/ARTS WEEKLY/ LITERATURE-CUBA: Poet’s Sullied Reputation Recast

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Feb 4 2004 (IPS) - Nineteenth-century poet, essayist and playwright Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda is cited as one of the founders of modern feminism in Cuban texts on art and literature. But her literary reputation is only now gaining lustre.

The name Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda is remembered in one of Havana’s leading theatres and as a street in her hometown of Camagüey, 570 km from the capital. But her works remain either little known or hardly appreciated.

“Even 190 years after her birth, the critics have not done her justice,” says Roberto Méndez, a Cuban poet and a member of the jury for this year’s Casa Prize, awarded annually by the Cuban cultural institution, Casa de las Américas.

“A woman who at one time signed her work ‘La Peregrina’ (the traveller), today continues to wander, without a place of her own in Cuban letters,” Méndez told IPS.

While in Spain Gómez de Avellaneda is recognised as one of the authentic voices of romanticism and as a precursor to modern feminism, on this Caribbean island where she was born she has been the target of severest criticism.

“She was too much woman for her era, and that fact was assimilated in Spain, where she had greatest success, but not in Cuba,” says Méndez, winner of the Nicolás Guillén international poetry prize in 2001.

“La Avellaneda” or “Tula”, as she was often called, was born Mar. 23, 1814 to a wealthy family of Spanish immigrants who had settled in what was then the villa of Santa María in Puerto de Príncipe, Cuba.

At age nine she wrote her first poems, and at 22 she travelled to Spain with her family. In 1839 she moved to Madrid, where she was presented to the society of artists and began to associate with such famed romantic authors as José de Espronceda and José Zorrilla.

The ‘criolla’ (born in the Americas to Spanish parents) lived most of her life in Spain, delved into journalism and theatre, and wrote poetry and novels until her death, Feb. 1, 1873, a victim of diabetes.

José Martí, Cuba’s national hero and literary figure, was harsh with La Peregrina, as indicated by his 1875 essay in which he draws a parallel between Gómez de Avellaneda and fellow Cuban poet Luisa Pérez de Zambrana, in a manner not so becoming to the former.

“La Avellaneda is daringly big; Luisa Pérez is sweetly timid,” wrote Martí, also a poet and novelist.

“There is no woman in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda: everything announced in her a potent and mannish spirit… there were no tender gazes for her eyes, always filled with a strange glow of domination. She was something like a threatening cloud.”

According to Martí, the pains of Pérez de Zambrana were tears; those of Gómez de Avellaneda were fierceness. “La Avellaneda did not feel human pain: she was bigger and more powerful. Her grief was a rock; that of Luisa Pérez, a flower,” he wrote.

The passage of time was even more relentless against La Peregrina. In the book “Cuban Poets of the 19th Century”, author Cintio Vitier lamented that he had nothing to say about the poetry of the woman from Camagüey.

“I confess my failure and with regret I turn a page of La Avellaneda without having been able to receive any sort of lesson from her, not even the annihilating power that the most sure and solid words often have,” wrote Vitier.

“Her plays add nothing to the Cuban stage,” said the late theatre critic Rine Leal, and fellow critic José Antonio Portuondo in 1973 launched his thesis on “the dramatic neutrality of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda.”

But, argues Méndez, “A calmer analysis of her life and work leads us to more solid assessments.”

In his opinion, La Peregrina’s poetry is “the most solid and modernising” of her era, after that of fellow Cuban José María Heredia. “She very skilfully cultivates the most atypical poetic metres, anticipating (Nicaraguan) Ruben Darío.”

“She was one of the leading figures of Spain’s theatre scene at the time, and she was successful in all theatre genres: comedy, tragedy, and the drama of the bourgeois courtier.”

The idea of “neutrality” also fails to hold up, according to Méndez, if one takes into account the times in which the author lived.

“The Baltasar Tragedy” (1859) is a questioning of the mechanisms of power and of the context of confrontation between a decadent monarchy and an enslaved people. “In spite of this book, there are those who say she didn’t get involved with politics,” he said.

Also in this vein are “Sap” (1841), a criticism of slavery through the love story between a black slave and a white woman, and “Guatimozín: Last Emperor of Mexico” (1846), in which she advocates for the independence of the Americas (Cuba was still a Spanish possession).

Méndez says that La Avellaneda “lived romanticism in a very authentic way.”

In a society as conservative as was Spain’s in that era, she had an active love life that she did not hide or disguise, and when she wanted to, she had a daughter outside of marriage.

“‘The Traveller’ did not say it was romantic, she lived all the dangers of romanticism.”