Puerto Rico (United States) / All works
Poetry
Tuntún de pasa y grifería
Not translated into English
Luis Palés Matos · 1937
Synopsis
The collection gathers nearly twenty years of the author's Afro-Antillean poetry. Steeped in rhythms and sounds of African origin, the poems celebrate dance, desire and nature as vital forces, sing the beauty of black women through the Mulata-Antilla or Tembandumba de la Quimbamba, a black queen, and mock the black man who wants to pass for white; the title itself defies a society that sees itself as white.
Context
Published in 1937, the collection received the first prize of the Instituto de Literatura Puertorriqueña and went into a second edition in 1950. Several of its poems, published between 1926 and 1932, had caused a scandal in the island's letters, and the author, a white man, was reproached for appropriating African themes. Mercedes López-Baralt sees in it the first Antillean literary movement to have become known beyond the islands, which influenced Ana Lydia Vega and Antonio Benítez Rojo.
Who it is for
For reading the poet who, with Nicolás Guillén, is held to be one of the founders of the negrista poetry of the Antilles.
Prizes and reception
The critic Luis Antonio Miranda judged, on the contrary, that so-called black art had no link with Puerto Rico.