Shango the Shaky Fairy

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This essay by Tony Harrison originally appeared in the April 1970 edition of The London Magazine.

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Where are you now, O Shango?
Two-headed, powerful
Man and woman, hermaphrodite
Holding your quivering thunderbolts
With quiet savage malice;
Brooding over your domain,
Africa, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil,
Slavery of mind is unabolished.
Always wanting to punish, never to love.

This question was posed by Abioseh Nicol, the Sierra Leonean poet in a poem called ‘African Easter’, and it’s a question I’ve often asked myself after my first acquaintance with Shango, that god of many parts. I am also worried to the point of madness by punishment and love. I have an oshe Shango, a Shango staff, I picked up in the country of the Nigerian Yoruba, whose god of thunder he is. Like all foot-or-so-high Yoruba wood carvings my Shango staff is good to feel, pick up, think and worry with. I am a chronic, inveterate feeler. I was once evicted from the Musée de l’Art Moderne for stroking Brancusi’s La Phoque, which surely was what it was made for. Later in the National Gallery of Prague I discovered with the help of a Czech friend that if you carried a white stick, wore dark glasses, and took someone to guide you round, you could handle the extremities of the Rodins, and insinuate your connoisseur hand just wherever you wanted, even essay a bit of hesitant frottage if you fancied. My oshe Shango, like the Yoruba twin figures (igbeji) of the same height, is a very feelable piece of wood, and it is my own. At my worst moments of tension I polish or fondle it, shove it under my oxter like a swagger stick, twirl it about like a bastard New York cop, or even waddle, to my children’s delight, with it stuck between my legs, until we all collapse in ribald laughter and my anxiety is eased. My daughter, Jane, has an appliqued cloth I bought in Dahomey. It hangs on the wall above her bed, and when she almost lost her leg in an accident, she had to gaze at it for months during her recuperation. There is a man carrying a double axe and a ram’s head belching fire, emblems of Shango, god of the storm for the Yoruba of Dahomey as well as Nigeria. So when I went looking for Shango, to investigate his status in the socialist island of Cuba, and under the military dictatorship of Brazil, Jane came with me, along with her mother and her brother Max. The unbalanced poet and the lame daughter. Jane tires easily, and when she does I carry her piggy back like an African woman, like that Shango figure in the D’Harnoncourt collection of New York, which William Fagg has called ‘one of the finest African sculptures extant’. When I carried her in this way people stared, and I remembered that when I produced a new translation of the Lysistrata of Aristophanes into a Nigerian setting, nothing caused more raucous laughter than when the Fulani herdsman I had made the equivalent of Cinesias came to claim his wife with the baby swaddled on his back, unless it was his great red phallus they were laughing at. The actor who played the part was so embarrassed by his costume he tried to wear it back to front. I remember only two other similar moments of high excitement in largely male Nigerian audiences, one in the film version of Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, where Morel turns on his wife and throws her out of the house, and the other when Olivier’s Hamlet castigates Ophelia. Anxiety over the definition of the sexual scope and role creates this humour, and its related despairs and prejudice. In this field Shango has had more experience than old Tiresias, and, in crossing the Atlantic to the New World, has come to acquire more drag and quick changes than Danny La Rue.

To search for Shango in Cuba is to search for that Africa I came to know and love. To search for Africa is to discover and create Cuba. Shango is just one of many, but one of the most powerful, and certainly the most widely travelled of the orishas in the Yoruba pantheon, which is every bit as rich if not richer than that of the Greeks. In the middle passage, in the dark hold of the slaver, and in the slave barracks of the sugar plantations, Shango, the thundergod, the king, who, in one version of his legend, is human and hangs himself in the forest, becomes Santa Bárbara in that syncretism of the Catholicism of the Spanish colonist and the orishas of the Yoruba, who were shipped over to Cuba in thousands after the extermination of the gentle Taino and Siboney Indian. Santa Bárbara is the patron saint of artillery, arsenals, powder magazines, and is invoked against lightning (quand le tonnerre tombera, Ste. Barbe nous préservera) because when her wicked father, the king of Nicodemia, struck off the head of the virgin for refusing to renounce new-fangled Christianity, lightning struck him dead. In Cuba she was an army patron too, but her negro devotees address her in lucumí, that form of the Yoruba language still used in the island cults like a liturgical Latin, as Changó (Shango). He/She/It is central to the understanding of cubanidad. And true cubanidad is as much an effort of the revolutionary as the 1969/70 sugar-harvest of 10,000,000 tons. Nicolás Guillén (b. 1902), now President of the Union of Artists and Writers, wrote of Cuba in 1931:

… esta tierra mulata
de africanó y españól
(Santa Bárbara de un ladó,
del ótró ladó, Changó)

One on either side, like a coat of arms, the black god and the white virgin. But they are one and the same person. A concept like the Trinity, only there are (for the moment) only two, and certainly more complex, and perhaps more kinky, but in the end fuller of potential salvation. A mulatto country; a mulatto culture, and much of this notion can be found in the apostle Marti’s idea of cubanidad. Though now the official report to the United Nations in 1968 can say that ‘the real Cuban culture is, and can not but be, mulatto’, and though now, when the Soviet Fleet made a courtesy visit to Havana in July 1969, the hands that held the Cuban flags on the posters that greeted them were of two shades of brown only, it needed the Castro revolution to make the recognition of this visibly obvious cultural fact about Cuba respectable. About some aspects of the mulatto religion, however, the revolution is decidedly uneasy.

It is true that in the period clearly defined in Ramon Guirao’s anthology Orbita de la poesia afro-cubana, 1928–1937, there existed a movement known variously as poesta afro-cubana, poesia negra or negrista. Of its various practitioners only one, Marcelino Arozarena, was actually black, and only Guillén himself mulatto. It was, like many similar movements, ‘gaucho’ poetry in South America, ‘Maori’ poetry in New Zealand, basically white, cultivated, urban and primitivistic. Its verses chime with rumba dancers and the onomatopoeia of the sun-dried gourd maraca. It owes much to the movement in Europe which brought to such artists as Picasso, Braque, Derain and Vlaminck, the knowledge of African masks, and to the theories of Leo Frobenius, mentor of Spengler, dabbled in by both Pound and Lawrence, and whose ideas were much prevalent in the Hispanic world after the translation of Schwarze Dekameron into Spanish in 1925, and after the master himself had toured Europe, and had been well expounded in the Revista de Occidente, a Madrid journal, very influential with Cuban intellectuals of the time. It is a movement wide enough to include Tarzan of the Apes, and what is behind it is what the Allied Supremacies of Africa declared in their Proclamation in the equally symptomatic novel of Charles Williams, Shadows of Ecstasy (1931), that ‘the great age of the intellect is done’. Europe, cerebral Europe, trapped in its grey matter, is done for. The two poems that initiated the movement in Cuba in 1928 are both by white poets, Ramon Guirao and Jose Z. Tallet, and they are both about a negress dancing the rumba, mildly sexotic, with surface sound effects as awful as Vachel Lindsay’s Congo, or, even worse, Edith Sitwell. It was Africa in the head. Now, we musn’t say, said Guillén, Afro-Cuban but Afro-Spanish.

Today’s Cuban poets, who are again turning to the Yoruba myths ‘in a revolutionary context’, dismiss the old thirties Afro-Cuban stuff as ‘pintoresquismo‘. They make an occasional exception, say, for Regina Pedroso, who was half-Chinese, and who very appropriately complained in his poem ‘Hermano Negro’.

Are we nothing more than rumbas … and carnivals?

And the new ‘Afro-Spanish’ poets, Miguel Barnet, Pablo Armando Fernández, whose book Libro de los heroes (1964) J. M. Cohen credits with giving modern Cuban poetry ‘a new beginning’, Nancy Morejón, Excilia Saldaña, and Rogelio Martinez Furé, also make an exception for ‘Nicolas’ their president. Guillén’s Motivos de Son appeared two years after the start of the Afro-Cuban movement in 1930. This poetry is also marred by facile onomatopoeia like

Tamba, tamba, tamba, tamba,
tamba del negro que tumba;
tumba del negro, caramba,
caramba, que el negro tumba:
yamba, yambo, yambambe!

But what was to distinguish Guillén from the exoticists pure and simple was his Marxism, his commitment to causes outside the poetry, where it was obvious that the exploited negro was more than rumba and carnival.

In the preface to his next volume of poems, Songoro Cosongo (1931), subtitled poemas mulatas, Guillén says that the spirit of Cuba is ‘mestizo‘, and it is his own awareness of his dual origins that was to produce some of his best poems like ‘Balada de los dos Abuelos’ from West Indies Ltd (1934) where he calls together his white Spanish ancestor and his black slave ancestor and presents them in a synthesis of anguish and celebration:

los dos del mismo tamaño,
ansia negra y ansia blanca;
los dos del mismo tamaño,
gritan, sueñan, lloran, cantan.

The components of what Jean Price-Mars called the ‘ajiaco‘, the goulash of Cuba, stirred together by colonial oppression and foreign investors. His poems move beyond Cuba to the rape of Abyssinia by Mussolini and to the activities of Mau-Mau in Kenya. It is the sustained anti-colonialism which made him the obvious choice for President of the Writers’ Union of the new Cuba. Although the critic Cintio Vitier praised Guillén’s ‘afro-cuban’ style as being produced, unlike that of his contemporaries, desde adentro, the one failing the new Cuban poets attribute to him is his only superficial knowledge of the negro culture of Cuba. Unlike themselves he doesn’t know the cults from the inside. And in all the poetry of rumba and maraca of the thirties Shango himself makes only a rare appearance, once in a shrine before yet another rumba dancer (this time that of Emilio Ballagas) whose navel gazes on the god like a solitary, adoring eye, and, apart from when he is set beside Santa Bárbara, again in Guillén, when his power is invoked to protect Stalin:

Stalin, Capitán,
a quien Changó proteja … !
(1937)

After the revolution most of this was to change. An editorial in the important journal, Casa de las Américas, in a special issue devoted to Africa en América, proclaimed in 1966, ‘now we are more Cuba, we are more Africa’. But only seven years before, Lydia Cabrera, one of the few researchers, apart from the great Fernando Ortiz, dedicated to the collection and description of Afro-Spanish folklore and culture, complained in her study of the secret society Abakuá of Efik origin, that it was perfectly acceptable to be an Indianist in Cuba because there was none left, but to delve into the rich complexities of negro culture was considered ‘antipatriotic’ and a ‘subversion of national dignity’. This is thankfully no longer so – up to a point. Caballero Calderon said of the whole search for national cultures in Latin America, ‘para crear es necesario conocer‘, something that applies equally to the creation of national cultures in independent Africa. If Guillén did not know the Yoruba cults from the inside, the new poets do, and there is that intimate connection between sociological research and creativity that Calderon thinks essential. Miguel Barnet (b. 1940), for example, worked for five years in the Havana Institute of Ethnology and Folklore, and, as well as doing a perhaps over-edited and directed Oscar Lewis type job on the 108-year-old runaway slave Estaban Montejo, El Cimarron, he writes poetry which often invokes the Yoruba orishas and includes chants in lucumí. In two slim pamphlets La Piedrafina y el Pavorreal (1963) and Isla de Guijes (1964) there appear Oggun, Eleggua, Oya, one of Shango’s wives, Osain, and Shango himself. He dedicates his first book to Tonde, a santero of Palmira in the Las Villas province of Cuba, ‘in memory of my first visit to a lucumí temple’. Impatient with the pintoresquismo of the afro-cuban poetry (so-called) of the thirties Barnet began travelling, researching and living with santeros in Palmira and Jovellanos in Matanzas, in order to know and create Cuba, correct the imbalance, that an education in a North American college had given him. Rogelio Martinez Furé (b. 1937) is a translator of Yoruba poetry through the English of such collectors as Ulli Beier, and also a compiler of the stories and songs of Yoruba origin in Cuba. His book of translations Poesia Anonima Africana (Instituto del Libro, 1968) is immensely popular among the poetry reading public and with other poets, and like most popular books in Cuba is unobtainable in bookshops. He has a similar background of Institute of Ethnography and Folklore, was a founder of the Conjunto Folkorico of the National Theatre, and was responsible for the introduction of the study of African Art in some of the colleges. To know is to create. ‘We use the myths‘, said one or the other of them to me at different times, ‘in a revolutionary context‘.

The orishas become modern Cubans. Eshu, say, can be a bastard and bugger things up. They are boozy orishas and lecherousorishas, like Cubans, though they’d be hard put to it to be boozy these days. And Shango, well Shango is a guerrilla like El Che.

And that made me recall the righteous indignation of the nineteenth century Herald correspondent, James O’Kelly, after his travels in Mambiland, as he called the island in the first stages of becoming Cuba Libre in the 1870s:

The planters grow enormously rich, and become millionaires at the expense of the tears and misery of the wretches who toil for their benefit. That such a system can be permitted to exist among men pretending to be civilized is an outrage on the common conscience of mankind. When one sees the representatives of this abomination kneeling before the altar of the God of the Christians, he must regret the thunderbolts of the grand old gods of the past, who, the poets tell us, smote in their indignation such criminals.

And about eighty years later along came Shango El Che. Down from the mountain, where all the orishas dwell, and from where they are summoned to the aid of the revolution by such poets as Pablo Armando Fernández:

Duermen en la tierra de los antiguos mitos,
doce presagios de los rios, doce
augurios de la primavera.
Cuando despierten será guerreros
de olvidada tradición. Sus memorias inauguran
el tiempo señalado por los poetas.
Caballos y leones misteriosos en la casa
de Orisha,
doce rayos invisibles que cambian el signo
de los meses.

The twelve. The twelve invisible lightning flashes are Shango’s and in the poem ‘Epiphanía’ the thunder that changes the age is Shango’s too:

Revolución,
naces y veo la edad cambiada, el trueno
furia y sangre y unas aguas de miedo,
arrasadoras, pasan.
En el futuro halla el hombre su límite.

An epiphany of Shango, but not here the protector of Stalin. That the Revolution is still keeping el hombre within certain limits, and la mujer within others, is no fault of Shango’s, who can pass from one into the other and back again.

‘Para crear es necesario conocer.’ This is even more apparent in the work of the theatre in Havana. The Teatro Nacional, as early as 1960 presented under the direction of Argeliers León who is director of the institute where Barnet and Martinez Furé studied, four successful programmes of Afro-Cuban (Afro-Spanish) ceremonies: Abakuá, with the rites, legends, drumming, songs and dances of the secret cult of Calabar Efik origin; Bembe, of Yoruba origin, including as finale the magnificent chant to Shango, and Yimbula, rites and music of Bantu origin. In his programme notes to the presentation of Abakuá, Argeliers León speaks of the timid and irregular process of mestizaje in Cuba, but adds that now in 1960 the door to ultimate integration had been opened by the triumph of the revolution. The National Theatre, pursuing the policy of research and creation, also sponsored the folklore monthly in 1961, Actas del Folklore del Teatro Nacional de Cuba, which published both new essays on Cuban folklore, mostly of African origin and reprints of inaccessible articles like those of Romulo Lachatañere on the religious beliefs of the Cuban Yoruba. This work and the presentations in the theatre were content with simply reporting on the rituals or with displaying them with only the minimum of direction. In the Teatro Nacional de Guiñol, an inspired group of puppet and mask players for adults and children, the legends of the Yoruba have found a true dramatic representation. This work has been encouraged and fostered by the directors Pepe and Carucha Camejo and the dramaturg Pepe Carril. Since the theatre’s inauguration in 1963, it has presented Chichereku (1966) based on some of the Afro-Cuban stories collected by Lydia Cabrera, who is now, to everyone’s regret, living in Miami, and in the following year La Loma de Mambiala adapted by Sylvia Barros from the same rich source material. In 1966 Pepe Carril wrote Shangó de Ima, subtitled a Yoruba mystery, which is a chronicle of the life and loves of Shango. One spectator compared Shango to a black Don Juan, and since Ulises Garcia (Shango) was the only unmasked actor in the play it was inevitable that the main review of the play by the poetess Belkis Cuza Malé should be titled Shangó Hombre. She praised the play as a true ‘work of our people and the revolution’, and one which confirmed the search for what was truly Cuban through the medium of the negro, rather than a search for the negro himself. No négritude that is.

But at the same time the Teatro Mella were mounting a production of Aime Césaire’s play Une Saison au Congo. The free programme was admirably educative, in a way that the theatre programmes of socialist countries tend to be and our’s don’t. There were essays on Césaire and Lumumba, by René Dépestre, the Haitian poet now living in Cuba, and by Sartre; the hair-raising betrayal of Lumumba was set out in ruthless detail, and the characters of the international intrigue carefully annotated. But on the stage all the characters shouted at the top of their voices the whole time, so that the only serious thing in the end could have been said in a whisper. The costumes were ‘African’, garish, carnival, and the faces of the Congolese were painted in bright hues. Lumumba did sexual athletics as he delivered his principle orations. One could almost hear that old Afro-Cuban rhythm coming in… rumba Lumumba, rumba, the jungle jangle of the congo bongo. It was embarrassing to learn that the producer Roberto Blanco had spent a year in Ghana. It was all, except for Césaire’s indictment of the Congo episode, an Africa of the mind, in the head. Actors and producers of other theatres tended to shrug and say there was ‘demasiado movimiento, movimiento gratuito‘. The one visual thing that saved the spectacle were the back projections painted on glass by the Cuban negro artist Manuel Mendive; and a remark I heard in the stalls:

‘Che was in the Congo, you know. That was quite a surprise when his book came out. But they say he couldn’t get on with the blacks.’

The spectacle I really wanted to see though was that of Shango possessing, ‘mounting’ his worshipper, as Apollo used to ‘mount’ the Sybil at Cumae. Yes, it still goes on, everybody assured me, all over the place, but a curious unhelpfulness entered into our relations. Granted that in an island where rationing is absolutely total, what food there is, what clothes there are, paper, toys, pencils, a whole goat or a sheep as a sacrifice for Shango might seem a huge extravagance, even for a god, even for a god who had seen service in the Sierra Maestra. But under Cuban Socialism even the gods are equal.

Everyone believes here in Cuba. Look, see that guy there with sort of sacking pants. He’s wearing them for Baba-lu-aye, that’s San Lazaro. And that woman we saw; she had a red and white necklace, those red and white beads. She’s a daughter of Shango. Those are his colours, red and white. Blood and bandages. You’ll see necklaces like that on even very high-up people in the Revolution. Or a little thing of beads round the ankle. Cubans can’t live without it, Santería, black and white. Our socialism is now a third ingredient in the mestizaje of beliefs. You wait in ten, twenty years, Che will be an orisha, if he’s not already in Oriente Province. Already, well, you know, he was a doctor, a healer. He tended not only the wounded guerillas, but the hurt Batista pigs as well. There were twelve when they came down from the mountains, twelve barbudos. Che was a great man, an important man … a minister. Maybe he was tempted … but he died a lowly death in the jungle. They hung his body from a helicopter. That was a mistake. You know, the Ascension and all that. Che will be an orisha. They’ll be calling him Jesus. The drums will bring El Che back. They might call him Shango or one of those. Or Jesus. Ten or twenty years. You must think our revolution is very primitive. Notice when you go into any office of the UJC, almost any, you’ll find almost always the table pushed against a mall, and up there above the table, three photos, Fidel, Che, Camilo. There you are already, your altar. Do you think we are very primitive? It’s usual socialist practice to name streets, factories, etc., after heroes of the revolution. When they do that here, Frank Pais, say, they believe that guy’s right there getting on with the work. Really there. It helps the revolution no end.

On 13 August 1969 Commandante Rene Vallejo Ortiz died. He had been chief medical officer to the army, a hero of the Sierra Maestra, and Fidel’s right hand man. It had been generally known that he was dying for some weeks before, as a consequence of a cerebral haemorrhage. Some weeks before he died a huge totem pole appeared implanted in the pavement of 23rd Street, ‘La Rampa‘, outside a cinema. I thought it was some sort of exotic restaurant sign, like the one for the Carabali (Calabar) almost opposite. But it had been erected, everyone whispered, to preserve the spirit of the Commandante, but by whom no-one would say.

He was born in Manzanillo in Oriente, noted for its spiritualism and its communication with the dead. Outside Manzanillo itself there’s a house where 12 santeros live, black and white, who join hands and sing songs in a language none of them knows or under-stands. But probably African. Commandante Vallejo used to visit them every week. Everyone believes in Cuba, even Fidel. Well he’s not a true believer but he listens, … listened, to everything Vallejo told him that the orishas communicated. But Vallejo really believes, believed. He was a famous surgeon, a lung specialist, but some days, you know, he just wouldn’t operate if the spirits said that it wasn’t a good day for it. It was he, well, Vallejo and the orishas who told Fidel to move the army from Oriente to nearer the centre of the island where the imperialist attack would come. That was at the time of the Bay of Pigs. The orishas advised it. They also say, said, that Fidel wouldn’t long survive Vallejo. We don’t know what Fidel will do without him.

So although Shango is culturally integrated, politically he still remains only the power behind the trueno. His presence among the barbudos makes Cubans lapse into a kind of inferiority feeling which is deeply rooted in their colonial past. Do you think our revolution is primitive? And where these feelings exist one has to create a compensatory superiority feeling. I was talking to a middle-aged negro woman from Santiago in Oriente, on holiday in the capital with her family, and when I told her I had lived in Africa for four years, she nodded in that direction with a worried face and said, ‘But, over there, aren’t they very backward, uncivilised?‘ So I didn’t get to see much of Shango in Cuba except when he zoomed from the hurricane with ostentatious flashiness and lodged in the palma real, the tree that most distinguishes the island’s landscape, which is his throne and lookout post. And his symbols were unintentionally there in the double axes of the old ironwork of the Pasco Jose Marti; double axes stuck into a bundle of fasces, like those near a small war memorial near the Prado Museum in Madrid, or, to the acute embarrassment of some Muscovites, in the railings round the Kremlin Park. And as in the famous and beautiful Shango figure of the D’Harnoncourt collection, where the indispensable double-axe motif is left out, it asserts itself in the divided, exaggerated cleavage of the cubana, the duple hacha carved in the iconography of breasts and buttocks, that, swaying or bouncing, inevitably turn the head of the Cuban macho. The tighter the skirt or trousers the better it seemed, the bigger the arse the better, rolling like something from our forties, when men were men, and women were women, before the outrages of unisex. The oddity about the tight garment that accentuates the eye-catching arse is that the zip, even on the female militia uniform, is neither tucked discreetly to the side, nor imitates the masculine fly (that would never do in Cuba), nor is discreetly flapped, but shines and glitters and divides the mountainous buttocks like a rich vein of silver. Odd. My Joycean kids coined an apposite word for the underwear of such Latin flesh: ANDES.

The figures of Shango, even in West Africa, are of ambiguous sex, but in Cuba once he is syncretized with Santa Bárbara, the Cuban male worries about him/her/it, as if as well as helping to overthrow the Batista regime, he were undermining machismo itself. The anxiety extends even into ‘scientific’ anthropological enquiry. One researcher tries to account for Shango’s association with Santa Bárbara by recounting one Nigerian legend which has him escaping his enemies dressed in the clothes of his wife, Oya. ‘This legend,’ he says, ‘has led to the belief that Shango is really a woman. But,’ he adds, ‘we have seen un macho muy macho under the skirts.’

And so sometimes the iconography of Shango has to depict the genitalia not debajo las sayas, under the skirts, but actually over the skirts as in Manuel Mendive’s drawing of Shango. In the same drawing Shango is holding a sword, a cup, and stands by a tower. Mendive went through formal Art School education where he ‘had to draw Greek beauties’ and eventually reacted against the European images towards Africa, and he began painting the legends of the orishas worshipped in his own house. I asked about the tower in the picture. A phallus, he said. And the goblet, I didn’t need to ask, would be a vagina. But, of course, it isn’t and the tower isn’t. They are part of the centuries old paraphernalia of Santa Bárbara. Her father imprisoned her in a tower. She had a third window put in it in honorem Trinitatis. He cut off her head with a sword, which is why Mendive’s Shango holds one. The tower can be seen in the Van Eyck St Barbara in Antwerp, where the virgin also holds a branch of palm, Shango’s and the martyr’s tree. And the cup? Ah, and here scholarship salivates at the coincidence of History. History is Finnegans Wake. The cup is, of course, the chalice and can be seen in Holbein’s picture of the saint on the St Sebastian altarpiece, in the Pinakothek, Munich, but she did not earn the right to carry it until after 1448, and all due to one Kock. Henry Kock was nearly burnt to death and called upon the saint, who preserved him long enough to receive the last sacraments. So Shango carries the chalice and the host. Kock’s near immolation took place at Gorkum in Holland. I can feel it starting, the great poem on racial integration in Cuba, my masterpiece. It will be called Burnt Gorkum. But Mendive doesn’t do many drawings. The ones he gave me were all done in hospital when he was waiting for an operation and couldn’t use other materials. His right foot was crushed under one of our Leylands. He and Jane compared sufferings and became immediately close, ansia negra y ansia blanca. He showed her a huge painting on wood of his accident. Above the bus, the injured Mendive, and the spectators crowded round the orishas in all their brilliance, and above them, the whole thing giving the effect of El Greco’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz, the Egungun, the ancestors, the dead, who in African societies are continuous with the living, who are behind such ideas as ‘African socialism’, who share the earth now with the living and the unborn. In other paintings Shango sat at table with the Mendive family. Jane was wearing red and white. She is the daughter of Shango, Mendive said.

If Cubans are learning and creating their cubanidad from a new discovery of the Afro- part of their Afro-Spanish inheritance, it is likely that it is from both strains that they inherit machismo. Machismo, the stereotype of the big guy, with lots of cojones, or at least two big ones, like money bags full of doubloons. One of the favourite Spanish curses is ‘By the twenty four balls of the twelve apostles’. So they were all right. I thought that maybe the greatest blasphemy one could produce in Cuba might be something like ‘por los veinte tres cojones de los doce barbudos‘. Machismo which makes a journalist attack a poet as a paederast for wearing a psychedelic tie given to him by Adrian Mitchell. A machismo every bit as suspicious and on the defensive as the Andycappismo of Northern England. That machismo can undermine the revolution is the suggestion of the third part of that prize winning film, the trilogy on Cuban womanhood, Lucia, where a country macho resists his wife’s attempt to learn to read with the young alfabetizador during the great literacy campaign of 1962, and the film clearly states, resists her taking part, her true part, in the revolution. It must have been a great source of anxiety to the Cuban man when he first saw his woman in the olive green militia uniform carrying that dreadful penis symbol, the rifle. Machismo:

Sure, sure, we’re scared of homosexuality. It’s a historical problem. Machismo, all the bullshit culture of Catholic Spain. God they’ve even corrupted the negroes. They’re the worst exponents of machismo. And those fucking, bullshit Panthers. They only come here to bum around and screw. Eldridge Cleaver’s here in Havana though nobody’s supposed to know. He sends notes round to women he fancies, saying who he is and that he’d like to meet them. He signs himself MADRUGADOR HACHA. You know even our fags are backward. Greenwich village, sure they’re a gas, but here…. But anyway, last September they rounded up thousands on the Rampa and shoved them inside incommunicado for ten days, all kinds of people, just everyone out there on the street, candidates for party membership, a second lieutenant, a mother with three daughters. Crazy! It was because of pimping for foreigners, payment in radio sets, clothes, and it wasn’t just prostitution of the genital organs either! Well all the queers, all those they said were queers, they sent to a UMAP in Camaguey. Military psychology … give them some hard graft, put some muscles, put some cojones into, onto them, make them real guys. They showed them porn, hetero porn, movies, and they just laughed themselves silly, the homos, and the colonel couldn’t count one damned erection in the whole goddam camp. Then the queers retaliated. They cut up their mosquito nets, and dyed them a pretty pink with mercurochrome, and hung up Priscilla curtains all over the place. They made wads of the netting, and put spots of mercurochrome on them, and went off to the medic complaining of aches and pains, and saying their periods had started. (Note: red and white: Shango, I noted.) They ogled the handsome guards. They drew up a directory of Camaguey fags. And in the end the military, the big, butch machos just had to let them go, released them. Yes, even now, after that gaff, the military keeps its big, brotherly eye on potential fag centres like art schools. Makes sure they get some real hard cane-cutting in their trabajo productivo and no tomato picking. One girl I know, plays violin, gets her hands so bad out there in the country that she can hardly touch her instrument for weeks, and she can’t be a fag … can she?

Machismo: the reverence for old man Hemingway. If the orishas can open one’s eyes to the Cuban landscape, the official tourist agency, INIT, only seems able to show you the Casa Hemingway. The house ‘just as he left it’. All the whisky bottles a big guy gets through. The obsessive pencilling of his weight on the bathroom walls. The awful bullfight posters like a ladies’ training college or a ‘fifties’ coffee bar. The stuffed heads of his kills. On the way back, with all the Russian tourists, my kids divide up the rooms between them, impressed by the house, its green setting, its views, its clutter: You can have the tower with the big-game guns and the war picture books. And I’ll have the lion’s head and the fishing rods and I want the room where he kept the hundred cats. Then as we turned a corner into the Plaza de la Revolución, with its Che seven stories high, one of them yelled: Look there’s the SHAKY FAIRY! But I am thinking all the way back of Hemingway’s last kill, and Shango hanging himself in the forest, like Okonkwo in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and of our room on the 8th floor of the Hotel Nacional, with the one bed for the four of us. Already I am bequeathing Habitación 844 to the Revolutionary Government ‘just as he left it’, still with the bits of mousy hair in the sink, his, because, although it barely covered his cars, he had been stared at, and even pointed at and tutted at by the lift-girl, between ocho and the cafeteria, and his son’s the same colour, also cropped after standing in one of those endless Havana queues, this time for ice creams at the z00, in front of two kids, a boy, who said Max was a girl, and a girl who said he was a boy:

Macho!
Hembra!
Macho!
Hembra!
Macho!
HEMBRA!

The boy clinched the argument.

What about Che, then, I wanted to say, didn’t he have long hair?

Just as the following exchange used to take place, at least once a year, between me and mi mam:

Get your hair cut. Boys don’t have long hair.
What about Jesus, then, didn’t he have long hair?
Don’t talk to me like that!

So the bits of hair as he left them, and, in the wardrobe, a purple crimplene shirt he’d worn only once, and all the heads in sombrero de yarey, on the tops of bodies belted with sheathed machetes and/or holstered pistols, swivelled, gawped and guffawed. The lobby rang with the studs of their boots. It was then I evolved the, perhaps, counter-revolutionary concept of machetismo.

I was sitting one day in the Public Library in the Academy of Science building in Carlos III reading Lydia Cabrera’s absolutely unobtainable book El Monte, a book which apportions the Cuban flora to the various orishas, and is acknowledged by many writers to be one of the strongest influences on their work. This is especially true of those poets I have already mentioned who are seeking to create a specifically Cuban mythology for the revolution. I was reading how Shango inhabited the silk cotton tree, and the palma real, and the incandescent flame tree, and opposite me was a man taking copious notes from a book called Destilación de alcoholes. And well he might, for Cuba is pretty boozeless. I hadn’t had a drop in all the two months I’d been in Havana, except a gnat-piss beer named after the rebellious Indian Hatuey. The heat of the afternoon made me drowze in my seat under the bust of Cervantes, and suddenly I was myself again, pissed, on palm-wine, Shango juice, wearing my purple crimplene shirt (Jan Hus’s colour Miroslav Holub once told me) and my hair flowing in the wind off somewhere near Key West, and I strode along the wall of the Malecon, Malecon, and the shouts, Malecon, or was it Morejón or Marejón, but there was I Shago (stet) the Shaky Fairy tilting a huge padded red phallus at all the military bureaucracies of the world. But, curiously, for all their African inheritance they don’t make palm-wine in Cuba.

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As we left Havana, on our way to Brazil to find Shango there, Jane bought a doll in the airport. One of those things, costumes, beefeater, guardsman, a nation projects something of its image into, and there was nothing else to buy except those lovely brown phalluses of tobacco with names like Romeo and Juliet. But I don’t smoke, though my wife had developed a taste for cigars in Havana and we were entitled to two cheap, definitely not hand-rolled ones, per male person per evening meal. So I used to get the ration for Rosemarie. But she was tutted at by the same lift-lady who tutted at my hair, when she was smoking one. Women don’t do that. And Jane’s doll was none other than the hooded diablito of the Abakuá cult, noted as Lydia Cabrera tells us in the study of the rites we have already mentioned, for its ‘agresividad‘, and dedicated above all to Afro-Cuban (-Spanish) machismo. ‘To be a man’ one of their refrains goes ‘you don’t need to be an Abakuá, but to be an Abakuá you need to be a man’. And the innermost secret of this cult, the sanctum sanctissimorum, the Fa Ekue, as they say in Efik, and as El Macho Hemingway could no doubt tell us, behind the black curtain, is a skull. But machismo had the last word on me. I noticed with a sudden panic that in my Mexican visa opposite profession, and no doubt misled by my pre-Havana days haircut, the consular authorities had written: escritora. I masculinized it discreetly on the short flight over to Mexico City, but fluttered a bit as they went through my papers, the toads in dark glasses who shoota de espiders in Mejico. One said the other nodding at me, and I was terrified they were going to put the deleted –a to the test.

Profesión?

Escritor.

Escritor?

Si, you know, The Children of Sanche and all that shit!

In Brazil, in Salvador, Bahia de todos os Santos, there was a boutique called Xangô, moda masculina, and it sold purple crimplene shirts. The African cults were on display for tourists. The hotels advertised TODAY, CANDOMBLE or TODAY, CAPOEIRA, that ritualistic foot fighting, of Angolan origin, that has given such a distinctive style to Brazilian football. Further North in Recife, in Pernambuco, all the cults are called xangôs after Shango, and at one I was given a medallion to wear round my neck by Pai Apolinario Gomes da Mota. It said that I was a filho do Xangou, a son of Shango, and when Shango came to possess the poor, ugly, worn women who were yet so graceful in their dancing, and became their joy, he was Xangô meninho, young Shango, and Xangô velho, old Shango, and they were both St John the Baptist. The iconography of the double axe had survived on my red and white medallion, but had been metamorphosed over the years into a crutch, like Mendive’s hung on the wall of his house, like Jane’s. Researchers of the local Sociological Institute were doing studies of the relation between xangôs and paederasty, and on the high incidence of mental instability among the devotees, and a psychiatrist was using the drums of Shango in his patients’ therapy. I wore my medallion, on the plane from Recife to Brasilia, and the bits of red paint came off on my almost hairless chest. In Brasilia all the buildings were El Che high and the groundplan was like a double axe; at night a violent storm swept across the surrounding desert. The lightning came out of the sky, first white, then red. It lit up all night the pyramid of the National Theatre where they were playing The Devil is a Woman.

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I arrived back in England, unisex rampant, a son of Shango the Shaky Fairy, Santa Bárbara, St John the Baptist, suicidal king, virgin martyr, man, woman, young, old, black, white, god and guerrilla, and when got back to Newcastle on the edge of the Roman Wall, I remembered how Tacitus had described Britain as bipenni, double-axed. I huddle over the fire, my flesh mottling to Shango’s colours, fondling my oshe Shango, staring in to the flames of the Shilbottle cobbles, flushing in Shango’s honour as I brood on punishment and love, and invoke his epiphany, here and now, in Britannia, bold but gentle, brave but neutral, an orisha in touch with the dead, the living and the yet to be, and with only double axes to grind.

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Tony Harrison was an English poet and playwright.

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