From a islander´s log of unmoving navigation

              D 0 5 S I E R : ISLHNDS
For C^lii(]iii Quinli'i'o aiirl Mariano áe Santa
Ana
"... bi'cdiisc irc iwed irliul yuii haré li'fl
orcr..." [B. (laiíascü de Figucroa. Comedia
tlel r(\"e])iniiento.]
PREAMBLE
What is beliind the title of mv essav? Al
least two or three things. In the first
place, il mentions the notes of sonieone
who practises or experiences the paradox
of "stationai'v navigation'. At the same
time, what does "islander' [insulano
-/ralis.] reallv mean? There may be
objeetions ovcr my disdain for other
tenns [insulano, instilar, isleño -Iraiix.].
all of thcni nieaninn; "a native or
inhabitanl of an island', and my cholee
of a certainly questionable term. But I
miist State that even if it doesn't appear
in the Diccionario de la Real Academia
Española, this in no wav imderniines its
aulhoiity, since it does appear amongst
the maniiscripts of Alonso Qiiesada -one
of the Canary Islands' inost
representative modern poets- who iised
it in the title of an interesting anthology
of his work.
Tlic word "islander" [insulario
-Irans.] is an enidite coinage. To the
meaning "a native or inhabitant of an
island" the suffix -ario adds "nuances
that bespeak a concrete reality', such as
that of "a fragmented geographical
space or whole", i.e. "an archipelago ',
but alsü, and especially, "things
belonging to an island and the
psvchologv of island peopie". Of roinse.
if this defiíiilion liad resolved the enigma
of the Canary Islander, then many
people would have been spared hours of
refleclion and writing.
I daré to propose thal. while this
islander s notes concern the creation of a
poetics and are confined within the
liniils of personal experience, ihey might
be enibraced, to some degree, by other
writers and even artists from the same
territory. At all events, the fact that I
was not born on the islands -though I
have lived there since cliildliood- obliges
me lo speak wilh greal caiuion. lesl 1
should not express mv opinión about
this business. Aside from this confession.
I believe the concept of a "Canary
Islander " cannot be classified as an
ellmicallv puré H|iecimen, since it is the
product of the fruilful biológica!
combination of ihe criollo and the
iiicslizo.
Froman
Islander's Log
of Unmoving
REGARDING THE POINT OF
DEPARTURE OF THIS ESSAY
The aflernoon that Orlando Brillo callod
me by telephone to invite me to takc
part in this seminar I had just finished
the draft of a poeni which, as such,
remains to atlain its final verbal and
aesthetic shape. Its génesis had been as
foUows: I was in ihal zone of Las
Canteras that is known as la Puntilla,
almost on the rocks themselves; the
waves, in quick siiccession, climbed onto
llie sliore ihal was al my back, and that
])lace -fríHiuented bv me since my
childhood games- gave the impression of
being a ship which had - a s it always
would- mv body as the figurehead on
the bow. I wanted to record a dual
experience; that of inimobilitv witliiu
movemeiit, and ihal of change within
stasis. In addition there was another
which consisted, as Seamus Heaney
nñght sav- of the adherence of the
inenlal and the geographical [1]. I
believe llial the readiiig of the lext.
though it is onlv a drafl. will stiffice lo
shed some light on anv shadowv regions
of what I have had to say thus lar.
/Fe scarcely inove, bul the Lüand
coiisents lo I he iiiipressioii of the
journey. reflecled in I he passing vlouds.
I ain ihe stevedore ndio cheeks ihe
dislribnlion oj ihe ireiglit oj ihe Jreighl
of dreanis in the deep holds: and ihen,
on the deck of the seajront ¡¡roiuenade,
stretches and .sings.
What is it thal the gulls
annoiincey 11 hat cisión do they
prefiguren
Shades musí risit iis, and the .y)irit
break.s inlo the depihs of the light. and
trarerses the Jlaine, and suslains the
frozen heart of the Mystery.
I lean on the successire sheet o/
the sea, I wish to retain ¡hese signs
which endlessly combine where the
catch is only the net flnng to the
innltiple, indecipherable roice.
I would have been indecently
happv if the fact of living on an island
had gratified me only with the gifts
corresponding to an oíd niagic. I am not
al all certain whether in anv other place
than that of which I speak a greater
amount of fable is juxtaposed or
stiperimposed: the Columns of Ilerctiles.
the Dark Sea, the Inferno, Atlantis. the
Elysian Fields, the garden of ihe
Hespérides, the Fortúnate Isles... Il
cannot be surprising that in a poem that
is almost a variant of the one I have just
recited, and that is entitled "De quodam
Cristophoro Colombo menlis ' ("On a
Christopher Cohmibus of the Mind")
and concerns an island iinder sail, I say
that we wander "in the centre of a
multiplied sea", and that, attracled
strongly by myth, we live always in the
doniain of the iniminent, "in the omen
of an endless vovage lowaids the Reab .
In childhood we learned thal an
island is "a piece of land entirely
surrounded by water"; but today we
know that such a definition is worth
liltle, perhaps fitting to describe, for
instance, a desert island. I mean that the
definition of island is inseparable from
otitside or extrinsic aspects of the
contents in its lexicographical confines; I
refer to factors of the geographical,
historie, economic, social, and cultural
situation, among others. which explain,
en passant. the concept of insularity,
whicli Gilbert Durand termed an
engramme which, for some
psvchoaualvsls. "woiild be enough to
psychologicalK sepárate Catholic Ireland
from the l'^nglish. Pi-otestant "conlineiil
[2]. To live on an island is also, and
fundamenlally, lo feel more or less
involved in island afí'airs that afí'ect us
as inhabitants . Or as Heidcgger might
say: "to the extenl that I am on an
island, I undersland whal an island is". I
have onlv just learnl that there exist
(ENKO AaANTICO DE AStt M00£«NO
nearly half a million islands on our
planet, and that if it were not for the
identity given to them by the people that
dwell on them, all would, in theory, be
equal.
The factors enumerated so far will
aheady have suggested the focus of my
approach to my participation in this
seminar, is necessarily different from
that adopted by the inhabitant of a
continent, since such a person would
certainly have been predisposed to
ideahse the island. It is not surprising
that Torcuato Tasso located the Carden
of Armida in the Canaries; it is possible
that Ronsard was thinking of the
Canaries when, in his poem "The
Fortúnate Isles", he confessed to a desire
to escape from his country and settle in
the islands.
I perceive the Island like the
mirror in which I contémplate my
historicity within the framework of the
others as a collective. The Island is the
place where we may once have thought
we might glimpse the neamess of
Platonic archetypes, with the passing of
time we now see the reflections of the
shade of their ironical specifics.
Parodying an exegete of T. S. Eliot, I
could mention the "place of experience"
and the extreme oscillation of the quality
of visión; whether it is the space in
which the innocent visión represents
myth, or the space where the
understanding of reality represents hell.
For the Other, these islands were until
recently the lands of great exiles From
the view point of the long apprenticeship
of existence, the island where the events
of my Ufe unfold is a realistic
representation of a labyrinth -the
tightest space contains the longest road
to wisdom But the labyrinth also
represents an underground realm, to
which 1 shall retum later on.
ICONOGRAPHY OF SELF-REFERENTIALITY
In a pamphlet I published some years
ago, entitled Septenario, I state that
Canary Islands writing and art lack
innocence, and that their main
exponents have never ceased wondering
about their cultural origins. As with
other island writers in the past, 1 was
setting aside a heap of questions which,
because of fate or expressive coherence,
had to emerge at a time of personal
crisis or maturity.
For each person there awaits the
special shape of the cultural life in
which he is immersed. The Canary
Islander has had to shoulder with
unequal interest the two currents of
tradition: on the one hand, the tradition
imposed by the conquest of the Islands,
which can be interpreten as a set of
ideological paradigms, with a Spanish
stamp that is identified with the
foundations of Western civilisation or
European culture; on the other hand, an
"intemal" or immediate tradition
resulting from the actions of different
agents upon this Hispanic discourse -I
am referring to the constant presence of
an impenetrable past which, prior to the
Conquest, incites us to approach its
enigma; it is a sentiment that is made
stronger by the lingering Atlantic
isolation and the features of its specific
destiny. These circumstances help
explain the incompleteness of the design
of the islanders' identity.
This situation should be
described from two perspectives: the
first is the loss of a central reference
point - a notion to which 1 shall shortly
retum; and the second is the gradual
attainment of "self-referentiality
-another notion which 1 shall address
forthwith, although only briefly.
By self-referentiality we know
that tradition appears as revealed by the
action of a telos, a melding of the
sameness of a language. And this
language, forged by the suspicion of a
being-in-the-world-in-spite-of-the-world,
erupts to say in a fissure of time
that violently brought closer the cultural
forms and contents of the Neolithic and
the Renaissance.
The poets Bartolomé Carrasco de
Figueroa (1538-1610) and Antonio de
Viana (1578-16??), from their
respective islands, configure what the
latter, in the first song in the coUection
Antigüedades de las Islas Afortunadas,
will cali a "Canary Island canticle" [3],
a term shared by the poet Silvestre de
Balboa (1563-1649?), who, as it is
known, opens with his Mirror of
Patience the first chapter of Cuban
literature. If we recall that Balboa was to
signify for Cuba what his teacher
Cairasco was to represent in Gran
Canaria and Viana in Tenerife, then we
can rigorously apply to Cairasco and
Viana what Cintio Vitier found' in
Balboa, who presaged against the poetics
of the time "the state of concrete island
nature [...] within the tyranny of
idealised or conventional European
models of nature" [4]. This "Canary
Island canticle" is rather more than the
use -and abuse- of dactylic stressed
verse and more than sympathy for the
native, and more than the striking
mixture of localism and mythology; in
sum, it is not only a literary legacy, but
also -and perhaps chiefly- a psycho-historiographical
legacy, at least in the
reception that island events will make of
its most egregious figures, the historian
José de Vieray Clavijo (1731-1813),
who would not be caught off guard by
the blinks of heterodoxy with which
Cairasco and Viana had viewed the
European cultural storehouse or the
simple historical truth.
Knots in the segments of this
"intemal" tradition would be tied by the
pre-Romantic polymath Graciliano
Afonso (1775-1861) and by the writers
at the end of the 19th century who were
grouped in the "regionalist school",
instigated by the enigmatic Nicolás
Estévanez (1838-1914). The
contemplation of literature by a group of
authors, or as material on which to base
a theory, has been addressed already by
Viera y Clavijo's Biblioteca de los
autores canarios [5], and by Graciliano
Afonso's "'Advertencia preliminar" to the
"Oda al Teide' (1837) [6], which would
lead to the creation of a "Canary Island
library" for promoting works by native
authors. As an implicit cortoboration of
this scheme, there would shortly appear
more selective anthologies such as the
Álbum de literatura isleña, that Carlos
de Grandy published in Las Palmas in
1857, and Poetas canarios, published by
Elias Mújica in Tenerife in 1878;
Antonio Domínguez' prologue to this
work, not included in book [7],
proclaimed the existence of a Canary
Island literature while exuding anti-
Spanish sentiments [8] as did a welter of
similar Latin American publications of
the time. Domínguez' work is interesting
in that it reflects a first attempt to
clarify the problem of the Canary
Islander's condition; and this
clarification, Domínguez says, is
inseparable from the interpretation of
the geography; as the true engine of
artistic creation, the natural setting
forces expression to achieve the
impossible -to conjúgate "at each step a
landscape, at each step an emotion" The
registers are extreme: the sublime and
the amusing; the terrifying and the
wistful; the jungle and the desert;
vegetation and volcanic lava.
From the contemplation of this
landscape which here and there is
shaped by certain constants (the sea, the
mountain, the palm, the pine, and the
drago tree) there arises, says
Domínguez, an indefinable sentiment
that is a "mixture of the will to live and
the indifference to death". These are
ideas and- sentiments that can be
breathed in the atmosphere of the
islands. In his celebrated and
controversial poem '^Canarias', against
the background rumble of events taking
place abroad, Nicolás Estévanez stutters
the sense of a homeland, although the
territorial basis of nationhood had not
been conferred upon the islanders. It is
as if the Canary Island homeland, not
extant as an historie fact, were a
possibility waiting as in the wings of the
language of that tradition, a tradition
that provided the fragments of an
awareness -what Estévanez called
"island spirit, which would suffice to
reconstruct it: it is the sum of the rough
substances that have channelled a
certain type of existence: island, eradle,
rock, trail, peak, hut, hermitage, grave,
and especially, "of ein almond tree/ the
sweet, fresh, unforgettable shade",
referring to a real landscape which,
rendered intemal with elementariness
and primitivism, thrusts outward
towards a cosmic visión. From this space
could not be excluded the Edenic
almond tree that symbolised permanence
and renewal, etemal root and flowers.
(It has been said more than once that
the almond tree is a standing invitation
to suicide by hanging But Estévanez'
enigmatic fatherland must not be sought
in the concrete vegetableness of that
tree, but rather -as 1 have said- in the
extreme reductionism of "something as
intangible" as its shade [9]. The lability
of a daydream.
For the Canary Islander, the last
decade of the 19th century was
dramatic, fruitful and soul-stirring. The
independence of Cuba raised the
possibility of emancipation from Spain,
but at the same time, Germany, Britain
and the United States were all believed
to have designs on the archipelago.
The "national" problem was
experienced on the islands with the
understandable distant treatment by the
metrópolis. Graciliano Afonso and
Nicolás Estévanez had been on-the-spot
witnesses of several emancipatory
episodes; but some islanders or
descendants of islanders were actively
involved in these independence
struggles. One such was José Martí, son
of a Canary Island mother, who justified
his struggle for the independence of
Cuba and Puerto Rico strictly on
grounds of social justice. It was the same
as Secundino Delgado's dream for the
Canary Islands.
According to Roberto Fernández
Retamar, despite the different
viewpoints which separated the people
of Spain and those of Spain's Latin
American colonies, they were united in
their sense of nationhood and the search
for historie solutions: the Latin
Americans would face the task of
nation- building; for the Spaniards, the
task would be one of rebuilding. [10] so
where did that leave the Canary
Islanders, isolated in Atlantic colonial
solitude? They had no cholee but to seek
an explanation of themselves through
another type of emancipation: the
inteUectual and aesthetic.
The Canary Islands gave a
singular welcome to the modernist
movement, and particularly to the
Rubenian spirit, which had no
correspondence in the poetry of the
Spanish mainland. I alinde, in the first
place, to the coincidence -on both sides
of the Atlantic- of the need to identify
what was genuinely one's own, -the
authentically Latin American and the
genuinely Cañarían. The Rubenian spirit
was soon to leave its mark on the
Canary Island cultural temple, in the
book by Tomás Morales entitled Poemas
de la Gloria, del Amor y del Mar (1908).
The Canary Islander knows the
feeling of disturbing alienation from not
knowing his cultural forebears, which is
to say, his own origins. And although he
has lacked a philosophy able to supply •
an answer to his ontological entreaty, his
proposals for self-definition come from
poetic meditation, as we see unfold in
the works of three major figure of
modernity: Domingo Rivero (1852-
1929), Tomás Morales (1884-1921) and
Alonso Quesada (1886-1925). Likeness
of their poetics discourses must be
sought -for reasons of historie
consanguinity- amongst Latin America
authors. I have written some where that
these poets represent the acquisition of a
knowledge that leaves the body
concentrícally, that spreads to the city
and is projected back into myths, into
origins; and since these three poetic
styíes are inaugural stretches of the same
positioning of the being, they are also a
re-beginning that travels from the
ahistoric to the historie. From the
observation of the physical or
geographical environment they move to
the metaphysical plañe; through poetic
though the Canary Islander can attain
unaided the solution his specific
circumstance inspires for his everyday
problem, be it transcendental or banal.
Accordingly, alongside the imaginary
stroke that kindles the poetic motive is
the reflexive or philosophical impulse
that completes the figure and makes it
recognisable, as if there were a lively
struggle between the knowledge of
thought and that of perception and
feeling.
Of these three poets, Alonso
Quesada best exemplifies this sense of
alienation. A progressive and fatal illness
drained him of the strength to gratify his
wish to go into exile, given the
impossibility of living with his fellow
islanders, whose ignorance he found no
more bearable than the arrogance of the
mainland Spaniards, and this state of
unhappiness and weariness is
exacerbated by feeling that he is the
object of the undervaluation of
humanity by the "Sterling Man", who
gave him his sustenance, because in his
hands were the main resources of the
Gran Canaria economy [11].
The Ariadna's thread of this
literary self-referentiality is the language
of the dialogue held by the islander with
Nature, with the landscape itself -always
the same, always different- which is
never a mere backdrop, but is woven
into the act of writing in a new form of
interíorisation. It should be kept in mind
that this exploration of the landscape
constitutes a "programme" that imposes
poetry upon painting; like the Mexican
art workshops, the Lujan Pérez School
in Las Palmas -established in 1918-
spurred research into native themes and
their subsequent representation, which
would be attempted with the smallest
number of elements. As Antonio Dorta
would later say of the painting of Juan
Ismael, this was "the Canary Islands'
revenge", an expressive thrust that
springs from "a simple palette of four
muted colours" [12], an ethics-aesthetics
so implicatory that it lifts craftsmanship
to the plañe of art. This landscape
which, as I have hinted, is the mirror of
the specific being, was to fascínate
Miguel de Unamuno, who visited the
islands for very different reasons in
1910 and 1924, and to whom we are
indebted not only for the book De
Fuerteventura a París (1925), but for a
dozen enriching articles containing a
wealth of data about the islanders and
their environment. I am especially fond
of the one entitled "La aulaga
majorera ", in which the "skeleton of a
thorny plant", the gorse that flowers to
provide food for camels, and serves to
express the "thirst of the volcanic
entrails of the land, contains an entire
lesson in style, consonant with the
sobriety of the people of Fuerteventura.
I will end this section by
mentioning a few ñames and the
meaning of their respective
contributions.
In a series of newspaper articles
that appeared in 1930, the poet Pedro
García Cabrera published an essay
called "El hombre en función del
paisaje' ["Man as a function of
Landscape"]; playfuUy he contends.
among other pronouncements, that the
art of the islands is "repetitive" for
geographical reasons: we walk to and fro
through the same landscape like a
person on a carousel, so we are
continuously receiving news of the
finitude of the world. And in this path of
self-referentiality that I am trying to
describe, amongst the avant-gardes we
find a curious interminghng of
compensating visions of the functionaUty
of the concept of "island". In some
cases, the real is the departure point for
the imaginary; in others, the progression
is reversed. As we know, Agustín
Espinosa opened his 1928 book
Lancelot 28_ 7_ with a sort of aphorism
by Paul Dermée, who expressed his wish
"to créate a work that Uves outside
itself, beyond its own Ufe, and that is
located in a special sky like an island on
the horizon". In curious contradiction to
this, on their visit to Tenerife in 1953
Bretón and Peret would find in the
islands concrete examples of what
heretofore they had seen only in dreams.
And the Teide volcano itself, which
Garciliano Afonso has sélected as the
element lending coherence to the
"Canary Island canticle", took on a new
reality when Briton intemalised it as a
"starry castle".
With the pubUcation in 1932 of a
partial bibliography of the works of
Canary Island writers in the 16th, 17th
and 18th centuries, Agustín Millares
exhumed an extensive inventory of
writers hard to classify in literary terms,
except for their Canary Islands origins
and themes, which add up to a concept
of Ganarían culture, rigorously
dependent, in its tum, on a vertebrating
tradition. A few years later. the essayist
Juan Manuel Trujillo published the
timely and excellent íirticle entitled
"^•ISxiste la tradición?'' [13], in whose
dramatic contents I would like to tarry a
moment. The essay says that the Canary
Island writer or artist "has, when he
begins to make literature or art, a
restlessness that comes from not
knowing in which tradition to work, to
serve, to Uve and breathe." Trujillo says
there are island writers that join
powerful mainland traditions since they
are ignorant of the traditions of their
native isles. To the question of whether
there is a Canary Islands tradition, he
replies in the affirmative, confessing that
he has found the stanip of a Cañarían
17th century poet -Antonio de Viana- in
another island writer of the
postmodemist present -Josefina de la
Torre. It is the allusion to a path that
extends from any present back to the
origins, or vice-versa. A special and
fateful feeling that the islands inspire,
ways Trujillo, for whom, even without
the scientific delvings of Millares, simple
faith would above sufficed. to verify the
existence of that tradition.
In 1937 Ángel Valbuena Prat
published a history of Canary Island
poetry, expanding from the pamphlet
and entitled Algunos aspectos de la
moderna poesía canaria (1926). He
pointed out and discussed characteristics
of Canary Island poetry, including
isolation, cosmopolitanism, intimacy,
and the sense of the sea. Valbuena lends
his authoríty to the principie of
coherence of the feelíngs of a people as
shown by their imaginings. And thus, in
my judgement, we have reached the
point where the island as a part of the
cosmos is identified with the entire
cosmos. Canary Island poets have to
their credit attempted to make an
autonomous definition of the things that
fill their world, which bears little
resemblance to the referential
descriptions recorded by outsiders who
are always prepared to use formulas that
allow them to define the unknown in
relation to the known: this is like that.
We had believed that in the
treatment of the landscape was to be
found the foundation of the highest
concept of our existence; we did not
suspect that it was to become a haggUng
argument for humanity that would
endure un til our times. In the eyes of the
Other we have become makers of a
localist art and Uterature, and thus we
have placed ourselves at a distance from
true universality, which is to say, the
motifs of Europeanism. We are in the
universe, but also excluded from the
universe on the basis of our
anachronism.
OF PROSPERO AND CALIBAN
The history of contemporary Euro-
American literature -or rather the
history of the mentalities prevailing in
this period- shows the emergence of the
struggle that I shall cali (other
denominations are possible) that
between the cultural centre and the
periphery, and which, with its remote
origins in the opposition between the
westem world and barbarism, has a
record of profound human bargaining,
especially -in the present context-foUowing
the conquest of the Canary
Islands and the New World, the former
being a trial run for the latter, according
to historians. With regard to this
Prospero-Caliban relationship, which
first meant a political and cultural
dependence in the European or Euro-
American context and later assumed a
technological-scientific nature between
Westem and Eastem civilisations, I will
confine myself here to reitérate, and
within the modest limits that are now
important, a reflection that I wrote
some where.
Spanish culture as a centre was
also unreceptive to the contribution of
the periphery; in its duty to absorb the
differences that shaped it as a centre
-i.e. as a nation- a certain atrophy in
the constitutional mechanism kept such
a centre from recognising and
addressing each and all of its parts. I
refer here to the troubled human
relations that have forged the concept of
Spain and about which brilliant and
provocative pages have been written by
Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez
Albornoz.
The same and well-know
judgement which, from a Hegelian
perspective, served Europe to culturally
appraise Spanish America,
symmetrically served Spain to appraise
the Canary Islands, which have always
been an unattended space, either
because it was thought that their
geographical distance made them
incapable of original cultural
productions, or because it was thought
that the only culture to be found there
was merely an echo of the metropolitan
culture.
Jorge Rodríguez Padrón has
addressed this matter, in a question and
answer format, which I would like to
share here:
Why do we stay here [on the slope
ofthe Spanish península] without
understanding fully the phenomenon of
the Spanish literature of America?
Precisely because our reading
stubbornly refuses to strayfrom our
Hispano-centric sufficiency; because it is
not done from the conviction that the
writers on the other side ofthe Atlantic
answer us in our own language,
returning it to us as our other voice.
[14].
The periphery looks to the centre
but does not see itself included as an
integral part. To change the periphery
into the centre is to claim the equal
representation of all productions of the
spirit.
To change the centre into the
periphery is a kind of ontological
restitution: a way of preserving being in
itself. Because of that language of which
I have been speaking and which shapes
the voice of our intemal tradition, we
feel like a whole, like a part among
other parts, different but equal. The
island, as 1 have said, imposed the idea
of errancy, on an endless exile, and this
negative and tragic power must be
opposed by the stability of the habitat,
that ensures the permanence of being.
So it is the word of the poet that
attempts to organise our dwelhng.
THE QUESTION OF THE CANARY
ISLAND BEING
The circumstance of unwiüing
marginalisation at ene time obUged the
Spanish Americans to address -and in a
tone the must have appeared heterodox
to Eurpean cuhure- the essential
question about themselves. Alfonso
Reyes, Leopoldo Zea, Lezama Lima,
Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz and
others have supplied a series of answers
from the viewpoints of the Mexican, the
Cuban, the Argentine, etc. It was only
natural that for the same reason of
marginalisation Canary Island essayists
attempted to clarify the condition of the
islanders, such as in the small number of
works by Ramón Feria, María Rosa
Alonso, Juan Rodríguez Doreste and
especially by Domingo Pérez Minik [15].
AU of them show a remarkable
eclecticism.; however, as disciples of
Ortega y Gasset, they see this
circumstance as a point of departure,
they couldn't fail to feel they were being
watched by the latter's centripetal
political thought. Thus, a revisión of the
rhetorical legacy of Pérez Minik acts as
illustration.
This essayist's attempt to analyse
the islander does not move from the
inside towards the outside, as would
have been desirable, i.e. from the
analysis of the one variety of Spanish
literature to the concept of Spanish
literature, but instead he proceeds in the
opposite direction, in accordance with
the deed already done. The Canary
Islanders "are Spaniards, but less, or
more," who, with their different ways of
being and behaving possess a
distinguishing feature in their
"existential condition as inhabitants of
islands [16] and therefore are marked
by geography, which engenders
contradictory feelings, and which has
often driven them to lea ve the islands.
Pérez Minik embraces the distinguishing
features of Canary Island poetry that
were enumerated by Valbuena, but the
essayist contends that this does not place
Canary Island poetry outside the
historical-cultural format of mainland
Spain; it was logical for him to maintain
his conclusión that Canary Island poetry
can be divided into the same historical
periods as that of the mainland. "It
was", he says, "Renaissance with Viana,
Baroque with Cairasco, classical with
Viera, Romantic with Negrín or Diego
Estévanez, regionalist with Ttibares
Bartlet, Pamassian with Verdugo and
ultra-modem with the latest generation
"[17]. Pérez Minik did not want to see
that, while these poets can be classified
in the periods he mentions, they still
represented heterodox work within
them. But next appears the intemporal
mirage, of long ago and nowadays: the
cultural producís of the islands seems to
be critically folding pieces to the extent
that they transcend the environment in
which they originated; Canary Island
literature and art are localist and for
Pérez Minik this doesn't mean that we
are sianding before a type of
universality, but rather before the
referential co-ordinates of something
that is found at the opposite pole from
universality.
More generous, if no less rigorous
in their cultural principies, are the
inductive and autonomous approaches of
the wave of Canary Island essayists that
lend sense to current thought, and which
are well know to us all.
A RELATIONSHIP OF CULTURAL
DEPENDENCY
As culture, literature is a form of
commerce, or, if you will, of exchange; I
know that my relations with the Other
could be less pragmatic. A writer with
whom I have coincided in group or
generational anthologies has written the
foUowing: "It is plain that we write to
express ourselves and that we read to
learn to express ourselves." For me, the
paradox lies in the clarity with which
this poet perceive a phenomenon which
in practice is different in human terms;
what is really clear are the nuances that
make this difference; for the author of
those lines, writing and reading amount
to a dialogue between different cultures
or languages; it is a dialogue because the
Other has previously acknowledged the
existence of it as a cultural specimen.
However, the lócale of my own
existential experience did not make it
possible for writing and being read to
make up the give and take of a dialogue.
At a time when media and means of
communication have multiplied, there
are men who still dwell in an
involuntary soliloquy. I have published
my view that the best symbol of Canary
Island poetry is Segismundo "the
hostage of an unjust sentence of the
stars". We have written and read to
recognise ourselves in our solitude, in
order -at best- to reaffirm our
monologue, while we wait for the
traveller to tarry at the crossroads and
talk with US. It is a hope of a moral
kind.
Leopoldo Zea says that to be a
Mexican "is felt as something that needs
to be completed with something taken
from outside, but that once belonged or
still belongs to one." This sense of
incompleteness -which must be a quality
of Latin Americans in general- is well-know
to the Canary Islander who is seen
in the mirror of his consciousness as a
divided self. This lack becomes a sense
of the lack of half of reality, and this
explains why we are passive, with no
appetite for historie deeds. Perhaps we
have shirked our responsibilities because
we prefer this state of indefinition.[18].
If we possessed the other half, as a
presence or even a proximity, the world
would be revealed to us in a complete
form. Llntil well into the 19th century
Canary Island authors had to send their
manuscripts to the mainland (especially
to Seville) to be printed, in a situation of
unequal opportunity which was not
shared by the New World. The news of
our historicity reached us in fragmenta,
over a long time, since it should be
recalled that the writings that could
have constituted the coUective
consciousness of a Canary Island
thought did not come to light until the
second half of this century, and not in
the "natural" way [19].
It is understandable that we
perceive this other half of reality that is
lacking from the cell of an underworld.
In this respect I never fail to evoke the
words put in the mouth of an island
native who was asked if he remembered
his birth, as retold by the historian
Andrés Bemáldez: "Our forefathers told
US that God put us here and forgot
about US. And they told us that in that
place a light or an eye would open where
we could see." [20] We need the light to
see, but also to be seen. Our poetry is a
part of this subterranean reality, and it
appear not to exist, except in the most
limited editions.
In opposition to the hackneyed
Identification of the Cañarles with the
Fortúnate Isles, Hesperides, etc., the
islands would be better represented by
the confluence of the nocturnal and
underlying rivers to the unknown that
make up the Aqueronte, which, when all
is said and done, is the antechamber to •
the Elysian Fields. I believe that poetry
springs from the infernal realm; that
poetry, being light, has its origins in the
darkness. Not long ago, while I was at
work on an interpretation of a sonnet by
the Canary Island poet Tomás Morales, I
was able to glimpse a dramatic
perspective of island poetry, and by
extensión, of the culture in which it fits.
The text by Morales reads as foUows:
/ was the brave pilot ofmyfantasy
vessel
An illusory argonaut froin a
country foretold, from some golden
island, a chimera or a dream hidden
amongst the shadows of the unknown
Perchance my boat held a
magnificent cargo in its hold, ñor did 1
ask, absorbed, my eyes probed the
shadows, and I even forgot to nail the
flag-
And the North Wind carne,
unpleasant and brusque, the vigorous
strength ofmy naked arm managed hold
to the compass the forcé ofthe
whirlwind; to win my rictory in
desperation I fought iiiid when my arm
gave out, exhausted, a hand, in the
night, snatched the helmfrom me.
I know not whether it is ignorance
or stubbomness that makes me see in
this poem a remote reminiscence of the
Aeneid; I refer naturally to the Palinurus
theme in Virgil's poem, where Palinurus
is the archetype of the "brave pilot" of
Morales' sonnet. Both texts take part in
the eternal night whose opacity is
prolonged in verbal matter. Morales'
poem is too ambiguous to allow for a
critical explanation. It is an ambiguous
poem and niust be addressed as such,
since ambiguity is a part of our way of
being. The words of Morales' poem are
fraught with the foundational sign of the
Virgilian poem, as is the way it gives off
a tragic sense that is intrinsic to Canary
Island literature and art. Since the
elements of that sequence of the matrix
poem appear symmetrically annotated in
the sonnet, we might say that it contains
the attempt -one that is frustrated by a
mysterious h a n d - to créate a
foundational space. In this same manner
Palinurus desperately demands the right
to be buried, because he doesn't believe
that he deserves such an outrage, and
jusl as the tomb is as necessary to him
as the ground is to the seed, this "brave
pilot" of the Atlantic in Morales' poem
wants to see his own seeds bear fruit.
FINALE
lUustrators, as we have mentioned, of a
problems in the philosophy of art, the
protagonists of the Canary Island culture
may also be so in the orbit of a practice
iniposed at each moment by the major
metropolitan centres of art; in the art
and literature we créate there will
always be a characteristically primitive
attitude, of continuous new beginnings.
Discussing Miguel Padomo and his book
A la sombra del mar, Miguel Martinón
alindes to a sensitive ontology that "has
its origins in astonishment" and in an
"Adamic viewpoint [...] that appears to
have been awakened suddenly before the
world [21]. AU fresh starts involve a
r e t um to one's origins. This primitivism
of Canary Island artists has contributed
greatly to the shaping of the meaning of
the visual arts in our time -consider the
pictographs and homunculi of Manolo
Millares, and the winds, birds and
masks of Martín Chirino.
I believe that of no less importance
than the place where the poem is written
is the process of its writing and the
ultiinate achievement. Writing is a kind
of navigation, and has its own dangers
-sudden hurricanes or sandbanks- but
always with the promise of a landing in
a New World, which is the same text, a
territory in which the solitude of the
house of his spirit can be built by a
Christopher Columbus of the mind.
[1] Cfr. S. Heaney, "La sensación de
pertenencia a un lugar", in his De la
emoción a las palabras, Barcelona,
Editorial Anagrama, 1996, pp. 115-140.
[2] G. Durand, Las estructuras
antropológicas de lo imaginario, Madrid,
Taurus, 1982, p. 228.
[3] Cfr. Antonio de Viana, Antigüedades de
las Islas Afortunadas, María Rosa Alonso
edition. Canary Islands, Viceconsejería de
Cultura y Deportes del Gobierno de
Canarias, 1991, t. 1, p. 52.
[4] C. Vitier, "Espejo de paciencia", in his
Crítica Cubana, La Habana, Editorial
Letras cubanas, 1988, p. 274.
[5] Cfr. J. de Viera y Clavijo, Libro XIX,
"Biblioteca de los autores canarios", in
Noticias de la Historia general de las
Islas Canarias, 6th edition, Introduction
and notes by A. Cioranescu, Santa Cruz
de Tenerife, Coya editions, t. II, 1971,
pp. 853-928.
[6] The two texts quoted were published in
Las Palmas (1853), with poems that
constituted the book "Las hojas de la
encina o San Diego del Monte".
[7] Text by A. Domínguez is reproduced as
"Carta-Prólogo", in Revista de Canarias
(Santa Cruz de Tenerife), no. 2 (23
December, 1878), pp. 22-25. h was
explained to the subscribers of the
anthology that forcé of circumstances
prevented the inclusión in the book of the
prologue entrusted to Domínguez, "being
even more difficult to do it now, said
Señor being abroad, with the object of
visiting the París exhibition".
[8] The recurrent psychological attitude of
friendliness towards the indigenous man
and rancour towards the conqueror, was
brought up to date again in literature by
Graciliano Afonso; his denomination is
Neo-Vianism.
[9] María Rosa Alonso, "Los Estévanez", in
her San Borondón, Sign of Tenerife,
Biblioteca Isleña, Santa Cruz de Tenerife,
1940, p. 73.
[10] R. Fernández Retamar, "Modernismo,
noventiocho, subdesarrollo", in his Para
una teoría de la literatura
hispanoamericana y otras
aproximaciones. Cuaderno Casa de las
Américas, Havana, 1975, p. 99.
[11] Cfr. Lázaro Santana, "Informe sobre
Alonso Quesada", in Perfil del
oficinista. Las Palmas, Edirca, 1988,
p. 33.
[12] Cfr. Eugenio Padomo, Juan Ismael,
Tenerife, Viceconsejería de Cultura y
Deportes del Gobierno de Ganarías, 1995,
pp. 41-42.
[13] Cfr. J.M. Trujillo, "¿Existe una
tradición?". La Tarde, Santa Cruz de
Tenerife, 1934.
[14] J. Rodríguez Padrón, El sueño
proliferante y otros ensayos. Servicio de
Publicaciones de la ULPGC, Las Palmas,
1993, pp. 30-31.
[15] Cfr. D. Pérez Minik, "Introducción" to
his Antología de la poesía canaria I,
Santa Cruz de Tenerífe, Coya Ediciones,
1952; for further consultation: La poesía
de las Islas Canarias en entredicho,
Guadalimar (Madrid), no. 20,
February (1977), pp. 111-113 and
especially, "La condición humana del
insular", in his Isla y literatura, Santa
Cruz de Tenerife, Caja General de
Ahorros de Canarias Publications, 1988,
pp. 13-30.
[16] La condición humana del insular., p.
13.
[17] Antología de la poesía canaria, p. 14.
[18] This is the idea held by Manuel Padomo
in his Sobre la indiferencia y el
acuitamiento: la indefinición cultural
canaria. Las Palmas, Mutua Guanarteme
Foundation, 1990.
[19] I refer, for example, to the later
publications of such works as Descrittione
et historia del regno del isole canarie, by
L. Torriani, written in 1592, and whose
printed Spanish translation dates from
1959; I also refer to the translation of the
Jerusalem literata of Torcuato Tasso by
Cairasco de Figueroame, from around
1600, which saw the Hght of day in
1967; I could refer to the theatre of
Cairasco himself, published in 1957...
What is most curious is that the
disinterment of the quoted texts was the
work of Doctor A. Cioranescu, to whom
are owed editions of the "Poema de
Antonio de Viana', the "Historia de Fr. J.
de Abréu Galindo", etc.
[20] Cfr. "Andrés Bemáldez, "Memorias del
reinado de los Reyes Católicos", in
Francisco Morales Padrón's, Canarias;
Crónicas de su conquista. Las Palmas de
Gran Canaria, Ediciones del Cabildo
Insular de Gran Canaria, 1993, pp. 510-
511.
[21] M. Martinón, "Prólogo" of .4 la sombra
del mar, by M. Padomo, Las Palmas,
Excmo. Cabildo Insular de Lanzarote,
1989, p. 12.
!S