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Absence and Disappearance:
A Black Caribbean Women’s
Poetics of the Body
Warren Harding

The 1980s were a generative period of creative production, as the increased publication of
Caribbean women’s writing accompanied growth in transnational Caribbean feminist move-
ments.1 As Ramabai Espinet notes in her introduction to Creation Fire: A CAFRA Anthology
of Caribbean Women’s Poetry, a Caribbean feminist poetics not only asserted the centrality
of women’s voices in the Caribbean literary canon but also expanded the avenues through
which Caribbean women’s voices were heard within a global feminist movement.2 This essay
reads the languages of absence and disappearance in the works of two Caribbean women
poets: Cuban Soleida Ríos and Trinbagonian M. NourbeSe Philip, who resides in Canada. How
can a recuperation of a poetics between Ríos and Philip inform a comparative study of the
body? I argue that as they negotiate language, interiority, and grammar, Ríos and Philip explore
instances of self-possession and self-pleasure to transgress silence. As touchstones, absence
and disappearance not only conjure experiences of violence but also establish strategies for

1 See Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (Trenton, NJ: Africa
World, 1990); Selwyn Cudjoe, Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference (Wellesley, MA:
Calaloux, 1990); Ramabai Espinet, ed., Creation Fire: A CAFRA Anthology of Caribbean Women’s Poetry (Toronto: Sister
Vision, 1990); and Carmen Estevez and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Green Cane and Juicy Flotsam: Short Stories by Carib-
bean Women (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991).
2 Ramabai Espinet, introduction to Espinet, Creation Fire, xx.

small axe 67 • March 2022 • DOI 10.1215/07990537-9724009 © Small Axe, Inc.

2 [ Warren Harding ] Absence and Disappearance

survival. Where absence represents a passive imposition, disappearance expresses a deliber-

ate act. Where absence requires an innate nonexistence of the subject, disappearance signals
an existing subject in movement. Where disappearance prompts investigation, absence fuels
the imagination.3 This essay joins Denise deCaires Narain’s charge for Caribbean discourse
to examine “the diverse ways in which the female body has been written about and written

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into poetic discourse.”4
Given that no critical work exists that comparatively engages Philip and Ríos, the first part
of this essay situates them together in the context of 1980s Caribbean poetry and parses out
the vibrancy of absence and disappearance. The second part of the essay reads two poems:
Ríos’s “Paredes” and Philip’s “Meditation on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the
Flying Cheek-bones.” Throughout my reading, I affirm that a poetics of the body is integral to
understanding how Black Caribbean women poets operationalize absence and disappear-
ance in response to silences at the level of aesthetics, literature, and culture. This reading
contributes to Odile Ferly’s call for a relational discourse across languages as a recuperative
space in Caribbean women’s poetics to affirm a “pan-Caribbean legacy.”5

Background
Soleida Ríos was born in La Prueba near Santiago de Cuba in 1950.6 As a teacher and
education consultant, Ríos worked in the Sierra Maestra, served as a director of profes-
sional technical education in Santiago de Cuba between 1972 and 1980, and led Café Dulce
and Café Bar Emiliana at El Instituto Cubano del Libro.7 She joined various workshops in
Santiago de Cuba, including the Taller José María Heredia and the Brigada “Hermanos Saíz”
de Escritores y Artistas Jóvenes. From 1974 to 1980, Ríos was a founding member of the
Consejo de Dirección del Taller Cultural (de Jóvenes Creadores) in Santiago de Cuba. She
completed her studies at the Universidad de Oriente in 1979, where she specialized in history.
Described by literary scholar Miriam DeCosta-Willis as a “poet committed to the struggle
for equality,” Ríos had already published two volumes of poetry, De la Sierra in 1977 and
De pronto abril in 1979, and belonged to the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba at the
beginning of the 1980s.8
Immersed in a life of movement, M. NourbeSe Philip was born in Woodlands, Tobago, in
1947. Having moved to Trinidad to attend secondary school, Philip won a scholarship to the

3 Here, while I acknowledge that the cognates desaparecidos and desaparecer have a particular register in Latin American
culture, arts, and letters, I am using disappearance differently to think about an alternative space of symbolic meaning.
4 Denise deCaires Narain, Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style (London: Routledge, 2002), viii (italics in
original).
5 Odile Ferly, A Poetics of Relation: Caribbean Women’s Writing at the Millennium (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 2.
6 Miriam DeCosta-Willis, “Soleida Ríos,” in Miriam DeCosta-Willis, ed., Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers
(Kingston: Ian Randle, 2003), 336.
7 DeCosta-Willis, “Soleida Ríos,” 336; “Soleida Ríos,” Directorio de Afro Cubanas, directoriodeafrocubanas.com/2016/01/25
/soleida-rios (accessed 15 February 2019).
8 DeCosta-Willis, “Soleida Ríos,” 336.
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 3

University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, where she studied economics and gradu-
ated in 1968.9 That same year, she migrated to Canada to pursue graduate studies. In 1973,
Philip completed a master’s degree in political science and a degree in law at the University of
Western Ontario.10 She then relocated to Toronto where she practiced immigration and family
law for seven years, first at Parkdale Community Legal Services in downtown Toronto and

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then as a partner at Jemmott and Philip, which Philip notes as “one of the first all-woman,
Black firms in the country.”11 As the 1980s approached, Philip left legal practice to devote
more time to writing.12 Before She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks appeared in
1988, she published two other volumes of poetry: Thorns and Salmon Courage, in 1980 and
1983, respectively.
Philip is known for her meditation on the linguistic terror of the English language. In her
1988 essay “The Absence of Writing, or How I Became a Spy” she writes that language is
“one of the most important sites of struggle between the Old World and the New World.”
This struggle is rooted in the terror that European colonialists imposed on the region by strip-
ping Africans (and other non-Europeans) of language, creating an absence in subjectivity
that continues to resonate in the linguistic development of African-descended people in the
Americas. As Philip continues, “The only way the African artist could be in this world, that
is the New World, was to give voice to this split image of voiced silence.”13 Philip defines
“image” as the substance of creative writing (orthographically, visually, and sonically) from
which a Caribbean writer makes both meaning and nonmeaning through language.14 Here,
she refuses to see this linguistic and subjective “split” as a problem. Instead, Philip affirms a
ruptural poetics that invites the “African artist” to claim herself through the voice. By claim-
ing the fissures within language, then, Black Caribbean women develop a poetic voice that
resists completion and stability.15
In “Reaparición de Soleida,” Antón Arrufat maps the long gaps between three of Ríos’s
volumes of poetry: De pronto abril (1979), Entre mundo y juguete (1987), and El libro roto
(1994). Arrufat sees these intermittent periods as ones of silence: “Cuando un poeta entra
en el silencio o cuando decide, para decirlo de un modo menos patético y más voluntarioso,
abandonar simplemente la escritura, lo hace por necesidad, por desprecio como lo hiciera

9 Maria Caridad Casas, Multimodality in Canadian Black Feminist Writing: Orality and the Body in the Work of Harris, Philip,
Allen, and Brand (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 38.
10 Patricia Saunders, “Trying Tongues, E-raced Identities, and the Possibilities of Be/Longing: Conversations with NourbeSe
Philip,” Journal of West Indian Literature 14, nos. 1–2 (2005): 202–3.
11 Casas, Multimodality in Canadian Black Feminist Writing, 38; M. NourbeSe Philip, “Our Stories: In Conversation with
M. NourbeSe Philip,” interview by Ubuntu Talks, YouTube, 23 April 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyPgUZ31Izc.
12 See Philip’s poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language” in She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014), 30–33.
13 M. NourbeSe Philip, “The Absence of Writing, or How I Became a Spy,” in She Tries Her Tongue, 81, 82.
14 Ibid., 78.
15 See VèVè Clark, “Developing Diaspora Literacy and Marasa Consciousness,” in Hortense Spillers, ed., Comparative Ameri-
can Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text (New York: Routledge, 1991), 43.
4 [ Warren Harding ] Absence and Disappearance

Rimbaud o bien al descubrir que se ha agotado la vena y ha terminado por tanto como poeta
o que, debido al tamaño de su ambición, su don expresivo no acierta a expresarla.”16
Here, Arrufat’s framing of a poet’s entrance into silence is profound for the ways silence
figures as a place with its own geography built on choice.17 He speculates on the range of
possibilities for Ríos’s entrance into silence: necessity, scorn, ambition, and creative obstruc-

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tion. Yet, as Arrufat goes on to acknowledge, something else may outweigh these possibilities—
disappearance: “Soleida Ríos, me advirtió Sigfredo Ariel, es muy exigente con sus poemas.
De los pocos que escribe, pocos conserva. De un estado de creación al que le sucede, va
destruyendo los puentes. Conserva sólo aquellos textos que considera menos borrosos, y
los intermedios desaparecen.”18
Read alongside Philip’s essay, we understand that, even with Cuba’s Special Period limiting
mass publications, perhaps Ríos’s prudent creative practice of disappearance represents a
search for image. Therefore, Philip and Ríos’s creativity dwells within a praxis of “consciously
restructuring, reshaping and, if necessary, destroying language” in order to create and “give
name” to her image.19 Arrufat determines this image as “suprapoesía,” one that merges genres
within poetic writing to expose its insufficiencies, to represent the unresolved tensions within
language.20 If, as Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido argue in their introduction to
Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, “for the Caribbean woman writer, the
reality of absence, of voicelessness, of marginalization is linked to the necessity to find a form,
a mode of expression,” then embedded in a Black Caribbean woman poet’s search for the
image is a politics of form, through language, that unsettles production in order to attend to
the idiosyncrasies of being Black, Caribbean, a woman, and a poet all at once.21
Unlike Ríos, Philip first published outside of the Caribbean. Nonetheless, critics identify
her in the context of Black, Caribbean, and women’s movements as she explicitly engages
the region’s histories of colonialism, language, enslavement, independence, migration, and
exploitation of Black women’s labor and bodies. While critics have noted Ríos’s oeuvre for
its consciousness of women’s relationship to desire and female subjectivity, and its attention
to Cuban rural life, only recently has criticism begun to read her alongside explicit references
to Black subjectivity.22 Furthermore, while Philip’s discourse on Black Caribbean women’s

16 “When a poet enters into silence or when she decides, to put it less plaintively and more voluntarily, to simply abandon
writing, she does it out of necessity, out of scorn like Rimbaud; or better yet discovering that her spirit has weakened and
has therefore ceased as poet; or because, due to the size of her ambition, her expressive gift is unable to express it”;
Antón Arrufat, “Reaparición de Soleida,” in Antón Arrufat, ed., El hombre discursivo (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 2005), 297.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.
17 See Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2012), 8.
18 “Soleida Ríos, Sigfredo Ariel advised me, is very demanding with her poems. From the few she writes, she keeps few. From
the beginning point to all that follows, she burns the bridges. She holds on to the texts she considers least unclear, and the
ones she wrote along the way vanish”; Arrufat, “Reaparición de Soleida,” 298.
19 Philip, “The Absence of Writing,” 87.
20 Arrufat, “Reaparición de Soleida,” 298.
21 Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, introduction to Out of the Kumbla, 4.
22 Catherine Davies, A Place in the Sun? Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Cuba (London: Zed, 1997), 140. See Caridad
Atencio, “Sobre la poesía de Soleida Ríos,” Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, www.uneac.org.cu/noticias/sobre-la
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 5

subjectivity in the historical present and past appears in essays, public forums, theoretical
multimodal forms, and interviews, Ríos has a smaller selection of materials. I pair Ríos and
Philip to study what happens when criticism written in English on Caribbean women’s poetry
attends to both anglophone and nonanglophone women poets, together. What connects Ríos
and Philip is their development as Black Caribbean women writers in the 1970s and 1980s,

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between nation-states that conscripted notions of what it meant to be Black, Caribbean, and
a woman in the service of multiculturalism and superficial racial harmony.23 The gendered
and raced body, then, becomes an apt symbol for Caribbean women poets to search for and
reform images. The emerging strategies of absence and disappearance, which enabled these
women to produce creatively, required constant movement as they searched for the image.24
In the context of Cuba, women poets of the 1980s belonged to what Milena Rodríguez
Gutiérrez identifies as the “período revolucionario.”25 Rodríguez Gutiérrez groups poets of
this period into seemingly opposing pairs: “las de adentro y las de afuera; las de la isla y las
del exilio; las de Cuba y las de la diáspora; las de una orilla y las de otra.”26 However, as she
concedes, these divisions collapse as “casi toda poeta de fuera fue alguna vez de dentro
y nada garantiza que mañana alguna de estas autoras que hoy es considerada de dentro
comience a ser vista como una escritora de fuera: el exilio cubano, o la diáspora, como bien
se sabe, no cesan.”27 As this quote shows, a constant flux, where Cuban cultural identity
mediated national borders, characterized this revolutionary period in Cuban women’s poetry.
This change forged channels through which Cuban women poets interrogated Cuban cultural
identity both on and off the island.28 These mediations created ample space for Black women
poets in Cuba. As Catherine Davies notes, “No black or mulatto woman writer (poet, novelist,

-poesia-de-soleida-rios; Lídice Alemán, “Género, raza y poesía cubana de los ochenta en ‘Entre el mundo y juguete’ de
Soleida Ríos,” Afro-Hispanic Review 33, no. 2 (2014): 9–21; Alemán, “¿No es la misma de siempre esta mujer? Género,
raza y poesía cubana de los ochenta en la obra poética de Soleida Ríos,” Literatura: Teoría, Historia, Crítica 17, no. 1
(2015): 263–95.
23 See Rinaldo Walcott, Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada (Toronto: Insomniac, 1997); M. NourbeSe Philip, Frontiers:
Selected Essays on Writing and Culture, 1984–1992 (Stratford, UK: Mercury, 1992); Dionne Brand, Bread out of Stone:
Recollections, Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming, Politics (Toronto: Coach House, 1994); Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation
for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001);
Carlos Moore, Castro, the Blacks, and Africa (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California,
1988); and Zuleica Romay Guerra, Elogio de la altea o las paradojas de la racialidad (Havana: Fondo Editorial Casa de las
Américas, 2014).
24 See Philip, “The Absence of Writing”; and Soleida Ríos, “Para leer en soledad,” in El retrato ovalado (Havana: Unión, 2015),
9–11.
25 “Revolutionary period”; Milena Rodríguez Gutiérrez, Otra Cuba secreta: Antología de poetas cubanas del XIX y del XX
(Madrid: Verbum, 2011), 29.
26 “Those from within and those from outside; those from the island and those from exile; those from Cuba and those from
the diaspora; those from one shore and those from the other”; ibid.
27 “Almost all of the poets from outside were, at some point, inside, and nothing ensures that tomorrow some of the authors
we consider to be inside will [not] be seen as writers from outside: it is well known that the Cuban exile or diaspora experi-
ence does not end”; ibid., 30.
28 See Yvette Fuentes’s definition of aislamiento in “Beyond the Nation: Issues of Identity in the Contemporary Narrative of
Cuban Women Writing (in) the Diaspora” (PhD diss., University of Miami, 2002), especially her discussion of transportability
and fluidity, which allow Cuban women writers to use the concept of aislamiento as metaphors to rewrite the nation in rela-
tion to gender. Also working well here is Madeline Cámara Betancourt’s discussion of a “subversive women’s discourse” in
Cuban Women Writers: Imagining a Matria (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
6 [ Warren Harding ] Absence and Disappearance

or dramatist) made a lasting literary reputation in Cuba before 1959.”29 Poets such as Nancy
Morejón, Georgina Herrera, and Excilia Saldaña garnered national and international attention
for transforming the thematic spaces of memory, desire, and spirituality through the voice and
subjectivities of Black Cuban women.
Within the context of the Trinidadian/Tobagonian Canadian diasporic experience, the

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success of independence and socialist movements was reinforced by the opening of immigra-
tion policies in North America. Subsequently, there were more opportunities for Black working-
class women to access education. As the Trinidadian Canadian poet Dionne Brand remarks,
“When my generation came along—when that whole exodus of people left for Canada or the
United States or wherever—the stakes were smaller. They were going away to fill in the cheap
labour spots. So it wasn’t the élite going off to become doctors, lawyers and so forth. My
generation was more of the masses—maybe lower working-class to upper working-class—and
were saving up money and going away.”30
Brand’s generation of women poets emerged as critics moved beyond the English/
Creole divide in language to think about poet Mervyn Morris’s observation that “the language
continuum of West Indian Literature ranges between our West Indian standard English and our
Caribbean Creoles.”31 Similarly, deCaires Narain makes the point that poet Kamau Brathwaite
privileged African cultural identity in his formulation of “nation language” as part of “his impera-
tive to reclaim the lost continent of Africa itself [and] his commitment to valorizing Creole.”32
This lost continent, deCaires Narain continues, becomes a “version of the lost maternal body.”33
As Black anglophone Caribbean women distill their relation to language, a corporeal poetics
of gender, race, and sexuality takes on new meaning.

The Poems
The body remains a material and discursive space that Black Caribbean women negotiate in
language. In her essay “Dis Place—The Space Between,” Philip writes, “The Body. And that
most precious of resources—the space. Between. The legs. The Black woman comes to the
New World with only the body. And the space between. The European buys her not only for
her strength but also to service the Black man sexually—to keep him calm. And to produce
new chattels—units of production—for the plantation machine.”34 Philip demonstrates here

29 Davies, A Place in the Sun, 125.

30 Dionne Brand, quoted in Makeda Silvera, The Other Woman: Women of Colour in Contemporary Canadian Literature
(Toronto: Sister Vision Black Women and Women of Colour Press, 1994), 363.
31 Mervyn Morris, Making West Indian Literature (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2005), 3.
32 DeCaires Narain, Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry, 91 (italics in original), 92. See Kamau Brathwaite’s discussion
of nation language as “the submerged area of that dialect that is much more closely allied to the African aspect of experi-
ence in the Caribbean,” in History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry
(London: New Beacon, 1984), 13.
33 DeCaires Narain, Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry, 92.
34 M. NourbeSe Philip, “Dis Place—The Space Between,” in A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays (Toronto: Mercury,
1997), 76.
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 7

how the exploitation of Black women’s bodies undergirds the economic, psychological, and
social development of the Caribbean and the Americas. A (de)valuation of Black women’s
bodies occurs, where capacities of production undermine possibilities of self-possession
and self-pleasure. Consequently, self-possession and self-pleasure are often displaced from
Black Caribbean women’s subjectivities, especially as national, anti-African, and patriarchal

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sensibilities repeatedly overdetermine these women’s bodies. Thus, as the 1980s amplified
the production of Black Caribbean women’s poetry, a poetics of the body reimagined the
boundaries for self-possession and self-pleasure.

“Paredes”

Soleida Ríos’s “Paredes” (“Walls”), the seventh poem in her collection Entre mundo y juguete,
details a speaker’s battle with her body.35 Throughout the poem, the speaker negotiates absence
and disappearance in her projections of bodily contempt.36 In wrestling with these projections,
the speaker embarks on a journey into the interior, evaluating and reevaluating each relationship
she has to the self. She eventually builds paths to self-possession and self-pleasure. Initially
the speaker constructs her body as another woman she disdains.
Insulto a esta mujer terrible.
La quiero derribar
pero sólo se aleja raramente y
vuelve
hombro con hombro
donde yo quiero levantarme.

(I curse that terrible woman.

I want to knock her down
but she rarely leaves and
returns
shoulder to shoulder
to the point where I want to get back up.)

The speaker not only condemns this “terrible woman” but also expresses a desire to physi-
cally harm her. The consonant rolling r’s in “mujer,” “terrible,” “quiero,” “derribar,” “pero,”
“raramente,” “hombro,” and “levantarme” sonically intensify this scene. She leaves the reader
wondering what this woman has done to the speaker to deserve such rage. This question
remains unanswered throughout the poem and becomes a haunting absence. Instead, Ríos
represents the body as a recurring affliction, a trouble that incessantly returns. Through this

35 Soleida Ríos, “Paredes,” in Entre mundo y juguete (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1987), 20–21.
36 The surrealist quality of this poem presented many challenges for translating into English, especially in conveying Cuban
idiomatic expression. The translations I offer are by no means definitive; they are meant to be a gesture into further read-
ings of Ríos’s works.
8 [ Warren Harding ] Absence and Disappearance

representation, the external forces—the nation, man, White supremacy, colonialism, capital-
ism—that constrict the speaker’s existence fade. In their place, the body takes center stage.
In this interior space, the speaker’s ability to explore herself is paramount.
The line “hombro con hombro” bridges any distance between the speaker and her body
but leaves the rage intact in its militaristic imagery. The relationship between the speaker

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and her body is strained at best, volatile at worst. As the stanza closes, the speaker’s place
shifts from reporter to subject. The verb “levantarme” expresses a self-reflexive action and
summons the speaker’s desire to resist. The speaker initiates her fight to regain herself, in all
her emotional capacities. By not disclosing the rationale behind her rage, the speaker makes
her insecurities as hypervisible as they are fleeting. In so doing, the rage becomes a space
through which she is able to possess her body in disappearance.
In the second stanza, the speaker moves into consciousness. This consciousness
produces the poem’s first disappearance: the subjectivity of the terrible woman. This disap-
pearance allows the speaker to focus on a different aspect of her gendered subjectivity. “La
otra mañana casi me ciega el / corazón de puro miedo.”37 Fear dawns within the speaker
as the heart comes into full view in relation to the body. The heart is not only the lifeline of
the body, but it is also the place that represents love and desire. As the stanza continues,
the speaker’s unconsciousness, however, reappears. “Una noche cualquiera me sigue el /
sueño / se acomoda, me exprime.”38 Unlike the heart, which almost blinds her, the dream
gathers up the speaker without her consent. At no point does the speaker invite or welcome
this dreamspace. Consent’s absence represents the dreamscape’s power to command the
speaker. The speaker cannot resist this power, and thus succumbs to its will. As the poem
continues, “Y todo por eso que lleva en el / alero. / Y todo bajo el brazo común de / atropellar
el salto.”39 The speaker is on edge and initiates a disappearance. The dreamscape permits the
speaker’s disappearance, opening readers’ consciousness to a possible elsewhere. Notice
how the word “todo” conjures a sense of ambiguity. This ambiguity intensifies the weight the
speaker is carrying: the fight with her body, her own interior, her own image. The speaker’s
attention to “el salto” presents a possibility to leave this conflict behind and expand the space
of her disappearance to an elsewhere.
In the third stanza, readers witness the presence of a woman, but not the “mujer terrible”
from before. The stanza opens, “No es la misma de siempre esta / mujer. / No va de negro /
ni hay garfio alguno igual a sus enseres.”40 This new woman represents another movement
into the speaker’s interior. The speaker does not seem to wish her harm. “La he dejado llegar

37 “The other morning, my heart almost blinds me, out of pure fear.”
38 “One night, whichever one, the dream / follows me / makes itself comfortable, squeezes me.”
39 “And everything, because of this, remains on the / roof’s edge. / And everything, because of the overtaking leap, / beneath
the common arm.”
40 “She is not the same as always, this / woman. / She neither wears black / nor can any hook equal her tools.”
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 9

alguna vez / hasta ponerme al borde.”41 This line functions as a turning point as the speaker
welcomes her other self. In this transition, she embraces the totality of her emotions, including
her rage. Suddenly, however, this other self becomes harmful.

Pero qué bulla trae. Qué

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cuchillos.
¿Serán acaso los moringos que
gritan
desde los otros años?
¿Será la vuelta a La Escondida?
Ni las limas más puras me hicie-
ron olvidarla.

(But what uproar she brings. What

knives!
Could they be the moringos that
cry out
from years past?
Could this be the return to La Escondida?
Not even the sharpest file al-
lowed me to forget her.)

Here, the woman’s violence catches the speaker off guard. The speaker becomes disoriented
to rationalize the woman’s violence as if she has forgotten her relationship to the body. She
recalls “los moringos” and “La Escondida.” Moringos are medicinal plants that grow throughout
the Caribbean and have been used to treat ailments such as malnutrition and reduce inflam-
mation.42 The moringos, however, are not new. They come from the speaker’s past, conjuring
a sense of uncertainty. While La Escondida literally translates as “The Hidden One,” it is also
the name of a town in eastern Cuba close to a mountain range. Together, moringos and La
Escondida offer spaces of escape in the poem, of disappearance away from harm. As the
speaker broods over the woman’s furor, we observe a level of empathy that she did not show
to the “mujer terrible.” Here, the speaker deepens her relationship to the body, transforming
rage into compassion.
The speaker explicitly references the body in the fourth stanza, using absence and disap-
pearance to interrogate her reimagination of the self.

Mírenla ahí mismo como viene

con la resolución del ala
levantado su escuela furibunda
diente de perro, bejucos, dien-
te, diente.

41 “I had let her come up once / to the point of putting myself on the edge.”
42 See WebMD, “Moringa,” www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-1242/moringa (accessed 22 March 2019).
10 [ Warren Harding ] Absence and Disappearance

(Look at her right there, how she comes

with the resolution of the wing
raising her furious school
dog’s tooth, bejucos, too-
th, tooth.)

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The speaker commands the readers to “mírenla,” creating a visual milieu for her body’s subjec-
tivity. What is absent from this milieu is where this new body is coming from. The speaker thus
brings the reader into a newly imagined self. Within this visual milieu, the “diente” emerges as
a critical organ, supplanting violent imagery: “su escuela furibunda / diente de perro, bejucos,
dien- / te, diente.” Notice that the “diente” is the only body part in the poem that is repeated—
three times. Teeth are used to bite both in aggression and to break down food for nourishment.
In addition, they guard the mouth, the site through which speech leaves the body. As violence
intensifies, a disappearance occurs. The image of the bejuco nestled between the teeth signals
this disappearance. A bejuco (also known as a guaco) is a vine similar to the moringa and is
used as an anti-inflammatory and for pain relief.43 The bejuco’s placement between the teeth
diffuses aggression, leading the reader to wonder where the aggression has gone. The disap-
pearance of aggression anticipates the disappearance of the body as antagonist. When the
speaker becomes aware of her ability to self-possess, possibilities for healing appear.
Mi alto varón profundamente
adentro
el mar, la cuesta, la cebolla
del lirio.
Yo misma calibrándome el ritmo
del bongó
y la palma suave, de amarga sal-
via y miel
en la garganta.

(My alto varón deep

inside
the sea, the hill, the lily’s
bulb.
I, calibrating myself, the rhythm
of the bongo
and the smooth palm, of bitter sa-
ge and honey
in the throat.)

In this stanza, the speaker’s self-possession invokes erotic and sacred knowledge. Imagery
of “el mar,” “la cuesta,” and “la cebolla / del lirio” surrounds the “alto varón,” a possible

43 See Rain Tree, “Guaco,” www.rain-tree.com/guaco.htm (accessed 7 March 2019).

 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 11

reference to the pistil of a lily. This imagery, in effect, conjures a geography where the female
body is no longer vulgar or crude but in harmony with the landscape. Self-pleasure emerges
as the speaker confesses, “Yo misma calibrándome el ritmo / del bongó.” Here, the speaker’s
embrace of the self emanates alongside the playing of bongó, an instrument historically linked
to Black Cuban ritual and performance. In so doing, the speaker grounds her self-pleasure in

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sacred cultures and vice versa. Notice the absence of male figures up to this point in the poem.

Tiémblenme aquí, hermanos y

enemigos
zúmbenme, canten
que el momento más grave de mi
vida
no ha llegado todavía.

(Shake me here, brothers and

enemies,
banish me, sing
that the gravest moment of my
life
has not yet arrived. [boldface in original])

Here, the body disappears, signaling a shift in inquiry. Perhaps the speaker realizes that
since her many selves—the terrible woman, the woman with knives, the woman with teeth—
have opened the doors to self-possession and self-pleasure, it is time for her to address the
exterior: her “brothers and enemies.” As the speaker addresses the exterior, the degree to
which she has plunged to reclaim her interiority reveals itself. The last three lines are sobering:
“el momento más grave de mi / vida / no ha llegado todavía.” As the speaker explores
the absences and disappearances that block her from self-possession and self-pleasure, she
gains new life. In “Parades,” Ríos invites us into an acerbic world where the speaker’s use of
absence and disappearance enables her to reimagine her relationship to her interior space.
By journeying with and disarming her rage, possibilities for self-possession and self-pleasure
appear. Embedded between los paredes, a deeper and perhaps restorative relation to the
body, the self, and others surfaces.

“Meditation on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones”

As Black Caribbean women poets journey into the interior space, they also contest how
dominant cultural images alter their relationship to the body. Oftentimes these images read
Black Caribbean women’s bodies in negation. Calling attention to these distortions, a poet-
ics of the body enlivens a reimagination of subjectivity. In “Meditations on the Declension of
Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones,” M. NourbeSe Philip extends an engage-
ment with absence and disappearance to challenge dominant images of Black Caribbean
12 [ Warren Harding ] Absence and Disappearance

women.44 Grammar surfaces as the foundation through which the speaker reclaims space for
self-possession and self-pleasure. While the speaker in Ríos’s “Parades” searches within the
body, the speaker in Philip’s poem focuses on representations of the body to explore how a
relationship to grammar presents opportunities to reimagine the body.
The outset of the poem is riddled with fragmentations. These fragmentations develop as

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the speaker divides the sentence “If not in yours in whose language am I” into a multitude of
clauses to form the first stanza of the poem. Within these fragmentations, absence takes center
stage, especially in the speaker’s nondisclosure of the speaker’s linguistic subjectivity. Through
the negative clause “If not,” the speaker destabilizes all that has been accepted as dominant
truth. The speaker’s fragmented grammar and speech narrates its own fabricated journey.
(if not in yours)
I am yours
In whose language
Am I not
Am I not I am yours

Throughout the stanza, absence figures prominently. First, as the speaker references “in whose
language,” she does not provide a frame for the poem’s language. From which language does
the speaker belong? This absence of naming a language allows the reader to suspend gram-
matical rules and focus on the speaker’s testimony. Even though the poem is written in English,
English itself becomes a metaphor for any language. Notice that in every positioning of the
sentence, punctuation marks are absent. The sentence may be a question, a statement, or an
exclamation. The thought, at the level of grammar and language, is limitless. Consequently,
the speaker plays with six structural permutations:
1. “If not in yours in whose language am I”
2. “In whose language am I if not in yours”
3. “In whose language if not in yours am I”
4. “If not in yours am I in whose language”
5. “Am I if not in yours in whose language”
6. “Am I in whose language if not in yours”

These six permutations simultaneously activate subjectivities for “language,” “I,” and “yours”
as they construct dependencies for “language,” “I,” and “yours.” In so doing, language, reflex-
ivity, and ownership emerge as focal subjectivities. Grammar and its disjunctions disrupt any
overdetermination that has conscripted these subjectivities.
Throughout this grammatical fragmentation, there is also grammatical disappearance,
especially with the adverb “not.” The speaker constantly dislocates “not” in the stanza,

44 M. NourbeSe Philip, “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones,” in She Tries Her
Tongue, 26–27. Declension is defined as both a grammatical variation of a noun, pronoun, or adjective and a condition of
decline or moral deterioration. “Flying cheek-bones” could reference the bone below the eye that structures the jaw or the
flesh that separates the buttocks.
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 13

displacing the negative images that English (and any other language) has conjured for Black
Caribbean women’s subjectivities. The speaker reverses English’s negation and unleashes the
negation on itself. In so doing, the speaker uses English to mock its constructions of beauty,
of pleasure. That the word “beauty” or referents to “beauty” are absent from the first stanza
presents an irony. Why does beauty only appear in the title? Is beauty not a subject of the

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poem? The absence of beauty, as the speaker takes control of English and grammar, affirms
her attention to beauty’s declension, its change in form, not beauty itself. In other words,
the speaker breaks how beauty has been constructed to disown Black Caribbean women.
Therefore, as the speaker unbinds the grammatical constraints of beauty, she claims beauty
for herself, harnessing self-pleasure.
In the second stanza, the speaker presents a disappearance of the meditation, “If not
in yours in whose language am I,” as she asserts her raced and gendered subjectivity as the
“girl with the flying cheek-bones.”
Girl with the flying cheek-bones:
She is
I am
Woman with the behind that drives men mad
And if not in yours
Where is the woman with a nose broad
As her strength
If not in yours
In whose language
Is the man with the full-moon lips
Carrying the midnight of colour
Split by the stars—a smile
If not in yours.

Unlike in the previous stanza, where the speaker solely fragments the meditation, the speaker
now intersperses these fragmentations between statements of her raced and gendered subjec-
tivity. The disappearance of the meditation structures the speaker’s multiple subjectivities.
Where the first stanza expresses grammatical prowess, the second stanza represents wide-
ranging self-location. This self-location carries a host of descriptive markers that structure a
raced and gendered reality of the body. The speaker highlights the “Woman with the behind
that drives men mad,” “the woman with a nose broad / As her strength,” and “the man with
the full-moon lips,” which invoke stereotypical and pervasive images of Black people—the
Hottentot Venus, the ugly Black woman, and the Sambo, respectively.45 These images, however,
flow between the refrains from the first stanza’s meditation. These brief disappearances (every
other line) create a rhythmic dialogue that shows the relationship between grammar, subjectivity,

45 See bell hooks’s discussion of stereotypical images of Black women in Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
(Boston: South End, 1981), as well as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s discussion of Black women’s sexualized stereotypes in
Black Venus: Sexualized Savage, Primal Fear, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
14 [ Warren Harding ] Absence and Disappearance

and the body. Where the search for subjectivity leads to the body, the body, in turn, questions
the grammar of that very subjectivity. By carrying the clause “if not in yours” through to the
end of the stanza, the speaker insightfully reminds the reader of a vital use of grammatical
speculation. Thus the speaker displaces the linguistic structures that root Black/African and
female/male bodies in deviation and negation. This displacement also allows the speaker to

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conjure new realities as she grammatically repossesses these bodies.
Slightly mirroring the first stanza, the last stanza continues to destabilize the logic of
beauty. While it appears that the speaker is on a quest for a language to be beautiful, we
realize that the speaker was already conscious of beauty’s insufficiency. The speaker is not
after beauty per se but the grammar that structures beauty. As I have noted, even though the
title includes the word “beauty,” explicit references to beauty remain absent until the last line,
where the word “beautiful” appears.
If not in yours
In whose
In whose language
Am I
If not in yours
Beautiful

Here, the speaker’s lament can be read in two ways. In one sense, the speaker questions
the veracity of language (English) to determine the grammar of beauty. At the same time, the
speaker asserts her possession of linguistic beauty. Consequently, Philip uses the absence
of beauty throughout the poem to invert the grammatical logic of beauty. In this inversion,
then, beauty is never a given, it is always a logic to be destabilized and asserted for oneself.
The speaker’s grammatical destabilization of beauty reimagines the subjectivities of Black
Caribbean women beyond negation. Therefore, “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty
by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones” examines not only how the grammar of the body
structures beauty but also how the mastery of grammar can undo its conscriptions. In effect,
Philip shows the reader the manipulative nature of language and how access to grammar
provides the power to transform its logics of subjective negation.
The body is central to a genealogy of Black Caribbean women’s poetry. It not only attends
to the histories and legacies of violence across the region but also offers strategies for self-
possession and self-pleasure. Through an analysis of absence and disappearance, we can
read the works of Philip and Ríos as meaningful expressions of Black Caribbean women’s
poetics of the body during the 1980s. As poets who traverse raced, gendered, and national
boundaries, they forge voices attuned to the struggles and possibilities that materialize in a
reckoning with the self that transports listeners along interior and connective journeys.
As the field of Caribbean women’s writing theorizes mothering, dislocations, globalization,
revolution, and nation, the body remains a critical link. Through their engagement with the
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 15

body, Black Caribbean women poets such as Ríos and Philip carve out spaces to transgress
the ever-present threat of erasure. A poetics of absence and disappearance presents images
to elsewheres and (some)bodies forgotten, lost, quiet, or lingering to face the world. When
studied, these images provide critical ground for Black Caribbean women’s subjectivities.

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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Chekwube Danladi, Anani Dzidzienyo, Alex Martin, Brian Meeks, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario,
Katsí Rodríguez Velázquez, and Esther Whitfield for guidance and support in draft reviews of and transla-
tions for this essay.