A Waist of Open Wood: Visiting the Impossible with Nicolás Guillén

My Cuban grandfather rewarded impressive feats with cash. In the hours after the Thanksgiving meal each year, there was always something new to accomplish. Spot the irregularity in the Persian rug and get five dollars; make fire from two sticks, one hundred dollars (hours of smoke and no flame); another year it was the same fee for capturing a hundred bees in an upturned cup. (A bee will send out a distress pheromone to attract help.) The year of the bees, we ate Thanksgiving dinner outside and waited patiently until we were in the high eighties of buzzing captives. It felt cruel, and yet they never stung us. Their humming bodies shone collectively through the glass cup like a tiger’s eye stone.

When I was first introduced to Nicolás Guillén’s El gran zoo, in Aaron Coleman’s translation, the architecture of the zoo struck me as the perfect psychological landscape in which to unfold Guillén’s ideas. I was jealous. The mental geography of the zoo is incredibly powerful. It’s a strange species of space, the zoo: nostalgic, familial, educational, and yet there is the constant nagging understanding of wrongness. I always felt the guilt of keeping animals in cages and a pervasive unnaturalness permeating the space, even as it is celebratory, a great feat of world building.

To understand such an orderly place, I turn to the order of etymology and definition: A zoo is a facility where living, typically wild animals are kept for public exhibition or education. The word comes from the Greek zōo-, meaning animal. The first zoo was perhaps in Egypt around 5,000 years ago. And yet, it is concurrently a situation characterized by confusion and disorder. Both the natural world brought to heel and chaos, a contronym, a word having two meanings that contradict one another (bolt, bound, cleave, clip). I think of the mind’s landscape upended by the cognitive dissonance of a pleasant day at the zoo, trying to believe all the animals are happy, well-fed. Guillén not only utilizes this framework, but plays with it, twisting our comprehension, presenting us not with a plane, but an “Air-Mammoth”: “an animal with more than enough credentials/to be in the Great Zoo” except that “only living beings are admitted.”

My Cuban grandfather often chalked my interests up to being Cuban. A love of rhyme, Cuban. A love of poetry, Cuban. Birdwatching, the same. When I began applying for colleges, my mother saw me ticking boxes and said she didn’t know if it would matter to me, but she was adopted, and he was not my biological grandfather. I could not comprehend this, could not comprehend my impossible inheritances. Throughout my life, when people try to guess where I am from, my mixed-race Blackness often places me in Cuba; over and over again, I’ve said yes, but or no, but or kind of or well...

In Guillén’s poetry, I savor the delicious whiplash of comprehending contradictions, of high-speed swerves in scale. In “The Rivers,” these familiar bodies of water shrink to the size of serpents, and then we are reminded of real rivers: “The Mississippi with its Blacks,/the Amazon with its Indians.” We shrink again: “They are like the powerful springs/of gigantic trailer trucks.” How? We have the word gigantic, but we know rivers can sweep away the hugest of trucks. We shrink again: “Laughing, children toss them/little green living islands.” Gigantic trucks, little islands. Yes, we know the metaphor of the snaking river, but Guillén keeps insisting, keeps our brains coiling tighter and tighter around the idea—it is real, it is really alive. We understand how they can “gobble down everything” in a flood, and yet we’ve never lived in their world so completely.

Scaling up from rivers, “The Caribbean” is housed within an unfathomable aquarium. Yes, I can picture “a crest of crystal glass,/a blue back, a green tail,” and I recognize “an underbelly of compact coral,/and the gray fins of a hurricane.” How satisfying that some alliteration carries over from Spanish to English: “vientre de compacto coral” into “an underbelly of compact coral.” I remember some gentle remorse at watching immense fish retrace the same paths, yet this creature is powerful enough to kill thousands with ease. I’ve seen videos of seas overspilling their man-made borders and devouring people.

I visited my grandfather in his assisted living residence after his mind began to uncoil. I remember finally being able to speak to him in his native Spanish when he was no longer able to hold a conversation or read the translations of my poems. I watched his eyes comprehend the words then lose them like a knot pulled apart. My mother told me he’d been putting the nurses through dissertation defenses, his mind folding back on itself to his years as a professor. I wonder what he would have thought of Guillén’s poems, and I wish we could have read his tamer ones together. My grandfather was a poet, but he wrote in rhyming verse and lamented my love for E.E. Cummings. I know he would have admired, even envied, Guillén’s “cintura de abierta madera,” his “waist of open wood” in “Guitar,” but the heavier resonances of the poem would have been uncomfortable to parse together:

But already she sings
when she hears, in other cages,
the flittering wings of sones and coplas.
 

We could never speak of these things. There are realities which are incomprehensible, unspeakable. Guillén is drawing on this incomprehensibility, and the immensity of the impossibility points to our inability to wrap our heads around atrocity, around slavery, around inequality, what Coleman aptly calls the “devastating consequences and conundrums of (neo)colonialism.” I would have been uneasy existing with Guillén’s persistence in a poem like “Gorilla” with my grandfather reading over my shoulder:

The gorilla is an animal
all but entirely human.
It doesn’t have paws but quasi feet;
it doesn’t have claws but quasi hands.
I am talking to you
about the gorilla of the African forest.
 

You. I am talking to you, Guillén stresses with his line break, you who would come to a zoo to enjoy caged animals. You who know all about injustice and do nothing. You who are aware of suffering and order cotton candy ice cream, taking extra napkins. I can barely read a poem like “Lynch” alone, with no one looking over my shoulder; I don’t want to remember the creature which

Feeds on Black people, ropes,
fire, blood, nails,
tar.
 

The image is driven home and insisted upon. As a poet, I was told I flitted too much from image to image, that I sacrificed meaning to the gods of sound, and yet I encounter Guillén and feel this, this is what I was reaching for. There are things so huge you must say them over and over in different ways until the mind cleaves what is right. I was born on June 8, 1989, and Guillén died on July 16, 1989. It’s nonsense, an impossible inheritance. Comprehending Guillén reminds me of the glass cup overturning with November’s chill on my arms and watching all those bees fly from us as fast as they could. Extreme, impossible concentration then a blink of dissipation, fleeting, legion.