had planned to give to a third volume in the trilogy. This third volume that, according to Alberto Pamies [in Los negros brujos, 1973] was one of the studies Ortiz was working on at the time of his death in 1959, would have completed the trilogy, but judging from its emphasis on "certain ruffians that infest [italics mine] Cuban life"—the definition Ortiz gives for negros curros—its publication would have been a retrograde step for Ortiz. The unilateral negativity of that view had been superseded in his work in the Revista de estudios Afro-Cubanos (1937-40), in his essay "Por la integración cubana de blancos y negros," in his Engaño de la raza (1947), and especially in his "Los factores humanos de la cubanidad," where the antiracist and prointegration stance of Nicolás Guillén's are best reflected. Ortiz even co-opts the word ajiaco from Guillén's poem "La canción del bongó," the only real "mulatto verse" in Sóngoro cosongo. Ortiz uses this word as the central metaphor for Cuba in his essay, "Los factores humanos de la cubanidad." After the blackening of Nicolás Guillén, Ortiz intensifies his view that "Cuba is an ajiaco (stew)." It is also after Guillén that words like creación mulata and música blanquinegra become a part of Ortiz's repertoire. Before Guillén, in short, Ortiz's emphasis was on the Cuban black, not on the black Cuban or the mulatto Cuban, and on the "Afro" part of the term "Afro-Cuban"—an isolated, negative part at best.

Guillén's decision, then, during the late twenties and early thirties to write as a black about blacks and to blacks, and to whites and mulattoes, too, was an influential one that represented a new departure for himself and for his contemporaries. But what was the immediate impulse that brought him to that new commitment? Literary historians and Nicolás Guillén, too, usually point to a moment in 1930 when the words and rhythm of negro bembón came to the poet in a dreamlike trance after which the Motivos de son were written, dashed off, as it were, in white hot heat. But what put him in that trance in the first place? Angel Augier in his well-documented background study to Guillén up to 1947 [Nicolás Guillén, notos para un estudio biográfico crítico, 1962] sees the collective unconsciousness at work here. This may well be true, but Guillén's new racial plan of attack was more than involuntary. We know that his turning point was inspired in part by his own personal experiences of racism, by his awareness of worsening economic conditions for blacks in Cuba, and by the control of the black literary and cultural image that was being taken over by white intellectuals like Fernando Ortiz and the negrista poets. We know also that Guillén had many local black models to emulate, including his father, Lino Dou, Juan Gualberto Gómez, and Gustavo E. Urrutia, the Director of Ideales de la Raza, the black section of the Diario de la Marina where Guillén published much of his first work. But most of all, I believe, the black model or example set by Langston Hughes provided one of the most immediate sparks.

Langston Hughes, the dean of black poets in the United States, was already famous when he made his second trip to Cuba in February 1930. Guillén met Hughes on this trip, showed him around, and as a journalist published an interview he had with him that he called "Conversation with Langston Hughes" on 9 March 1930, in the Diario de la Marina. The very next month, on 20 April 1930, Guillén published his Motives de son. For a black writer who had already begun to see that the black problem was really a white problem, the black pride and racial flavor of Langston Hughes' verse and manner had to have an impact on any black, certainly on one who writes. I think what moved Guillén deeper into his blackening process was Langston Hughes' physical or somatic appearance. In Guillén's words [in the interview], Hughes "looked just like a little Cuban mulatto. One of those dandies who spends all his time organizing little family parties for two dollars a ticket." This description, of course, is negative, but Guillén's appraisal of "this great Black poet," "one of the souls most interested in the black race," is overwhelmingly positive. The impact for Guillén, I believe, comes with the realization that Hughes, a mulatto like himself, could genuinely identify with blacks with a dedication so intense that his only concern "is to study his people, to translate their experience into poetry, to make it known and loved." When Guillén says that Langston Hughes is unique, we have to understand this statement to mean both Hughes' total concern "with everything related to blacks" and the fact that this concern can come from a mulatto.

In this same interview, Guillén says that the Hughes poem containing the words, "I am a Negro / Black as the night is black / Black like the depths of my Africa," makes him feel as though it "springs from the depths of my own soul." Guillén decided shortly after Hughes' departure to inject some authentic blackness into Cuban letters, from the bottom up. He decided, quite simply, that it was time for "The New Negro" to make his appearance in Cuba as well. We should not forget that the twenties had been the decade of the world famous Harlem Renaissance, which influenced just about everybody who adopted a black perspective from that decade on, and Langston Hughes was at the center of that movement from its very beginning. Guillén himself writes about Harlem in an article, "Camino de Harlem," published in 1929, that can be seen as the starting point of his determination to bring to his country a corrective vision regarding Cuba's ethnic composition. It is this new vision that his poetry celebrates with himself at the center as a symbol of the mulatto nature of that ethnic composition. Guillén also was concerned that Cuba avoid taking the negative direction to which "going the way of Harlem" could lead. He did not want black Havana to become as black Harlem had become, a city within a city. He wanted the black recognized but at the same time fully integrated. Nor did he want the black to be a passing fancy, a danger he saw inherent in negrismo and perhaps in The Harlem Renaissance, which despite the authentic blackness of Langston Hughes and others, did contain some of the superficiality that white interest and involvement in the movement had fostered. Perhaps more interesting than Guillén's portrait of blacks is his self-portrait as one who resolves in his son all the racial and cultural contradictions of a black and white society. His own mulatez certainly resolves that conflict. He extends that personal identity through his mulatto verses to his country. That is why I think Langston Hughes' identification with blacks could not go unnoticed by Guillén, especially since the tendency in the Antilles was for mulattoes to identify or to align with whites. Guillén decided, in short, that in Cuba he would bring all the people together-black, white, and mulatto-through his concept of mulatez. This is the face Cuba has put on to the world ever since.

It is not surprising, then, that Guillén's conversion to blackness becomes complete shortly after Hughes' departure from the Island. Guillén even deleted an unfavorable reference to Langston Hughes that had appeared in the original 1929 version of his "Pequeña oda a un negro boxeador cubano," one accusing Hughes of being unconcerned about the black boxer. Nor is it surprising to see the Ltd. of Hughes' Scottsboro Ltd. (1932) reappear in Guillén's title West Indies Ltd. (1934), or to see Guillén try the so«-form, which sometimes has a blues effect, considering Hughes' earlier success with blues and jazz forms in poetry. One also can see the striking similarity between Guillén's black credo in the prologue to his Sóngoro cosongo (1932), especially the part where Guillén says that it does not matter if people are not pleased with what he is doing, and Hughes' own well-known declaration of artistic and racial commitment published five years earlier. He wrote in that piece ["The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," The Nation, 23 June, 1926], "If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not it doesn't matter … If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not their displeasure doesn't matter either." Were it not for such credos firmly rooted in black ethnic identity, it is possible that the later revolutionary vision these two poets developed might not have been so intense. Guillén realized, as did Hughes, that "the very root of Fascism grows out of terrain fertilized by racial hatred and the division of men into inferior and superior beings and that he, the Negro, has been assigned the lowest place." It was that indirect vested racial interest that carried them both to Spain to oppose fascism during the Spanish Civil War. The same concern prompts Guillén to care about the dispossessed of whatever color and to oppose what he sees as racist tinged United States imperialism. It is but a small step, then, from Guillén's early black poetry of his Motivos de son days … to his current revolutionary poetry. The two are not as mutually exclusive as some would have us think.

I see a compatibility between Guillén poet of negritude and Guillén poet of revolutionary Cuba. Guillén need not have continued with the black talk of the Motivos de son to be considered a poet of negritude as Gordon Brotherston [Latin American Poetry, 1975] and others seem to think. Nor was it necessary for him to abandon the black man to be considered a universal poet. Although Guillén now rejects the term negritude that he insists on seeing in its strictest sense, there can be little doubt that he was just as much a forerunner of the term in its strictest racial sense as he is now a leading exponent of what I have called elsewhere [The Black Image in Latin American Literature, 1976] the negritude of synthesis, which is negritude understood in a broader sense that does not reject "a quest for an antiracist, possibly universal culture, 'the culminating point of the dream of every serious advocate of negritude,' a universal brotherhood in which the black man will establish solidarity with all mankind." The organization of this section on the Major Period reflects the central role Guillén played in the development of black consciousness and black literature in Latin America in the thirties and forties, when—under his influence—the black as author became just as visible as the black as subject. This period is major because of the high visibility given the black as author through the appearance of works like Pilar Barrios' Piel negra (1947) and Virginia Brindis de Salas' Pregon de Marimorena (1947) in Uruguay, Juan Pablo Sojo's Nochebuena negra (1943) in Venezuela. Adalberto Ortiz's Juyungo (1943) in Ecuador, and Jorge Artel's Tambores en la noche (1940) and Arnoldo Palacios' Las estrellas son negras (1949) in Colombia. These works and others such as Guillén's El son entero (1947) that follow his initiative of the thirties, made the forties especially a fertile decade for black writers in Latin America.