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ABSTRACT This essay examines selected poems from The Mountain in the Sea by US Puerto Rican poet Víctor Hernández Cruz, who sets out to complicate Puerto Rican, Spanish, and US notions of cultural identity. It demonstrates how Hernández Cruz is tropicalizing the Maghreb through the juxtaposition of and interplay between languages (Spanish, English, and Arabic), as well as imagery linked to Morocco, Spain, Puerto Rico, and New York. It also shows how the subversiveness of the collection reaches a new dimension through its depiction of the North African presence within the geopolitical borders of the United States in our post-9/11 context.
Our mother country is not just Spain but also Morocco,
North Africa. . . . We are all swimming in olive oil.
-Víctor Hernández Cruz
In his introduction to The Mountain in the Sea (2006; henceforth simply Mountain), US Puerto Rican poet Víctor Hernández Cruz states, ''I hope I am translating cultures, as I always feel southern Spain, Andalusia, on my way home to the Caribbean or on the way home to north Africa. These are the places that color my poems; I crisscross them and melt the many fusions that history has knitted through these regions'' (1). These words highlight the continuity between this collection and some of his previous poetry, inspired by the links between Spain and North Africa, while at the same time they serve to emphasize Mountain's focus on the latter. Doris Sommer commented on this connection between North Africa and Spain in Hernández Cruz's earlier collection, Red Beans (1991): ''The poet keeps his eyes and ears open for the most primeval vestiges of the region's complex diasporic ethnohistory to make the invisible heritage visible, concentrating on the traces of Andalusian Islamic traditions left in the Spanish folk songs'' (891). Her observation serves as a reminder that Hernández Cruz has been writing poems about this topic for over a decade. However, Mountain is the first collection where the links between North Africa and Spain become a unifying concern. One of my arguments is that this book marks a shift in Hernández Cruz's poetics, a point that is even more evident after the publication of his latest collection, In the Shadow of Al-Andalus (2011; henceforth Shadow).
Spain, the Caribbean, North...