The Guerilla Tongue": the Politics of Resistance in Puerto Rican Poetry
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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Open Access Dissertations 2-2012 The ueG rilla Tongue": The olitP ics of Resistance in Puerto Rican Poetry Natasha Azank University of Massachusetts Amherst, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Azank, Natasha, "The ueG rilla Tongue": The oP litics of Resistance in Puerto Rican Poetry" (2012). Open Access Dissertations. 512. https://doi.org/10.7275/5rm4-z450 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/512 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “THE GUERILLA TONGUE”: THE POLITICS OF RESISTANCE IN PUERTO RICAN POETRY A Dissertation Presented by NATASHA AZANK Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2012 English © Copyright by Natasha Azank 2012 All Rights Reserved “THE GUERILLA TONGUE”: THE POLITICS OF RESISTANCE IN PUERTO RICAN POETRY A Dissertation Presented by Natasha Azank Approved as to style and content by: _______________________________________ Deborah Carlin, Chair ____________________________________ Rachel Mordecai, Member ___________________________________ Martín Espada, Member _______________________________________ Agustin Lao-Montes, Member ____________________________________ Joseph Bartolomeo, Department Head Department of English DEDICATION For my family. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the support and guidance of so many people. I thank my chair, Professor Deborah Carlin, for her support and encouragement over the years, for her thorough reading and honest feedback, and for challenging me to think more critically about my project. I extend gratitude to Professor Martín Espada, who also served on my area exam committee and who introduced me to the verses of Julia de Burgos, Clemente Soto Vélez, and Naomi Ayala. Thank you to Professor Rachel Mordecai, who enthusiastically came on board without knowing my previous work and who encouraged me to take my analyses one step further. I also thank Professor Agustin Lao-Montes in the Sociology department for serving as my outside committee member. Thank you all for working with me long-distance and for helping me become a better writer and scholar. I also want to extend my gratitude to several others who have guided me throughout my years in graduate school. Thank you to Professor Stephen Clingman for serving as the chair of my area exam committee and for all of the knowledge he has shared with me, especially in the field of transnational studies. I extend thanks to Professor Asha Nadkarni, who took on an independent study with me during her first semester at UMass and whose door was always open. I thank Deirdre Vinyard for her commitment to and mentorship during my years on the Writing Program’s Diversity Committee and for helping me see connections between my own research and teaching. I also want to thank Wanda Bak in the English department for her gracious support and for helping me navigate the administrative side of things. Professor Bonnie TuSmith at Northeastern University introduced me to the rich world of ethnic American Literature v and mentored me throughout my master’s program, and I thank her for teaching me to pursue the literature I am passionate about. I never would have applied to graduate school without the encouragement of Professor Shelia Smith-McKoy, whose course in Caribbean Literature at Vanderbilt University piqued my interest in studying literature more rigorously. I am grateful to the English Department for an Opportunity and Diversity Fellowship during my first year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A few words cannot express the amount of gratitude I have for my family, who have always supported me. Thank you to my parents, Ricardo and Lucy, for supporting me in so many ways during this process and for believing in me even, and especially, when I did not believe in myself. Dad – thank you for your financial and emotional support, and for always brightening my spirits. Mom – thank you for your endless hours of listening and for teaching me how to persevere. I express gratitude to my sisters, who have been constant pillars of love, guidance, and friendship. Karina Azank enthusiastically, and often with very short notice, read drafts of every chapter and provided invaluable feedback as to how I could shape my readings into stronger and more cohesive arguments. Thank you for staying up late to read my work, for talking through ideas with me, and for motivating me to keep going. I also thank Yashira Azank Anderson for her unwavering support and belief in me, for all of her much-needed care packages, and for making me laugh when I often wanted to cry. I am fortunate to have a wonderful circle of friends, without whom I probably would not have finished this degree. Amber Caron and Seth Archer have been with me since my first day of graduate school and they are more like family than anything else. Thank you both for reading my work, sharing ideas, and perhaps most importantly, for vi taking care of me over the years. Thank you to my dear friends and fellow UMass comrades, Anjali Kholsa Mullany and Jaclyn Wasneski, who knew how to listen, how to make laugh, and how to motivate me to keep going. I also want to thank Edward Mullany for reading my work and for giving me insightful feedback as well as encouragement. Several classmates and friends at UMass also read my work in the early stages and encouraged me to keep on writing; many thanks to Amanda Carr, Kajsa Henry, Linh Dich, Colin Enriquez, and Sarah Stanley. I reserve my final thanks for my partner, Trevor Atwood, without whom this dissertation would not have been possible. He talked through ideas with me and gave me poignant critiques to push my thinking further; he cooked while I wrote and edited, and he lovingly pushed me out the door to the library. Thank you for your constant love and encouragement, and for believing in me. vii ABSTRACT “THE GUERILLA TONGUE”: THE POLITICS OF RESISTANCE IN PUERTO RICAN POETRY FEBRUARY 2012 NATASHA AZANK, B.A., VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY M.A., NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Deborah Carlin This dissertation examines how the work of four Puerto Rican poets – Julia de Burgos, Clemente Soto Vélez, Martín Espada, and Naomi Ayala – demonstrates a poetics of resistance. While resistance takes a variety of forms in their poetic discourse, this project asserts that these poets have and continue to play an integral role in the cultural decolonization of Puerto Rico, which has been generally unacknowledged in both the critical scholarship on their work and the narrative of Puerto Rico’s anti-colonial struggle. Chapter One discuses the theoretical concepts used in defining a poetics of resistance, including Barbara Harlow’s definition of resistance literature, Edward Said’s concepts of cultural decolonization, and Jahan Ramazani’s theory of transnational poetics. Chapter Two provides an overview of Puerto Rico’s unique political status and highlights several pivotal events in the nation’s history, such as El Grito de Lares, the Ponce Massacre, and the Vieques Protest to demonstrate the continuity of the Puerto Rican people’s resistance to oppression and attempted subversion of their colonial status. Chapter Three examines Julia de Burgos’ understudied poems of resistance and argues that she employs a rhetoric of resistance through the use of repetition, viii personification, and war imagery in order to raise the consciousness of her fellow Puerto Ricans and to provoke her audience into action. By analyzing Clemente Soto Vélez’s use of personification, anaphora, and most importantly, juxtaposition, Chapter Four demonstrates that his poetry functions as a dialectical process and contends that the innovative form he develops throughout his poetic career reinforces his radical perspective for an egalitarian society. Chapter Five illustrates how Martín Espada utilizes rich metaphor, sensory details, and musical imagery to foreground issues of social class, racism, and economic exploitation across geographic, national, and cultural borders. Chapter six traces Naomi Ayala’s feminist discourse of resistance that denounces social injustice while simultaneously expressing a female identity that seeks liberation through her understanding of history, her reverence for memory, and her relationship with the earth. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Burgos, Soto Vélez, Espada, and Ayala not only advocate for but also enact resistance and social justice through their art. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………….v ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………….viii CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………1 “Puerto Rico Is In You”: The Poetries of Burgos, Soto Vélez, Espada and Ayala…………………………………………………………….……………5 Literature of Resistance and Decolonization……………………………………...7 Transnational Poetry…………………………………………………………......10 From Nuyorican to “Diasporican”: Critical Analyses of Puerto Rican Poetry…..14 II. PUERTO RICO’S HISTORY OF RESISTANCE………………………………30