The Great Zoo. Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista. Translated by Aaron Coleman. The University of Chicago Press. 96 pages, 2024.
Guillén’s awareness of the devastating consequences and conundrums of (neo)colonialism extends outward from his native Caribbean. The form of this zoo is not left to be read as an innocuous or arbitrary bestiary. Here, Guillén makes clear that the zoo’s absurdity and violence is symptomatic of the fraught history of Worlds Fairs and zoos. The Great Zoo stresses the imperialist desire to try to capture and define what is or isn’t savage, to decide what is or isn’t (in)human(e). The poems of this collection speak to colonial violence throughout the past and present in locations around the world, whether that be in Gaza, Darfur, the United States, or anywhere else the machinations of power have wreaked havoc in people’s lives.
[…]
To read Guillén across the diaspora, as he speaks out against colonialism and anti-Black violence, bears witness to Blackness beyond any single language, history, or country. To read his poems in translation in the United States today traverses political, geographic, linguistic, generational, and poetic boundaries.
Aaron Coleman’s Introduction (Poetry, September 2024)
In the aquarium of the Great Zoo
the Caribbean slips by.
This animal,
enigmatic and maritime,
has a crest of crystal glass,
a blue back, a green tail,
an underbelly of compact coral,
and the gray fins of a hurricane.
On the aquarium, this inscription:
“Caution: it bites.”
The Caribbean, Nicolás Guillén, translated by Aaron Coleman.
En esta parte están las águilas.
La caudal.
La imperial.
El águila en su nopal.
La bicéfala (fenómeno)
en una jaula personal.
Las condecoratrices
arrancadas del pecho de los condenados
en los fusilamientos.
La pecuniaria, doble, de oro $20 (veinte dólares).
Las heráldicas.
La prusiana, de negro siempre como una viuda fiel.
La que voló sesenta años sobre el Maine, en La Habana.
La yanqui, traída de Viet Nam.
Las napoleónicas y las romanas.
La celestial,
en cuyo pecho resplandece Altaír.
En fin,
el águila
de la leche condensada marca “El Águila”.
(Un ejemplar
realmente original).
Las águilas, Nicolás Guillén
Lynch de Alabama.
Rabo en forma de látigo
y pezuñas terciarias.
Suele manifestarse
con una gran cruz en llamas.
Se alimenta de negros, sogas,
fuego, sangre, clavos,
alquitrán.
Capturado
junto a una horca. Macho.
Castrado.
Lynch, Nicolás Guillén.
