poetic conversations: “Como partir de cero”: Sovereign Women and New Verbs — On Cristina Pérez Díaz’s “From the Founding of the Country”

To enter the world of this collection is to be guided by an expert navigator. Cristina Pérez Díaz leads readers through an Atlantic & Caribbean sea of islands, channeling a series of sovereign relationalities between languages, creation narratives, and ways of knowing, forging a love story between islands and the ocean that joins them, between sovereign women and their home islands.

The dedication, “Para mi país,” could be read as a literal call to Borikén, a symbolic call to a lover as a metaphorical country, or a call to Borikén as a beloved. We may understand it as all three at once, a signpost mapping the direction of the work. The dual epigraphs, from Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” and Manuel Ramos Otero’s Invitación al polvo, direct the reader to the key role of these poets in the collection. In Words Without Borders Pérez Díaz has translated Ramos Otero’s words, “Cada isla nos seduce, nos obliga a naufragar, / a llegar, llegar, llegar, a inventar un verbo nuevo,” as islands “enticing, inviting us to wreck” and “to arrive, arrive, arrive, to come up with a new verb.” Virginia Woolf also makes an appearance, adding the concept of elegy to the search for a new verb, as well as other influences like Thoreau, Livy, and Greek literature.

The collection is composed of the sections “The Garden of Limbs,” “Sunday Expeditions,” “The Future of Dust,” “Parenthesis,” “To Sail!” and “Canto Primero.” The first five sections, which range in length, are written primarily in English. The last section is written in Spanish. Pérez Díaz weaves the themes of Whitman and Ramos Otero throughout the poems, as she questions what it might mean to found a country, exploring the balance between sovereignty and erotics, poetry and theory, the archive and the actualities of history and futurity.

The voices of Whitman and Ramos Otero become transmuted into the voices of two women seeking new verbs and founding their own country. Ramos Otero’s José becomes Josephine, one of the women at the center of the collection. The narrator questions, “Why did I write this poem instead of hitting on Josephine? What megalomaniac decides to found a country because she has fallen in love? And what does love, of all things, have to do with the business of founding a country? If only she were able to yell, with lungs immense: To drive free! To love free! To dash reckless and dangerous!” (65). Juxtaposing love, sovereignty, the nature of verbs, and the exuberance of Whitman’s exclamation points, Pérez Díaz brings the reader into relationship with a decidedly female and English-speaking counterpart of Ramos Otero’s Invitación al polvo’s narrators.

Pérez Díaz makes intricate work of language, playing with multiple meanings only available in particular languages, and verbs that challenge the boundaries between tense and mood, and systems of past-present-future and those of completed or uncompleted verbs. Tenses shift in lines such as, “Later, later I stop. / In the future I stop. / Next Tuesday, maybe / Next Tuesday I’ll stop.” (25) Arms take on multiple meanings, as both weapons and limbs, “Arms, to be precise, will be used. / Our limbs will be used. // For she meant it in all earnest: / We are founding a country.” (50). Similarly, in English, unlike in Greek, the word “bush” can have particular anatomical meaning, such as in the following: “I’ll take sunset to bed / For coming back from dreams, we encounter objects / In strange places, just as Archilochus / Back then / Left his shield lying next to a bush / And said later I’ll find another one / I now take / Hold of something that is not in the Greek / Only in English can the word bush shield me / With that part of your body” (43). Greek idiosyncrasies also make their presence known: “One can fold the edges of anything into something / Else, prettier and softer in its definition / Kind, slow, sweet // And the total sum of the many-folded object / Is an ongoing aria // — For which the word in Greek is the synonym of law / but there are no laws on Sundays — / I sing, only / I sing // To sing is not a verb but an adjective of voice / Or it is movement contained in a noun: // Breath?” (38) Here, the narrator moves fluidly from language to language and one form to another, creating a sense of motion within and through modalities of grammar and meaning.

As Pérez Díaz and her narrators shift within language, the collection engages the nature of sovereignty. What forms does sovereignty take, for example, as a genre? “Perhaps she presumes all too quickly that the spheres that here concern her — the erotic and sentimental — are free from the dangers of the epic dynamics by which men have made history. Should I ask her to take a detour into theory? Or should I presume an informed reader?” (51) In what ways might sovereignty be compromised by adherence to the epic or to archives which are by definition incomplete, “Or should we take this more seriously and look for models in the recesses of libraries and archives and in the silences of the material record?” (61). Pérez Díaz contrasts the world of the mind and of the bed as creative spaces measured against the politics of bureaucrats and the vagaries of governments: “When all this founding of the country starts to resemble the language of bureaucrats, they can always run to bed.” (51) The founding of a country can also run into logistical issues: “It’s good that she has taken to reading theory and history. Not that history repeats itself just because someone does not know it, but founding a country is not something one does by stepping into a boat and reaching a territory and erasing the bad verses.” (58) Poetry may allow forms of sovereignty where founding a country or rowing a boat would wreck or run aground.

Pérez Díaz challenges readers to keep an ear trained to the cadences of Manuel Ramos Otero, and also the specificities of her central characters. As the narrator reminds us, “This poem tells of two women and of two women alone: Josephine and I. It is a particular task, not engaged at all with universals.” (51) The narrator argues for the specificity of Josephine and for the right to the bed and to sleep, “But you and I, we will find time for sleeping / Camping on the far edges of our land / We’ll claim our sovereign right to slumber” (44). What does slumber encompass here? Is it the right to stay in bed and sleep? The right to read theory and imagine a country? The right to found a country that is always in a stage of being created and brought into being? We can find all of these possibilities and more.

Echoes of Ramos Otero appear throughout the collection, through word choice, cadence, phrasing, and affect. Readers can feel the presence of Ramos Otero in Pérez Díaz’s translation, adding a specifically female narratorial voice and view towards sovereignty. The opening of the collection embodies this juxtaposition of elements: “Every dead Sunday we grew a garden of limbs. / Every dead Sunday a garden of daggers in our thighs. / Not to be remembered / That every Sunday we neglected this labor / Of founding a country. / And stayed in bed.” (13) These lines call back to Ramos Otero’s Invitación al polvo, and Pérez Díaz’s translation of “Onto Dust We Shall Come”: “I love reality that gathers us in bed / wearing off our tongues with sea urchins, / growing daggers in the garden of our thighs, / every dead Sunday between our bodies.” Beds and Sundays proliferate throughout Pérez Díaz’s collection, including the last section, “Canto Primero,” which navigates an island country both in ruins and constantly in a state of being founded. The title “Canto Primero” is both an unusual choice for the last section of a work, and may also remind the reader of Dante, or of the connections between song, poetry, and opera.

This last section leaves the reader with haunting and visceral images, forever Sundays marked by ruins: “Aquí siempre es domingo, / aquí hay abundancia de fosas, / donde podría sembrarse, / pero no, / esto no es un cementerio junto al mar, / tampoco hay que creer que son jardines,” (86) where one might emerge from one’s fog to learn the trills of birds, “no sabemos, atolondradas, relentecidas, / tan sumidas en la niebla de nuestros mutuos párpados, / cómo leer, cómo cantar digo, / el trino cacofónico de estas aves de la mañana — ” (86). Animals surround the narrators here: “ — Los animales nos rodean, lo sabemos, / — por el murmullo con que invaden la atmósfera / — y no es el mar, / — o no tan solo, / — lo que ruge acompasando este caminar incierto.” (88) The sound of the sea accompanies them, and rooms open into other dimensions, “el cuarto de visitas, cerrado por días abre / otra dimensión, como partir de cero.” (93). The narrators, the animals, and the weeds begin continuously to found their own country, from within a garden, “al interior de los jardines, donde el sol / siempre es clemente y la lluvia cae en forma de cortinas, / recordatorio lúcido que siempre hay un afuera,” (97). Inside this dimension of forever gentle sun and curtains of rain, the humans and their companions stay ready, forever founding their sovereign lands.

What is sovereignty if not a form of love? What is translation if not a navigation of other ways of knowing and being? In From the Founding of the Country, Cristina Pérez Díaz translates Manuel Ramos Otero as landscape and affect, a feeling of floating, of being driven by ocean, of launching and becoming airborne, or ocean borne. Where Ramos Otero reminds us that we are of the dust and visceral, combining alchemies of earth, mud, and limbs, verbs rooted in terre and polvo, mud, dust, earth, Pérez Díaz calls to both Ramos Otero and the exuberance of Whitman, as well as to futurities of islands.

Like Ramos Otero, Pérez Díaz invites us into the concept of shipwrecking on islands. Is to shipwreck to plunge or sink into the ocean before reaching one’s destination? Or is it to become one with the island? Is to shipwreck thus to become stranded or to become island kin? To translate from Ramos Otero, the word “naufragar,” which could be understood as “to shipwreck,” “to sink,” derives from “naufragus,” from “nāvis” (“ship”) + “frangō” (“break”). In a figurative sense, it could mean “to go under,” by metaphorical extension — “to break” as waves break, or “to break” as rhythm and hip hop break beat — to enter the rhythm from the music. The ocean too has its own rhythm, its own pulse and current, its own desires and motivations. So Borikén and its Nuyorican Diaspora have their own rhythm and pulse, from Pedro Pietri and Miguel Piñero to Alynda Segarra and iLe (Ileana Cabra Joglar), from the Young Lords to the Taíno Movement. In From the Founding of the Country, Cristina Pérez Díaz brings English speaking readers a taste of Manuel Ramos Otero’s unique voice and also her own singular forms of language and sovereignty, introducing necessary voices and also relationships between English and Spanish.

poetic conversations: “Como partir de cero”: Sovereign Women and New Verbs — On Cristina Pérez… was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.