Black skin, black verses, black rhythms: polyrhythmia, syncopation and antillanity in the work of Tato Laviera

Abstract

Henry Meschonnic’s critique of Western understanding and theorization of rhythm are illuminating on thinking the singularity of minor poetics such as those of Afro-Antillean poetry and its diasporic derivations such as Tato Laviera's Nuyorican Poetry, whose work eloquently exemplifies the polyrhythmic singularity inscribed within an Afro-Antillean tradition and articulated as a cultural expression of resistance against the hegemonic social devices that confine these minor cultures to a subordinate and passive role. This black rhythm presupposes, in addition, a way of conceiving the world and inhabiting it through a bodily scheme that, following Maurice Merlau-Ponty, at the same time as it inhabits space, perceives and understands it, corporally and fruitively, by means of the Antillean ethos that constitutes it. These black verses, in short, emerge from its black skin emulating the famous title of the Martinican thinker Franz Fanon, whose essay, Black skin, white masks, illuminates clearly how these bodily schemes are always attached to its historical-racial dimension, introducing and thus making visible what Walter Mignolo calls the "colonial difference", that difference introduced by the blackness of the body inscribed in a system of colonial knowledge that constructs it as a racialized body, but which, at the same time, as Fanon points out, allows of its difference an emancipatory movement that is, as we try to demonstrate in this work, the one that guides and promotes the exceptional poetics of writers like Tato Laviera.