Tuesday, April 12, 2005

victor hernandez cruz

I actually met Victor Hernandez Cruz once. A good friend of mine introduced us. I read him one of my poems and he told me he liked my stuff which made me smile for a good long time. :) His latest book Maraca, New and Selected Poems, 1966-2000 actually really fits in with Planet Grenada. I need to study him some more. I believe his wife is Moroccan and he has actually spent a certain amount of time living in the Middle East being influenced by Muslim culture. Even the title of his latest book is in part a pun (Maraca/Morocco) which plays with this link. One of the points he was trying to get across was that both the Caribbean and the Middle East are places where parallel mixings of different races and cultures took place.

In at least one interview he is quite explicit about these connections and influences:

VHC: There’s a Brazilian guy in Italy who wrote a thesis based on my work and sent it to me. He’s fascinated with Ginsberg and all the Beat stuff. I told him thank you, you know. But I didn’t like it much because it’s full of cliché. And there’s another guy, Francisco Cabanillas, who has done critical stuff about my work, a professor who’s writing some kind of book. Cabanillas comes closer to understanding what I'm doing, puts me in perspective with the literature of the island of Puerto Rico. But there are some things that I am about that critics tend to ignore.

turnrow: What are they missing?

VHC: For one example, no one has asked me about my influences from Islamic culture. I read the Islamic-Arabic philosophers, thinkers, poets.... About the fact that I lived in Morocco for a period of time and the effect that would have on my writing, the connections with Islam that I’ve seen in Spain. No critic has ever written about that.



I need to dive into Cruz's work alot more but at some points at least the connections are actually really obvious and explicit for example:

Islam

The revelation of the revelation
The secrets offered in rhythms
The truth of heaven entering through
chorus
Yourself runs into yourself
Through a crack of understanding
As if Falcons landed on a
shoulder of your thoughts
With a letter from your guardian
angel -
Like Carribean mambo dancers
The whirling dervishes go off
spinning into the arms of light
Across a floor of endless squares
and circles
Calligraphy brushed into tiles
Painted inside the names of God
Love
Compassion.

No comments: