'Our America' That is Not One: Transnational Black Atlantic Disclosures in Nicolas Guillen and Langston Hughes

According to Gilroy, it is "routes" (the diasporic memory of the rupture of the middle passage), not "roots" (the nationalist memory of a historic homeland) that matter most: "English and African-American versions of cultural studies," Gilroy writes, "share a nationalistic focus that is antithetical to the rhizomatic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation that I call the Black Atlantic" (Gilroy 4). According to Gilroy, the Black Atlantic world of diasporic exile is symbolized in black expression by a persistent imagery of sea and ships, of distances measured between unidentified places of destination and departure that leave the central subject lost, adrift in space and time; "I have settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean ... ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland" (Gilroy 4). The collection was entitled Cuba Libre: Poems by NicolAs Guillen. Since translations are always implicit transculturations, we should pay close attention to the way Hughes has brought Guillen's Afro-Cuban poems across the border to a U.S. and African American public. [...]writes Helg, "after independence, Afro-Cuban intellectuals faced the difficult task of destroying the image of the uncivilized black and claiming their rightful share in the new society" (Helg, ibid. 54).