Palestine in the Nuyorican Literary Imagination: Pedro Pietri’s Anti-Imperialist Poetics

• In Event: Solidarities with, of, and alongside Palestine

Abstract

This paper explores the anti-imperialism of Nuyorican avant-garde artist Pedro Pietri, specifically through a reading of his posthumously published poem, “Wine and Dine in Palestine.” I argue that the poem subverts the American jeremiad, a rhetorical tradition with roots in the seventeenth century where early American settlers equated themselves with the enslaved Israelites of the Bible to construct a culture and myth of America as earthly Paradise or the Promised Land. The legacy of this rhetoric has been reified by the countless invasions, occupations, and colonization of Indigenous lands throughout the Americas, and beyond, from the seventeenth century onward. Engaging with Pietri’s visual artwork, essays, pamphlets, performances, and poetry, I examine the parallels Pietri made between Palestine and Puerto Rico throughout his artistic career in his call for building solidarities with those oppressed by coloniality. “Wine and Dine in Palestine” exhibits such a call as it counters hegemonic narratives that legitimized what Pietri termed the “American Inquisition.” In that regard, I argue that the poem is grounded within a Nuyorican literary tradition, as Miguel Algarín states, where poetry records cultural/collective memories/histories of “whole generations of people, whole tribes of people, dead and without any semblance of a history because all historical records were destroyed.” Lastly, I argue that the poem not only validates Pietri’s experiences as a diasporic Puerto Rican but acknowledges the Spanish American War (1898)—the war that made America an empire—as the teleology of the American jeremiad tradition, while offering a language invested in securing our futures.

Biographical Information

Joseph Anthony Cáceres is a queer Nuyorican writer and scholar. His work has been published in Evergreen Review, Slice magazine, CURA, and Nuyorican and Diasporican Visual Art: A Critical Anthology. An alumnus of the Yale Writers’ Workshop, he is also the recipient of the Bronx Council of the Arts’ Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) Grant for Fiction, and LAMBDA Literary Writers Residency for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. Joseph is an English Ph.D. candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center where he studies queer American artists of African and Caribbean descent. He is also a senior archivist for the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Archive Project, which was established in 2015 by Lois Elaine Griffith, one of the last surviving founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Joseph is currently working on three book projects revolving around the Cafe’s aesthetic, featuring unpublished works and other archival artifacts that records the forgotten contributions of the Cafe’s founders and artists affiliated with the Cafe.

Author

• Joseph Cáceres, CUNY Bernard M Baruch College