Intersectional Feminism, Black Love, and the Transnational Turn

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Intersectional feminism, Black love, and the transnational turnManizza Roszak, Suzanne

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Intersectional Feminism, Black Love, and the Transnational Turn: Rereading Guillén, Hughes, and Roumain

Suzanne Manizza Roszak

Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 44, Number 4, Summer 2021, pp. 37-56(Article)

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Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 44, No. 4 • Copyright © The Trustees of Indiana University • DOI 10.2979/jmodelite.44.4.03

Intersectional Feminism, Black Love, and the Transnational Turn: Rereading Guillén, Hughes, and Roumain

Suzanne Manizza RoszakUniversity of Groningen

Critics who have read Nicolás Guillén, Langston Hughes, and Jacques Roumain together have been captivated by how their shared politics bridge distances of nation, language, and genre. Still, despite the vivid and sometimes problematic ways that these writers imagined gender and sexuality within the diaspora, there has been little discussion of what they share in this respect. Considering all three writers’ conceptions of “ black love” (as Guillén terms it) from an intersectional feminist perspective creates new interpretive possibilities for many of their works. Guillén’s, Hughes’s, and Roumain’s intertwined representations of love, sex, pregnancy, and parenthood constitute a resistive response to the physical and psychic threats that white racist and capitalist society has posed to Black lives and especially to Black women throughout the Americas. However, these works also contain counter-revolutionary elements that reflect their patriarchal and heteronormative social context.

Keywords: intersectional feminism / Black love / transnational American litera-ture / Nicolás Guillén / Langston Hughes / Jacques Roumain

“[M]an, / can that woman cook!” (Man-Making Words 45). With this triumphal exclamation, Cuban modernist poet Nicolás Guillén ends the second stanza of his early poem “Mi chiq-

uita,” a short love poem whose speaker presents a decisive vision of African dias-poric womanhood. Guillén is known for his founding contributions to Cuban negrismo, and his legacy remains visible in the writings of contemporary Cuban

Suzanne Manizza Roszak ([email protected]) is an assistant professor of English at the University of Groningen. Her articles on transnational American literature have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, and Studies in the Novel. Her first book, Intersecting Diasporas, was published in 2021 by SUNY Press.

38 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 44, Number 4

American authors like Cristina García, despite the efforts of some publishers to whitewash their books.1 Earlier on, Guillén also enjoyed a transnational kin-ship with Langston Hughes and with Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain—and indeed, the three men knew each other well, translating one another’s writings and in some cases even writing about one another, as Guillén did in his elegy for Roumain.2 Those who have read Guillén, Hughes, and Roumain side by side have been captivated by the shared concerns that bridge the distances of nation, lan-guage, and genre between their poetry and fiction, not to mention the ideological and practical distinctions that sometimes surfaced between negrismo, négritude, and the ideas and outputs of the Harlem Renaissance.3 One question that has been little discussed, however, is what is shared among the characterizations of the African-descended women who appear in their writing.4

For the conventional “Anglo-American” feminist, Gordana Yovanovich argues, Guillén’s verse might seem to present a problem (16). Yovanovich sug-gests that poems like “Mi chiquita” are provocative because they propose “a radical departure from the mainstream North American feminism,” aligning themselves instead with “a brand of feminism typified by the women who gathered in Abidjan in July of 1972 to discuss issues connected to the topic ‘The Civilization of the Woman in African Tradition.’” There, Yovanovich relates, the conference pro-ceedings recorded the sentiment that the “African woman, at least in the precolo-nial society, is neither a reflection of man, nor a slave. She feels no need whatsoever to imitate him in order to express her personality” (qtd. in 17). Unnamed but also integral to this conversation about Guillén is the work of critical race theorists like Kimberlé Crenshaw, whose writings about the mutually constitutive influence of gender and racial discrimination have helped to show why non-intersectional, second-wave white5 feminism and its afterlives (often referred to simply as “white feminism” for short) do not effectively represent women of color.

What interests me is what might happen if we bring an intersectional fem-inist lens to bear not just in exploring Guillén’s “playful” vision of women and sex—as Yovanovich calls it—but in looking more broadly at the intertwined representations of love, sex, pregnancy, and parenthood that recur across some of Guillén’s, Hughes’s, and Roumain’s works from the period of their collaboration, which began around 1930 (18). Refracted through this particular lens, with a historically contextualized understanding of the high stakes of “Black love” (a term Guillén specifically uses) in light of whiteness’s continuing transnational threat to Black lives in the Americas, poems like “Mi chiquita” require new interpretations. They reveal a complex kinship that spans the geographic, linguis-tic, and formal boundaries between the three men’s works—and at least partly distinguishes them from the general landscape of “the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude canons” that privilege “the figures of the heroic male and the nurtur-ing female” (Wilks 21).

Crenshaw’s scholarship on anti-discrimination law has had a profound effect on ways of reading contemporary women writers, but it has also encouraged re-readings of texts that acknowledged the realness of intersectional experiences

Intersectional Feminism, Black Love, and the Transnational Turn 39

of race and gender long before Crenshaw coined the term. For Crenshaw, it was critical to recognize that “Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender” (140). Importantly, this combination of identities and injustices is not purely additive, combining fixed experiences of gender discrimination expe-rienced identically by white women and women of color with static experiences of racial discrimination experienced identically by non-white women and men. Instead, Crenshaw has been pivotal in teaching that discrimination on the basis of race can look different and be experienced differently when issues of gender, too, are in the mix—just as discrimination on the basis of gender can look differ-ent and be experienced differently for women of color than for white women. In other words, “the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism” (140), although at times, “Black women can experience discrimination in ways that are both similar to and different from those experienced by white women and Black men” (149). In naming these realities, Crenshaw’s work—like the writings of other critical race theorists such as Patricia Hill Collins—has disrupted the convenient mythology of a unified, singular experience of gender inequality that has so often dominated white feminist rhetoric. In the process, Crenshaw has centered the voices of women of color who were marginalized as they persistently pointed out these variegations arising from colliding experiences of gender and race.6

At the same time, discourses of Black love with their own intersectional resonance have continued to claim an important space within the transnational imagination of the diaspora. The term “Black love” neither originates nor ends with Guillén, and it reverberates from works like Nikki Giovanni’s Black Arts Movement-era poem “Nikki-Rosa” to bell hooks’s 2001 book Salvation: Black People and Love.7 In this book, hooks contemplates the conceptual importance of love to the ethics and mechanics of racial protest (“Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you” [8]) alongside the ways that the “[c]ontemporary focus on material gain as the key to healing our crisis has deflected attention away from the need for emotional growth, for us to embrace more wholeheartedly the art and act of loving” (15). In between Giovanni’s and hooks’s writings lie Alice Walker’s womanist proposition that “the quintessence of Black feminism” is “loving love” (Lloyd 231) and Cornel West’s insistence on “those forms of individual and col-lective resistance predicated on a deep and abiding black love” (qtd. in Johnson 34, emphasis in the original). Black love in these figurations can be broadly humanist, but it can also be deeply romantic and solidly familial. What’s more, it is often invested in undoing both racist and capitalist social structures, an idea that hooks contemplates in her exploration of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, with its devotion to “non-market values of communalism and sharing of resources” and its concern for men like Walter Lee Younger who “neglect . . . to focus on love” (12–13). I read these discourses as fundamentally intersectional in how they not only address interlacing experiences of racial and socioeconomic injustice but


also distinctively interpret constructs of romantic attachment and family life that non-intersectional feminist thought often associated with the oppression rather than the liberation of women.8

These ideas become essential to resisting and complicating the monolithic Anglo-American lens that Yovanovich references in scrutinizing Guillén’s poems—particularly when the issues at stake include sex, love, the formation of families, and the diverse forms of women’s labor, pain, and joy that these experiences might possibly imply. Rereading Guillén’s, Hughes’s, and Roumain’s African-descended women from a stance that resists the oversimplifications of white feminism allows us to recast the relationship between the three men’s writings in a way that more carefully takes into account the physical and psychic threats posed to Black women by white racist and capitalist society from Cuba and Haiti to the United States, while also listening closely to what these writers have said about Black love as a method of resisting these forms of tyranny and terror. This approach to reading Guillén, Hughes, and Roumain does not erase what is still sometimes problematic in all three writers’ representations not just of gender but of sexuality as well—for all three writers determinedly focus on heterosexual identities and experiences in a way that leaves troublingly little place for queerness in the politics of Black love. Still, excavating what is complex and challenging about Guillén’s, Hughes’s, and Roumain’s work in this respect both expands our understanding of their transnational connections in general and gives us a fuller grasp of the more specific shared resources and limitations of all three writers as they worked to disrupt and frustrate the transnational threat of whiteness. Meanwhile, this approach also makes a direct challenge to readers who, in doing previous comparative scholarship on this literary trio, have avoided engaging with questions of gender and sexuality at all, indulging conspicuous omissions that have threatened to re-marginalize the Black women who play such prominent roles in the authors’ writings themselves.

Romantic Love fRom GuiLLén to Roumain

In a poem wrought from his sorrow at the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., Guillén uses the phrase “black love” to describe the quality and the output of King’s “black soul” (Man-Making Words 57).9 In doing so, Guillén resists the imagistic racial binary imposed by cultural outsiders like Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who writes of King that his “skin was black, / but with the purest soul, / white as the snow” (qtd. in 55). For Guillén, it was critical to provide alter-natives to the received vocabulary of white purity that had been so crucial to the white supremacist project across the Americas, rewriting Yevtushenko’s elegiac verse to instead affirm the racial pride that Guillén envisioned reverberating at the core of King’s interiority:

Still it might be said another way:What a powerful black soul


that gentlest of pastors had.What proud black passion burned in his open heart.What pure black thoughtswere nourished in his fertile brain.What black love,so colorlesslygiven. (57)

This rendering of King’s “black love,” while it was written decades after Guillén’s early negrista poetry, nevertheless offers a kind of key to some of the earlier poems and their echoes across the work of Hughes and Roumain.

“Mi chiquita” (“My Little Woman”), for instance, was published as part of Guillén’s 1930 collection Motivos de son. It is easy to see where Antonio Benítez-Rojo locates the “everyday black woman, who suddenly comes to the surface in Caribbean poetry,” in the speaker’s explicit admiration for a woman who can “wash, iron, sew,” and, yes, cook (124; Man-Making Words 45). It is also easy to see why some readers may wince at this characterization, since the domestic arena has retained its significance as a gender battleground thanks to the persistently unequal distribution of labor in the average Western household regardless of women’s labor outside the home.10 Still, such responses make little room for the diverse significances of women’s domestic labor as they vary alongside racial and class identities and according to divergent histories of women’s work. What changes, for instance, when we stop to consider that, as Angela Davis remembers in Women, Race, and Class, it was “[p]recisely through performing the drudgery which has long been a central expression of the socially conditioned inferiority of women [that] the Black woman in chains could help to lay the foundation for some degree of autonomy,” and that “the special character of domestic labor during slavery . . . involved work that was not exclusively female”? (17).11 Part of what is important about Guillén’s modernist expressions of Afro-Cuban iden-tity is that they joyfully recuperate the private, everyday domestic afterlives of these intersectional histories. Instead of “showing Afro-Cubanness as a negative derivation of the middle passage and of slavery,” Guillén’s verse “speaks of black men and women who established a firm American presence . . . and proclaim[s] their laborious cultural victory” (Benítez-Rojo 125). There is a multilayered and historically grounded note of exultation in the admiring exclamations of Guillén’s speaker. Just as arresting are the poem’s ending lines, which give voice to the unnamed woman’s own desires and commands:

She say: “Daddy,you can’t leave me ‘t all,come get me,come get me, come get me,let’s have a ball.” (45)


In a sense, this final moment of the poem is about power: the power to dictate the couple’s agenda and their movements in the world, which the woman asserts through repetition and in claiming the last word as an expression of her desires. The chiquita’s words also underscore the unity of the couple: the fact that they are indomitably, unapologetically happy together. In the carefree exhortation “let’s have a ball,” originally rendered in Spanish as “bucamé / pa gosá” (“búscame para gozar,” literally “look for me to enjoy”), Guillén’s female speaker asserts the right and the power that both she and her partner have to revel in love, which itself becomes a form of “cultural victory” (Man-Making Words 44–5).

Hughes translated “Mi chiquita” himself as part of his effort to disseminate Guillén’s poetry to English-speaking audiences, but his own translation of those lines somewhat occludes the current of enjoyment in the original poem, rendering them as, “you needs me, / you needs me, / to look out for you! / You do!” (The Translations 85). This version has the potential to frustrate patriarchal ideas of feminine fragility and dependence, especially coupled with the previous stanza, in which the poem’s speaker depicts his sweetheart sometimes going “dancing, / or out to eat” without him (85).12 Still, Guillén’s original version is unique in underlining the couple’s shared, celebratory joy at each other’s company. While Hughes’s version does not necessarily emphasize this element of joy, something similar does happen at the close of Hughes’s own poem “Negro Dancers,” which appeared in his collection The Weary Blues in 1926. There, “two mo’ ways to do de Charleston” become simultaneously a reason to celebrate and a method of rejoicing in Black love, something that was even more important when Hughes included the poem in his anthology of verse for young readers, The Dream Keeper (32). “Negro Dancers” sounds a note of triumph as it revels in the togetherness of its dancing lovers, who refuse to be cowed by “white folks” who “laugh” at their artistic ingenuity (32). Like Guillén’s female speaker who commands her lover to “have a ball” with her, Hughes’s dancers are unapologetic in their enjoyment of each other, so that the act of creating art comes to have ramifications far beyond the dance floor: ramifications that have to do with experiences of both gender and race. In Hughes’s poem, the speaker’s “baby” does not need to be liberated from his enjoyment of her moving body so much as she needs to be allowed her own brand of self-expression and agency, one that eschews white women’s efforts to dictate narratives of gender. While this is more of a subtle undercurrent in Hughes’s poem, it is an idea that will be rendered explicit in his 1934 collection The Ways of White Folks. There, stories like “The Blues I’m Playing” and “A Good Job Gone” give Hughes the space to explicitly identify and detail the failed efforts of both white women and white men to dominate Black couples and alienate them from one another.

Both Guillén’s and Hughes’s writings from the 1920s and 1930s unflinchingly portray the threat of whiteness to romantic love within the diaspora. Guillén’s famous poem “Mulata,” also from Motivos de son, uses the figure of the multiracial woman whose “aversion to blackness . . . translates into a fear of her own racial heritage” to probe the insidious influence of white supremacist ideology within


the transracial workings of 1930s Cuban society (C. Williams 100). As Claudette M. Williams notes, the ending of “Mulata” is ambiguous in terms of its implica-tions for the male speaker’s understanding of race: the speaker chooses loyalty to his darker-skinned lover only after he is rejected by the more socially powerful “mulata,” who ridicules the visible traces of the diaspora in the shape of his nose. Writing in what he hoped would be a new era where Cuban society might embrace “the ‘mestizo’ reality understood as ‘unity’” and might thus begin “to transcend the racial conflict inherent in the Plantation,” Guillén appears harshly critical of the outmoded ideologies to which both the “mulata” and perhaps even the poem’s speaker appear susceptible (Benítez-Rojo 126–7). At the heart of this critique, however, is the poem’s sense that the problem arises from a white suprem-acist discourse that has persisted from the early history of European imperialism in Cuba to the modernist postcolonial moment in which the poem is embedded.13

Likewise, the real pathology in Hughes’s story “A Good Job Gone,” originally published in Esquire in 1934, is the fixation of its narrator’s white male employer on his whiteness and his socioeconomic resources. In this short narrative, a rich womanizer named Mr. Lloyd uses these markers of his identity as a kind of cudgel in demanding affection and loyalty from his light-skinned young lover, a woman named Pauline who has her own “sweetie,” a “black boy” and “the only boy she loved in the wide world” (63). Pauline eventually leaves the white man for her “sweetie,” consigning Mr. Lloyd to a sanatorium where he remains “crazy as a loon” (68). Hughes’s portrayal of the “high brown” Pauline flips the script of Guillén’s “Mulata” by situating multiracial identity as a site of covert, subversive resistance to white racism and colorism. Indeed, Pauline appears fully in control of her selfhood and her choices throughout the narrative, using her white bene-factor’s resources when it suits her and forsaking him when it doesn’t. Still, like Guillén, Hughes pinpoints whiteness as a palpable threat to Black love, some-thing that represents a clear and tangible danger although it also can be variously resisted (57).14 As Anne Borden has said in her analysis of the “genderracial” dynamics of Hughes’s writings, the work of “exploring sensuality in relation to social change” is critical to Hughes’s project (333); we can see this in Pauline’s refusal to allow her relationship to be dominated, whether sexually, emotionally, or otherwise, by the racial and class agendas of white America. Meanwhile, although Michael J.C. Echeruo is not wrong to locate a certain “essentialism” in the descriptions of Pauline offered by Hughes’s narrator, these evocations “of per-manently knowable, identifiable black women” (17) can be read as an indictment of white attitudes internalized by some Black men rather than as Hughes’s own act of gender stereotyping.

Poems like “Mi chiquita” and “Negro Dancers” have a special signification in this context, as they offer a sense of enjoyment and pride in the particularized contours of love within the diaspora while gleefully dismissing the white threat or erasing it from the picture altogether. In this way, they capture the spirit of an intersectional Black feminism that draws its strength from “loving love,” to bor-row Lloyd’s phrase. Jacques Roumain’s 1944 novel Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters


of the Dew), which was published posthumously and which Hughes translated into English for publication in 1947, achieves a similar feat in its rendering of revolutionary love against a backdrop of drought, anxiety, and factionalism in a Haitian agricultural community. Roumain’s protagonist Manuel has returned from his labors on a sugarcane plantation in Cuba, full of revolutionary fervor and eager to inculcate an activist spirit of collectivism in his childhood home.15 In his journey to bring life—literally, in the form of water—to his parents’ village, he encounters a woman named Annaïse, his revolutionary counterpart from a rival family. Manuel and Annaïse’s love becomes an emotional force that propels the plot of the narrative and proves indomitable in the face of tragedy, as Manuel ultimately dies but leaves behind an unborn child who, it is felt, will inherit his activist vision as well as the literal products of his work on the land.

Some of the most impressive moments in Roumain’s novel involve its joyful treatment of sex, which becomes a revolutionary act in its unapologetic allegiance to romantic love over the legal and religious rituals imported into Haitian society by French imperialists. Although Manuel and Annaïse do not have sex until they have decided to marry, they consummate their relationship without the approval of a priest, offering a modernist answer to the traditions of characters like the older Antoine, who remembers having courted his wife in the French style. The young couple’s decision to act as the arbiters of their own ethical and emotional com-mitment is described in terms that celebrate the pained yet exultant union, which coincides with the discovery of the source of water that will be the salvation of the village: “She listened, with her quiet face lighted by an infinite joy. He was beside her. ‘Anna!’ Their lips touched. ‘My sweet,’ she sighed. She closed her eyes and he laid her down. She was stretched out on the ground and the low rumble of the water echoed within her in a sound that was the tumult of her own blood” (118).16

As a literary activist writing in the international context of Haitian négritude, Roumain worked not only to acknowledge and valorize what Stuart Hall would later call the “Présence Africaine” (230) within the diasporic Caribbean but also to repel the specter of Western hegemony in Haiti, including its economic and religious dimensions, which had intensified with the American occupation. Here, the act of sex takes on a symbolic character as a gesture of Black love that, like the discovery of water that can be carried back to the village, will sustain life in contravention to the threats posed by structures of white oppression and control under US neo-imperialism.17 The act also specifically resists historical “efforts to regulate Black women’s bodies” that “illuminate the larger question of how sexu-ality operates as a site of intersectionality” (Hill Collins 135). Wilks suggests that Annaïse’s sexuality is not “her own” but is instead a marker of her “devotion and deference” to Manuel (187). Yet a historically contextualized reading of the scene suggests that Annaïse’s active sexual desire—which she proclaims to her mother when she is later shamed for her actions, saying that she “wanted it” (168)—is indeed a marker of sexual agency through which Annaïse challenges the dictates of white European colonialism and its long-standing attempts to regulate Black female sexuality.


Annaïse refuses to be emotionally defeated when Manuel dies, having sacri-ficed himself for his community in a way that recalls the religious symbolism of his name and that positions him as a secular martyr.18 Instead, Annaïse’s attitude becomes an intergenerational expression of love that supports an older, wearier generation—represented by Manuel’s mother Délira—in surviving Manuel’s fate. In a final chapter titled “The End and the Beginning,” Délira exclaims her grief through repeated invocations of her son’s name, protesting, “Oh, Manuel! Manuel! Manuel! Why are you dead?” (188) In doing so, she echoes Annaïse’s own repeating protestations at the moment of Manuel’s death, when she asked, “Are you asleep, God? Are you deaf? Are you blind?” (161) But at the novel’s end, Annaïse refuses to answer Délira’s inquiry on its own terms, instead answering a different question than the one she has been asked: “‘No,’ said Annaïse. She smiled through her tears. ‘No, he isn’t dead’” (188). Her reasoning, of course, is that she is pregnant—something that I will discuss later in more detail. Roumain holds up Black romantic love as immortal, able to withstand suffering, violence, and death in a way that recalls an intergenerational and transnational history of diaspora across the Americas: the “Black love that has been forged in the face of American barbarism (slavery) and American terrorism (Jim Crow, lynching),” as well as in the face of European imperialism and US neo-colonialism outside the borders of the United States (West).19 In this context, the stakes of romantic love are entirely different from the ones captured by the quintessential second-wave white feminist adage, “It starts when you sink into his arms and ends with your arms in his sink” (Jackson, qtd. in Hollows 72).

Importantly, this suite of readings does not erase other problematic compo-nents of these representations of African-descended womanhood. If, as hooks has argued, “racialized sexist hierarchies” have encouraged “black male thinkers” to “act in complicity with a white power structure wherein sexist thinking sup-ports devaluing black women as critical thinkers” (Killing Rage 233), then it is certainly possible to locate traces of such thinking in Masters of the Dew and in poems like “Mi chiquita,” where the power of the “chiquita’s” mind is less visibly on display than that of her body in sensuality and in traditional “women’s work.” Nevertheless, these early writings of Guillén, Hughes, and Roumain cast the fig-ures of Black women not just as “nurturing” but as fierce in the act of claiming and loving love, an act that can be better understood in light of these racial dynamics as they intersect with problems of gender in the transnational landscape of early twentieth-century America.

fRom PReGnancy to PaRenthood: famiLiaL Love

Valerie Kaussen expresses the understandable concern that “there is little place for women’s agency in Roumain’s vision of liberation, except as the vessels that will produce the next generation of revolutionary subjects” (138). Kaussen thus pinpoints a problem that would later continue to reverberate within the Black nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s, when, “to put black men at social and political


ease, black women were expected to assume a position of passivity” (Pollard 178).20 Even in her more active moments of involvement in the novel’s social action, Annaïse participates in a manner that is pointedly circumscribed by her gender: she agrees to minister to the women of the community and call them to arms as Manuel requests. Both as a sort of missionary meant to circulate Manuel’s revolutionary ideology and as the mother of his unborn child, Annaïse serves a fundamentally reproductive function as a change agent: she “bears” ideas and children equally. Nevertheless, together in love, Roumain’s Manuel and Annaïse are important not just individually but as a unified whole whose bond informs and energizes their social resistance while actively challenging the historical and continuing threat of whiteness to women and their families in the diaspora.21 That threat makes the constitution and continuance of the family itself in Masters of the Dew a very real form of activism, giving new significance to Roumain’s rep-resentations of pregnancy.

Given the Marxist tenor of Roumain’s novel, which has inspired critical responses ranging from J. Michael Dash’s rather condemnatory reading to Kaussen’s recuperative moves, it should come as no surprise that the danger to the family involves a web of capitalist and racist forces operating in Cuba as well as Haiti.22 The novel explicitly invokes these forces when Manuel remembers how “in Cuba, we had no defense and no way of resistance. One person thought himself white, another was a Negro, and there were plenty of misunderstandings among us” (89–90). This changed, he says, when the workers “realized that we were all alike, when we got together for the huelga” with the understanding that “all men are brothers” and “each weighs the same on the scales of poverty and injustice” (90, 91). Here, the threatened family collective is a more figurative one where men alone are visible. While Kaussen rightly describes how “the operations of capital” in the novel “provide . . . the ground for the imagining of global solidarity” (123), it is also true that the mechanisms of capitalism and white supremacy are what has kept Manuel and his “brothers” in Cuba from recognizing their familial col-lectivity in the first place. This more metaphorical danger to the family system is mirrored in how the demands of migrant labor left Haitian families separated by national boundaries during the US occupation, a time when “the Haitians who migrated to Cuba were overwhelmingly men” and when leaving a village and a mother and father behind, as Manuel does during the narrative’s backstory, would not have been uncommon (Casey 87). In this fragmentary climate, Masters of the Dew ends with a profoundly physical union of bodies—the bodies of a mother and child during pregnancy—reversing the family separation and suggesting that successive generations of activists might make such fractures permanently unnec-essary. An intersectional reading of Annaïse’s role posits the liberatory power of pregnancy as a multilayered means of neutralizing the capitalist and racist forces that cause psychic suffering in the world of the novel, especially for the women left behind by migration and death, through this particular form of Black love.

This way of reading Roumain opens up new space for re-reading some of Guillén’s poems that are very direct in their gaze at women’s bodies and


reproductive identities. In “Casa de vecindad” (“Neighborhood House”), a poem from Guillén’s 1958 collection, the speaker fixates on the process of childbirth as a figurative symbol of the future’s promise as captured in the sound of his “harsh-son guitar,” “a simple song of death and life / red as the sheets, as the thighs / . . . of a woman who’s just given birth” (Man-Making Words 21).23 This simile echoes repeated moments in Guillén’s earlier poems when the “thighs” and “wombs” of women take center stage, seemingly threatening to eclipse their greater three-di-mensionality. In the much earlier 1931 poem “Mujer nueva” (“The New Woman”), the object of the speaker’s attention is a “Negress” who is “[c]rowned with palms” (¡Patria o Muerte! 141) and “brings . . . / her solid loins” (The Translations 109) or “strong haunches” (“el anca fuerte”) (¡Patria o Muerte! 140) as a signal of her fertility. Here I am reminded of Cherise A. Pollard’s discussion of a Black Arts Movement-era poem by Odaro (Barbara Jones), in which the poem’s speaker refers to herself alternately as “Poverty’s little girl / Black Woman, Queen of the World” (qtd. in 178). If Odaro’s poem “gives the reader the impression that she is trying to define herself as every idealized female figure,” “Mujer nueva” evokes those same idealized images and gives a sense of some of their roots in the transnational aes-thetics of Black modernism (Pollard 178). Yet these sorts of images take on a dif-ferent significance when considered together with diasporic discourses of familial love. Unlike the “gendered understanding of racial uplift that foregrounded the aspirations of black and mulatto men” in Afro-Cuban societies of the 1920s such as the Cuban branches of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which also promoted a kind of respectability politics predicated on a “notion of racial backwardness” inherited from Cuban slavery (Guridy 73–4), Guillén’s poem envisions a process of social rebirth that relies on familial inheritances and ties stretching back into the pre-colonial and pre-slavery history of the diaspora. This rebirth is present, for instance, in “the deep rhythm of the drum” (¡Patria o Muerte! 141). The “solid loins” of the “Negress” allow for an egalitarian project of family construction that provides Guillén’s own Afro-Cuban answer to the late nineteenth-century Anglo-American concept of the “new woman,” herself a variation on the first-wave white feminist.

Even “Madrigal,” one of Guillén’s seemingly most controversial poems, reveals more complex contours when examined from this angle. Márquez’s English translation of “Madrigal” begins with the lines “Your womb is smarter than your head / smart as your thighs” (¡Patria o Muerte! 145), suggesting that the poem participates in the tradition of “devaluing black women as critical thinkers” that hooks describes. This particular poem is also famous for its reference to the Zambezi river, which emphasizes “the transcontinental mysteries of the African forest” (Benítez-Rojo 124). The laudatory reference potentially risks fetishizing or primitivizing African spaces in the same way that it threatens to essentialize the body of the woman herself. Nevertheless, as an Afro-Cuban “madrigal” that rewrites Eurocentric beauty standards (“the fierce black grace / of your naked body” [¡Patria o Muerte! 145]) and unseats Western society as the exclusive refer-ential center of the literary universe, the poem can also be read as a challenge to


the Western notions of logic, progress, intellectualism, and cultural superiority that formed so much of the rationale for slavery and imperialism and that specif-ically threatened the physical and psychic lives of women in the diaspora, making their experiences critically different from those of the idealized white woman. Incidentally, these lines are also some of Guillén’s most straightforward in terms of their potential for translation; the original poem’s reference to “la fuerte gracia negra / de tu cuerpo desnudo” lacks the politically important colloquialisms and dialect of earlier works like “Mi chiquita,” perhaps making it easier to render in English in a way that feels simultaneously true to both the literal meaning and the stylistic vision of that stanza.

On the other hand, the original version of the poem’s opening is subtly dif-ferent in Spanish than in Márquez’s translation, and the declaration “Tu vientre sabe más que tu cabeza”—literally “Your womb knows more than your head” rather than “Your womb is smarter than your head” (¡Patria o Muerte! 144, my italics)—seems to connote a deeper intergenerational knowledge that is far from devaluing women’s intelligence. Supporting this reading are the variety of similar references that Guillén makes to men rather than women in other works such as “El apellido” (“My Last Name”), a poem described as “a family elegy,” where it is strongly implied that Guillén himself is the speaker.24 There, he describes himself as having a kind of bodily knowledge of his ancestry that cannot be matched by intellectual understanding, not because he is not “smart” but because the details of his African heritage have been suppressed:

Are you sure it is my name?Have you got all my particulars?Do you already know my navigable blood,My geography full of dark mountains, Of deep and bitter valleysThat are not on the maps?. . .Have I not, then, a grandfather who’s Mandingo, Dahoman, Congolese?What is his name? Oh, yes, give me his name! (¡Patria o Muerte! 161, 163)

Read together, “Madrigal” and “El apellido” suggest that the woman’s womb “is smarter” or “knows more than [her] head” not because she is unintelligent but because her womb, like Guillén’s own “navigable blood,” connects her to and breathes new life into a long-desired, intergenerational family history that would otherwise be inaccessible because of the purposeful withholding of knowledge about African-descended people’s familial roots by white slave-owning societies in the Americas. Rather than being “disremembered and unaccounted for” like Toni Morrison’s Beloved in her symbolic relationship to the Middle Passage and its traumatic legacy (324), Guillén’s version of history keeps the Afro-Cuban woman from continually re-experiencing the trauma of “severance from [her] past” because she can access it through bodily memory, with the womb and its


physical promise of family life as the seat of this remembering (Wyatt 95). In these poems, then, familial love becomes a legacy that triumphs over erasure as the speaker trumpets “[m]y name without end, / made up of endless names; / my name, foreign, / free and mine, foreign and yours, / foreign and free as the air” (169). This is the metaphysical importance of diasporic women’s bodies to themselves rather than to others in Guillén’s verse: a promise of self-protection from “genderracial” trauma through intergenerational knowing. While the poem undoubtedly suggests an idealized vision of what recovery from trauma might look like, it becomes a poem about something much larger than misogynist gender binaries when examined in this way.

Of all three writers, Hughes is the one whose work most variously and concretely represents the experience of parenthood itself. Although I have commented on them in other essays, I would be remiss if I did not mention Hughes’s poems about mothers and children in The Dream Keeper, which imag-ine mothers as performing artistically rich feats to get their children to sleep and protesting if their children seem to waver in their resolve to face and defeat injustice. Generally published elsewhere first but specifically included in this collection for a child audience, poems like “Lullaby” and “Mother to Son” are assertive in showing Black familial love to a diverse body of child readers. They anticipate and reject the racist arguments of sources like the 1965 “Moynihan Report,” which attempted to pathologize the so-called “matriarchal” structures of African American families as a “crushing burden on the Negro male” that “retards the progress of the group as a whole” (qtd. in Spillers 58), and which Crenshaw held up as a particularly urgent example of the need for intersec-tionality as a concept. Other poems written more exclusively for adults, like the onomatopoetic “S-sss-ss-sh!”, take equal joy in mother-child relationships forged from “great adventures” of premarital sex undertaken without “marriage / Licenses and such,” which end in as much “fun” for “mother and child” as shock produced in “The neighbors– / and [the baby’s] grandma” (357, emphasis in the original).25

These particular works represent mothers and children in relationships of familial intimacy that are not interrupted by the presence of a father. In some poems, like “Mama and Daughter,” the story of a father’s leaving is told directly; in others, the father is simply missing. While these poems are resounding in their rejection of the idea of matriarchal households as “pathological,” they do not necessarily disrupt the stereotype of single-parent households traceable to “the horrendous impact of slavery on Black people,” as opposed to the historically val-idated evidence of “a thriving and developing family during slavery . . . involving wife, husband, children and frequently other relatives, as well as adoptive kin,” which Davis discusses in Women, Race, and Class (14). And as Tara T. Green has noted, “when both a father and a son are present” in Hughes’s writing, “tension between the two emerges which has a major impact on the son’s self-definition,” shaped by Hughes’s “intimate knowledge of this tension” through his pained and complex relationship with his own father (17). So there is a sense in which


Hughes claims his rightful ability to write from his own individual perspective without undoing the cluster of stereotypes that would surround Black families in the American media in the years to come. Yet overall, Hughes’s narratives and poems of family life and love project a vision of this love energizing and liberating both women and their children. Even in the story “Father and Son,” whose violent ending recalls histories like Margaret Garner’s in that mother Coralee sanctions her son’s suicide as a way to keep him from being lynched, Cora exhibits a kind of calm that comes from knowing “it was all right” once her son has been delivered from the worst of white violence by his death (254).26 There is a fraught, pained complexity in this envisioning of Black familial love and its multivalent strength. This is not the burdensome archetype of the strong Black woman, which was “cre-ated to validate the abuses black women endured and the resiliency they exhibited” (Adams 8); rather, it is an aura of love that promises to psychically protect Black mothers as well as their sons and daughters in the face of whiteness, even when it cannot physically save them.

tensions, discontinuities, and LiteRaRy inheRitances

As we have already seen, the texts that appear in this essay are not wholly unprob-lematic in their manner of representing Black women and families. Indeed, in addition to their general focus on women who fall into the categories of “mother/lover/partner,” some of these poems and narratives approach femininity within the diaspora in ways that anticipate troubling Black nationalist attitudes toward gender—including the “masculine bias” (Wilks 21) and “violent imagery” (Mullen 57) that poets like Nikki Giovanni would respond to in working “both within and against the men’s assumptions about the relationships between race and gender and art and politics” in their writings of the 1960s and 1970s (Pollard 173). Here we might again think of Roumain’s description of Manuel and Annaïse’s first sexual encounter, in which his “lacerating presence” elicits “an injured groan” and “unspeakable anguish” from her as well as “a terrible delight” (118). While Roumain’s euphemistic prose might not exactly capture the “latent rapist bravado” that Ntozake Shange’s narrator ascribes to so many of the Black Arts Movement-era male artists and writers who are characters in her 1982 novel Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo (85), there remains a palpable current of “violent imagery” in this scene. If anything, Hughes has received more positive attention from contemporary critics for his gestures of literary allyship with Black women, and perhaps this distinction between his work and that of Guillén and Roumain is deserved.27 Even in Hughes’s case, however, an insistent emphasis on heterosexual Black love in these particular works threatens to marginalize Black queerness as part of the political project of undermining white supremacist thought, action, and social architecture, in some sense obscuring the traces of Hughes’s own queer perspec-tive. While David A. Gerstner points out how Hughes, in his personal life, “did


not lower himself to an overdetermined homophobia to veil his sexual identity,” such veiling does seem to occur by default in these texts, which render Black love otherwise legible for readers while leaving unacknowledged the revolutionary power of queer relationships or queer self-love (27).

Still, there are also ways that all three of these male writers anticipate later inclinations in novels like Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo, whose intersectional vision refuses to allow retrograde assumptions about what feminism might look like to disrupt its reflections on the critical significance of diasporic “women’s work” or Black romantic love. I mention Shange here, although her writing post-dates that of Hughes and his collaborators by more than half a century in some cases, partly because as one of many examples of this turn in African diasporic women’s writing, her work helps to illustrate that poems like “Mujer nueva” and novels like Masters of the Dew are not alone in their response to default, non-in-tersectional, white feminist assumptions about how feminist identities should operate within the context of the diaspora. Just as Shange’s novel ends with Indigo finding a home in her work welcoming babies into the world as a midwife, while Cypress celebrates the prospect of marriage and Sassafrass the prospect of becom-ing a mother herself, the women in Guillén’s, Hughes’s, and Roumain’s writing draw strength from complex, diverse, actively chosen, and ultimately celebratory experiences of love and family-making. These experiences both shape and reflect a transnational and diachronic literary and cultural history, flying in the face of not only second-wave white feminist thought but also white supremacist attempts to fracture and overcome Black families and Black love.

The presence of Shange here at the close of this discussion gestures toward a final possibility for generating meaning from this approach to rereading Guillén, Hughes, and Roumain. Novels like Shange’s were also urgently important to the rising call for self-care and self-love among Black women that emerged in part as a way of countering the aggressive masculinism of much of Black radical politics in the preceding decades, not to mention the aggressive whiteness of so much of second-wave feminism. In Cypress’s embrace of her own body through an evolving and increasingly non-Western approach to dance, for instance, there are potent echoes of Audre Lorde’s formulation of self-care as “an act of political warfare” that equally anticipate Toni Morrison’s bold hope for Sethe: that she might begin to see herself as “her best thing” (“In the Realm” 251).28 Likewise, for Black women to love each other has long been recognized as a politically rev-olutionary act, whether within the context of families like Cypress, Sassafrass, and Indigo’s or in the bloom of romantic love. While these other forms of Black love with women at their center do not hold a shared place of prominence across Guillén, Hughes, and Roumain in the way that heterosexual love does, privileging Black love in rereading these three authors allows us to recognize their essential, transnational place in a longer literary history that, in the years to come, would increasingly insist on centering and honoring these all-important ideas.


Notes

1. The book cover for García’s Dreaming in Cuban features an image of a strikingly white- presenting young woman; she has blue eyes, pale skin, and light golden-brown hair with just a hint of wave. Meanwhile, the novel itself makes an explicit critique of the sort of colorism that the cover image seems to have been inspired by. It also complexly—if at times problematically—depicts santería and other inheritances of the diaspora, with one chapter title that explicitly calls the novel’s main characters “Daughters of Changó.”

2. Hughes was active in translating Guillén’s poetry after their first meeting in Cuba in 1930, and in 1948, he published the English-language collection of Guillén’s poems titled Cuba Libre in collaboration with Ben Frederic Carruthers. Hughes also collaborated with another translator, Mercer Cook, to produce what is still the authoritative English translation of Les gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew), which appeared in 1947. Roumain’s premature death in 1944 meant that he was unable to realize several translation projects, one of which was intended to focus on Guillén’s poetry. In 1942, however, Roumain did publish a translation of Guillén’s 1934 poem “Balada de los dos abuelos” (“Ballad of the Two Grandfathers”). See Fowler, Feracho.

3. Leary emphasizes that Guillén’s writing “contain[s] a great deal of sometimes subtle, and often explicit, criticism of his American colleagues,” and Kutzinski points out that “AfroCubanism, unlike the Harlem Renaissance, was not supported, financially or otherwise, by a nascent African American middle class surrounded by a host of wealthy white patrons” (135; 153). Guillén at some points was suspicious of Hughes’s responses to Afro-Cuban culture, which seemed exoticizing. See Guridy.

4. Eric Williams’s 1952 article “Four Poets of the Greater Antilles” examined the relationship between Guillén and Roumain while avoiding the problem of gender. In 1974, in her essay on all three writers, Cobb noted references to female sex work and domestic labor as commentaries on racial and economic issues without examining how they might reflect larger intersectional gender issues. In more recent studies like Scott’s 2005 article and Leary’s 2010 essay, a focus on problems of translation and collaboration takes precedence over these questions.

5. In capitalizing the term “Black” but not the term “white,” I seek to continually name whiteness and render it visible while also heeding the call for writers to “leav[e] white in lowercase” as “a righting of a long-standing wrong and a demand for dignity and racial equity”—something that will remain necessary “until we address the interactive effects of discrimination and subjugation on the lives of Black people and how they are baked into our policies, practices, and institutions” (Price).

6. See Freedman.

7. “Nikki-Rosa” proclaims that “Black love is Black wealth,” a fact that “no white person” ever “understand[s]” (53).

8. See Hollows.

9. Throughout this essay, I will refer to various English translations of Guillén’s and Roumain’s work. Where matters of translation create a notable discrepancy between versions of Guillén’s poems, I will specifically comment on those variations.

10. See Hochschild.

11. Davis is also the subject of a later poem of Guillén’s in which his speaker asserts that while she is a beautiful woman, her activist confrontations with white society—not her beauty—are what is at issue. See Claudette M. Williams.

12. Here, too, Hughes’s translation is distinctive; he renders “ella me tiene que llebá, / o traé” as “she’s bound to take me, / else bring in something” rather than “she got to take me / she got to bring me back” (Man-Making Words 44; The Translations 85; Man-Making Words 45). In omitting the “or” from Guillén’s original, the latter translation deemphasizes the possibility of the woman going out without her lover, even if she later brings him home with her. Hughes’s version, while somewhat “free with” the poem, better captures this element of autonomy in the woman’s life as it is imagined by her lover.


13. Because of this, I would disagree with Arrizón that “the mulata’s sensualized body [in Guillén] tells more about the speaking subject’s positionality of desire than about her experiences as a black woman” (145). In “Mulata,” the multiracial woman is posited as a desiring self as well as an object of desire, and her internalized racism says something decisive about her own experiences of race.

14. In his translation of “Mulata,” Hughes titles the poem “High Brown,” emphasizing through a common vocabulary the thematic current shared between the two texts, despite this reversal of some of their key details.

15. By making a Cuban sugarcane plantation the site of Manuel’s socialist coming-to-consciousness, Roumain links white capitalism and (US) neo-colonialism with the longer legacy of white European imperialism and slavery. See Arrizón.

16. Perhaps partly as a function of genre and partly because it does not feature the same colloquial-isms and dialect as Guillén’s early poetry, this translation of Roumain follows his original vocabulary much more closely than the translations of Guillén that I mentioned previously.

17. This is a concern that Guillén shared with Hughes; see Smart.

18. See Gilroy, Souffrant. The name Manuel is a variant of Immanuel, or “God is with us.”

19. Although Manuel has been violently attacked and murdered by an enemy from his own commu-nity, the novel frames this act of violence—like the greater feud between the families—as a product of these overarching forces.

20. Regarding the similar demands made on women of color by the feminist movement of that era, see Freedman.

21. It is critical to recognize this threat of whiteness while rejecting discourses that ignore the resil-ience and resistance of Black families.

22. Dash suggests that Roumain’s narrative “must be the only Haitian novel that makes no reference to any episode of Haiti’s history” in its “anxiety for establishing a truth beyond words”—yet the novel’s backstory revolves around its protagonist’s participation in a historically grounded pattern of transnational labor migration between Cuba and Haiti (76).

23. As Arrizón notes, “[m]usicality and dramatism are central elements in Guillén’s works” and often dovetail with his representations of Black and multiracial women (143).

24. Near the middle of the poem, the speaker refers to himself as “Nicolás” (165).

25. Another more allegorical example is “The Negro Mother,” in which Hughes “avoids the mas-culinism of those ‘protest’ poems of the New Negro Renaissance that would seem to have the most in common” with the text, instead assigning Black motherhood “an activist (as opposed to stoic) resistance to racism” (Smethurst 95–6).

26. Joyce makes a similar argument about the “other Cora” in The Ways of White Folks, the eponymous protagonist of the opening story “Cora Unashamed,” when she emphasizes Cora’s “ability to love” as well as her “wholesome attitude toward lovemaking and pregnancy” (104).

27. Contemporaries of Hughes did sometimes criticize him for his sex-positive portrayals of Black women, as in the poem “Red Silk Stockings”; see Schwarz.

28. This is Paul’s assertion in Beloved, but Morrison echoes the idea in this interview with Marsha Darling.


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Intersectional Feminism, Black Love, and the Transnational Turn

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Transcript of Intersectional Feminism, Black Love, and the Transnational Turn