An Island in the Clouds: Landscape, Resistance and Change in Laura Gallego’s Celajes (1951-3)

• In Event: Poéticas del escape en la literatura puertorriqueña

Abstract

The 1952 status change in which Puerto Rico became a US commonwealth marked one of many challenges to traditional notions of national identity. Among them, increased migration to the US began to defy previous conceptualizations of nation as defined by geographical delimitations. Writers of this time were left to grapple with the precarious task of reclaiming, revising and reconstructing a cultural identity. While some mid-century poets such as those of the Guajana group are associated with political fervor, intimate, lyric poetry is oftentimes excluded from debates on Puerto Ricanness.

In spite of its deeply introspective nature, Laura Gallego´s 1951-53 collection, Celajes, employed celestial imagery in order to invert the Puerto Rican landscape and to reexamine geographical definitions of cultural identity. In this way her work dialogues with Edouard Glissant’s Antillean Discourse (1989) in which the literary appropriation of landscape becomes a form of cultural resistance against imperial powers. Additionally, through her use of landscape, Gallego bridges the gap between subjective and collective experience. As Simon Schama asserts in Landscape and Memory (1996), landscape is composed as much by physical elements as it is by collective memory. By imagining an ideal Puerto Rico or “cloudscape” alongside a material Puerto Rican landscape, Gallego’s poetry forges a space in which to consider the changing relationship between the Island and its people.

Author

• Hannah Agauas, Indiana University