Abstract: The poem of the Peruvian poet Victoria Santa Cruz, Me Gritaron Negra, is an example of how one can artistically make use of discursive devices in order to address political issues of identity. Based on her personal life story, Santa Cruz traces back the path she has taken from shame to pride, showing the strength of the violence imbued in the racist discourse she had to face, and how her acquiring awareness of that discursive construction made her powerful enough to fight back.
Keywords: Discourse. Peru. Victoria Santa Cruz. Racism. Social Change.
V
ictoria Santa Cruz’s poem at the same time fights against racism by making use of discursive devices and shows the path that the author has taken until she re-alizes how racism was built through discourse and how she makes use of that under-standing to fight it back. As a way to assist in the recreation of the author’s feelings as well as its evolution process – from labeling, to mirror identification, to self-denial, to self-acceptance, and finally up to terminological appropriation and a counter-discourse production – the poem makes use of enriching elements other than that of a rhymed speech, such as sound coming from musical instruments and voices coming from the chorus. Before moving on to the poem, we will take a brief look at the issue of racism, specifically in Peru.Peruvian population is, nowadays, constituted by 2% of black people2 and, simi-lar to most of other countries in the Americas, it had a slavery-based colonial econo-my beginning in the 1520’s. During colonial times, African people who came or were brought to Peru played an important role in settling the Spanish colonies in America, either as free citizens or as slaves. As time went by, the role Afro-Peruvians played in Peruvian society was diminished and, again, such as in most of the American coun-tries, due to the reinforcement of the image of the white Europeans as the “superior race” - which received scientific contribution from the Nazism in the middle of the 20th century - black people started being discriminated according to their skin color, creating a social-economic hierarchy called “pigmentocracia”3.
The discourse that claims the superiority of the white European race against the inferiority of the black African one - and other ethnic groups - is difficult to be dat-ed, and is continually spread up to current days. Although in some countries, such
Terminological appropriation for
as Brazil, we are able to see, at a certain degree, a profound miscegenation, the ways of racial discrimination vary from different times and places, with its forms ranging from segregationist Laws (racial segregation in the middle of the 20th century in the United States, Apartheid from the middle up to the end of the 20th century in South Africa, etc.), up to in-equalities regarding the access to social and economic opportunities, and down to verbal offenses.
Racism is a ubiquitous problem, it shares a strong linkage to a Western-cen-tered globalization and has similarities in every place of the world, hence why we understand that such poem can be analyzed regardless of the fact that it was written and performed in the Span-ish language in Peru. In spite of the fact of it being a literary work, the way it makes use of discursive devices is worth of attention, for it is very well made with elements which may be discussed in the field of discourse analysis. Thanks to that, it is possible to analyze racism in Peru by making use of theoretical texts dealing with racism in Brazil, which shares even more similarities due to both countries’ same regional location.
The purpose of this paper is to an-alyze how racism is presented in dis-course and to show one of the ways in which discourse is used to address such issue. In the text we will deal with, it is easy to notice how racial discrimination is subtly built up in discourse and how effective it is in its violent purpose by posing the racial difference in a hierar-chical set, giving negative attributes to
the black color, which is extended, then, to the color of someone’s skin.
The situation of the insult which in-spired the poem is detailed by the author in an interview given to a show of the Peruvian channel TV Perú. There, San-ta Cruz narrates the time when a white family moved into her neighborhood and how they openly expressed their distaste for having a black child playing with other children on the streets, and how they avoided any relationship with her because of her skin color. For Guimarães (2003), the situation of insults are com-monly claimed to be the consequence of conflicts. However, he denies such com-monsense by stating that the insult itself may give rise to a conflict. And it seems, through Santa Cruz’s accounts of the fact that the situation indeed happened such as the latter. In his article, too, insults coming from neighbors make up the sec-ond greatest number of denounced cases of racial insults in Brazil, being in its majority white women insulting black women. The cases of insults presented in Guimarães’ article have many different reasons. In Santa Cruz’s case, the report-ed reason was a dispute of a game placreport-ed on the street among the children of the neighborhood.
First, the poem starts with a narra-tion situated in the past, at a time when the author is five years old. She gives then the viewer/reader an account of how she was attacked and offended on the street, and behind the word lied a racist discourse (in Spanish, “negra”). By then, Santa Cruz identified herself with the “label” and, at the same time,
inter-nalized all the negative aspects linked to the term with which her new neighbors ascribed her. In order to illustrate how the hidden truth is present in such label, I bring here Guimarães’ article (2003), which deals with “Racial Insult in Bra-zil”:
[S]ince the social and racial position of the insulted is already historical-ly established by means of a long process of prior humiliation and subordination, the very term that designates them as a racial group (‘preto’ or ‘negro’) has already become in itself a pejorative term, capable of shorthand use, unaccompanied by adjectives and qualifications. The term ‘negro’ or ‘preto’ thus comes to be a verbal or chromatic synthesis of a whole constellation of stigmas relat-ing to the makeup of a racial identity.
More than the term, the color itself acquires this symbolic stigmatizing function, as the synonyms listed in vernacular language dictionaries clearly show: dirty, stained, lugubri-ous, dreadful, grievlugubri-ous, accursed, ne-farious, perverse, and so on. Stigma can be so deep-seated that a Black per-son could be offended, for example, by a reference as subtle as this one:
‘também, olha a cor do indivíduo’ (‘Be-sides, look at the individual’s color.’).
(GUIMARÃES, 2003, p. 136)
Thus, as her life goes on, she suffers from not being able to get rid of such stig-ma linked to her identity. Here, it is con-venient to analyze the other elements
of the performance: it is possible to see, from the beginning and up to that point, that the beats of the percussion are at a low pace, indicating perhaps the author’s depression for not being able, despite the efforts, to change the situation where she is in - change her skin color and oth-er African traits she has (thick hair and lips, etc). The voices coming from the chorus have an angry and violent tone, indicating the violence once felt.
But at a certain point, she stops step-ping back and finds no way out other than stepping forward. It is interesting to see here the variety of meanings one may come up in order to interpret the opposition “stepping back”/“stepping forward”, since it is the turning point of the whole poem, which is divided in two parts by this very opposition. When she was first called “negra”, she understood it as an offense (as it really was the inten-tion), and “stepped back”. With this “step-ping back”, the author may mean that:
a) she did not want that label because of the implicit negativity that came with it;
b) she may also have understood it as a warning not to come close to the “other”
and keep the boundaries which separat-ed Peruvian people by their skin colors, or; c) finally, she may have wanted to say that she recognized the diminishing in-tention coming with the verbal violence and had no other choice than to “step back”.
So, at a certain point of the poem, she decides not to step back anymore and that is when the whole suffering is trans-formed into strength to resist racial seg-regation. From then on, the beats of the
percussion get faster and more vibrant, bringing a renewed energy to the per-formance, indicating the energy she gets from assuming her identity, yet attribut-ing a new meanattribut-ing to it. The chorus’ voic-es, which once shouted angrily against her, now come from herself with a con-fident, powerful and vibrant tone, more melodiously than the previous ones.
When she finally understands that the whole matter is not with the word
“negra” itself, but with the (racist) discur-sive chain embedded in it, she decides to appropriate the word and construct,as a black person, her counter-discourse, now ascribing to the word “negra/o”
all the positive characteristics and as-sociations she could encounter, be it in its sonority or in the positive aesthetic qualities of the black color, etc. Here, she assumes the role of ‘founding subject’, ac-cording to Foucault (1970), where the poet voluntarily proposes a meaning to, in this case, not an empty word, but a word filled with negative characteristics up to that point in its historicity.
She could never deny - even when she wanted to - her identity, because of the natural inexorability of one’s skin color. However, she manages to choose denying not the identity itself, but the discourse embedded in it and that is when she “finds the key” not to step back anymore. Dealing with the construction of identities through discourse, she cre-ates a counter-discourse in order to face the previous one with which she was addressed (attacked) on the street when she was five and that followed her for a lifetime.
It is possible to draw a parallel with the Brazilian scenario of appropriation of the term “negro” by the “movimento negro” (Black political movement) in or-der not only to set ourselves free from the stigma associated with the word “preto”, but also to include other non-white peo-ple under such identity denomination, as Magalhães (2004) claims in her arti-cle “Interdiscursividade e conflito entre discursos sobre raça em reportagens bra-sileiras”.
By appropriating the word “negra/o”, Victoria Santa Cruz inverts then the whole meaning of it, in order to use the term which describes her social identi-ty without being diminished by it. It is noticeable that the word itself does not change along the poem, only the attitude, along with the musical elements that as-sume another perspective, another color, another rhythm, thus, another meaning.
The process adopted by the poet, in an in-dubitable strength for its well-developed artistic work, is already theorized by Fairclough (1992) under one of the types of intertextuality, called metadiscourse.
The author says:
“Metadiscourse implies that the speaker is situated above or outside her own discourse, and is in a position to control and manipulate it. This has in-teresting implications for the relation-ship between discourse and identity (subjectivity): it seems to go against the view that one’s social identity is a matter of how one is positioned in particular types of discourse. [...] subjects are in part positioned and constituted in discourse, but they also engage in practice which
contests and restructures the discursive structures (orders of discourse) which position them.” (FAIRCLOUGH, 1992, pp.
122-123)
The poem here shows how identities are shaped by discourses in such a level that the poet herself takes a long time of her life believing that the label with which she was ascribed was the only one possible, and reflects the whole “sad true hidden in it”. Fortunately, discursive constructions can be and indeed are de-constructed once she finally notices that words might have different meanings, depending on the context or the speaker by whom they are used.
The aim of this paper was to show how an artistic work could explicit the historicity of a discourse, and, on one
References
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Polity Press, 1992. p. 101-136.
FOUCAULT, M. Orders of Discourse.
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2, March 2003, p. 133-151. Available at:
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hand, how this very discourse/discur-sive chain could make itself present through a single word, despite all the cruelty and selfishness concerning a privileged ethnic group, embedded in it.
On the other hand, Santa Cruz’s poem also makes use of a multimodal text in order to intervene socially through the discursive devices available to her. Indi-rectly, it has shown how discursive chains can be deconstructed and given other meanings through one’s agency. In the multimodal text here analyzed, through its artistic composition of dif-ferent communicative elements, we were able to see the beauty and the (black) power present in such construc-tion of meaning produced by the Peruvi-an poet Victoria SPeruvi-anta Cruz. Y
MAGALHÃES, C. Interdiscursivi-dade e Conflitos entre Discursos sobre raça em reportagens brasileiras. In: Lin-guagem em (Dis)curso - LemD, Tubarão, v.
4, 2004, n. esp., p. 35-60.
SANTA CRUZ, V. Me Gritaron Negra, Victoria Eugenia Santa Cruz. [s.d.]. Avail-able at: <http://youtu.be/F5vPoqDkMF0>.
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______. Victoria Santa Cruz: Me gri-taron negra: depoiment given to the TV show “Retratos de TV Perú”. Available at:
<http://youtu.be/754QnDUWamk>. Ac-cessed on Jan. 21, 2015.