Currency

Juan Carlos Flores traffics in poems, written as well as performed.  They are his currency. 

As do writers in most places, Juan Carlos Flores expresses an occasional preference for actual currency to be his currency.  But there it is.

In the following poem from The Counterpunch (and Other Horizontal Poems), Flores closes his first and last sentences with the phrase “cualquier moneda dura.”  My translation, “any currency beating our peso,” comes less from the literal starting point of his three words than from our conversations about how the poem captures a spirit of economic frustration common in recent decades on the island.  That frustration must be clear in order for Flores’ performative assertions to land effectively at the end of his first and last sentences, especially given the many pauses embedded within them.

In the wake of the translation process, I'm now encountering ideas that articulate more of the poem's social power.  There are forces in poetry that translators may intuit when rendering the words, without yet seeing their full contours.  This temporal component of the lived experience of translation need not compromise the translation on the page. 

Rather the poems grow in concept, posterior to the writing, without any change to the translator's words on the page.  Perhaps translators of cultural expression like poetry are most likely to experience this expanded temporality, as types of translators go.  Defamiliarization, mystery, desires/procedures for enlightenment (as well as the denial of these expectations), and the design of writing/images intended to be re-read multiple times play into various forms of artmaking.  The following text is a good starting point for seeing how poetry triggers the mind differently with time.

The smith

Metalworker, talkative through someone else’s mouth, says the sacred mouth Ifá, that my deity, governing spirit, is Oggún, but I say it’s the dollar, any currency beating our peso.

Though he may still have teeth / a man-eating tiger is always a sclerotic tiger / if the clientele were not terribly afraid of the vicinity / where there are no longer comrades / because they offer no camaraderie /but to besiege / laying siege / to feed their litters / though he may still have teeth / a man-eating tiger is always a sclerotic tiger / which has been of little benefit to tigritude /

Metalworker, talkative through someone else’s mouth, says the sacred mouth Ifá, that my deity, governing spirit, is Oggún, but I say it’s the dollar, any currency beating our peso.

El enrejador

Trabajador del metal, a través de otra boca parlera, dice la sagrada boca Ifá, que mi divinidad, la rectora, es Oggún, pero yo digo que es el dólar, cualquier moneda dura.

Aunque conserve algún diente/ un tigre cebado siempre es un tigre esclerótico/ si la clientela no tuviera un miedo atroz al vecindario/ donde no hay ya compañeros/ porque nunca acompañan/ sino los asediantes/ porque asedian/ de cuál modo sustentaría a la prole/ aunque conserve algún diente/ un tigre cebado siempre es un tigre esclerótico/ de poco sirvió la tigritud/

Trabajador del metal, a través de otra boca parlera, dice la sagrada boca Ifá, que mi divinidad, la rectora, es Oggún, pero yo digo que es el dólar, cualquier moneda dura.

Based on our 2010 conversation about translating this poem, Flores wanted it to be reasonably clear, as his poetry moved into English and abroad, that his phrasing in this poem surpasses a basic US/Cuba contrast in currencies.  To my mind the wonder of this poem -- for Flores creates tiny pockets of wonder throughout the book -- lies in its divination of a feeling:  a vague awareness that currency expands and contracts across the bounds of secular vocabulary. 

When Flores composed the poem it was not uncommon for tourists to arrive in Cuba with Euros as well as dollars, used within the unusual dual economy established by the Cuban state to cope with economic crisis. Locals with little or no access to foreign currencies used a Cuban national currency in stores for citizens, but it seemed powerless in stores with goods reserved for purchase in other currencies, including a “convertible” Cuban currency (CUC), which the Cuban government attempted to set more on par with the dollar and Euro.

The visible flow of international currencies functioned as reminders to average Cuban citizens that they were not sheltered from the imbalances of  globalization affecting other places, despite a tendency among outsiders to imagine the island as inhabiting a separate space in world history (say, one frozen in 1959 or afloat in some Marxist-insular alt universe).   In the dollarized/CUC spaces such as stores and hotels, goods and services expanded for  people with access to the right currency, while they shrank for the people left out.

This pragmatic phenomenon dividing island society, setting people into “their” places, symbolizes various facets of the Cuban relation to the modern world.  In terms of the carefully selected details Flores put into his poem, I'm  intrigued by statements from Stephan Palmié, author of an impressive work on contemporary Afro-Cuban religious practice.[1]  Palmié claims that in the wake of 1989, confronted with international political realignments and attendant economic crisis, the island became “a symbolic universe in which foreign currency nowadays exerts functions that are as magical in their everyday effects, as they are hoped to be effective in a sense that development economics (whether of socialist or cryptocapitalist persuasion) would seem to predict” (265). 

How so?  Boundaries are moving between what is perceived as real and what is perceived as irreal.  For Palmié, as a scholar of religion, this motion is about “the extent to which moral artifacts such as witchcraft, history, the state, hard currency, or the gods come to structure social praxis that endows them with their capacity to affect people’s lives and so, for all practical purposes, to become real” (266). 

Afro-Cuban religious practice, previously suspect and disavowed in public discourses, gained visibility and partial new acceptance in recent decades. It did so within a state that had taught its citizens to be suspicious of religion as a source of mystification and dissociation distracting from the real.  Yet as Palmié's meditations suggest, religion is not the exclusive site of magic, mystification and dissociation, nor is it the only binding social force left.  Religion competes with the practical/magical powers of currency for a hold over two terrains at once, the meaningful planes of reality and irreality.

Flores blends cultural literacies and practices in his precise little poems.  Mentioned in “The smith / El enrejador,” Oggún is a deity associated with metal work in various Afro-Cuban religious systems (practices circulating across visible racial lines in contemporary Cuba), while Ifá divination is particularly associated with the western African traditions for which Cuban culture is so famous.

Placing currency alongside Ifá divination, Flores’ poem sniffs at the boundaries of relevance in everyday life.  It seems to engage Palmié's assertion that a major issue in contemporary social life, the question of where reality stops and irreality takes over, manifests through the blurring of class division and its symbolic discourses into an ongoing navigation of Afro-Cuban religious legacies.  In that blurring, Cubans negotiate new possibilities and failings for social consciousness today, and they perform acts of association and disassociation.   I propose that the flow of Flores’ poem, “The smith / El enrejador,” gestures at that fluctuation within the constraints of its tiny canvas.

 The poem appears in our bilingual edition of The Counterpunch (And Other Horizontal Poems) from the University of Alabama Press.  See more on Flores here, here, here, and so forth.[2][3]

[1] Wizards and Scientists:  Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition.  Durham:  Duke UP, 2002.

[2] Like here.  In addition to Flores' poems, this issue also includes my short article situating Flores and his fellow poet Angel Escobar in the community of Alamar (on the eastern side of greater Havana).

[3] Also here.