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Landscape, Place and Belonging in
Selected Poems of the Afro-Cuban
Writer Jesús Cos Causse
This article critically interrogates a selection of poems by Jesús Cos Causse, an Afro-Cuban writer of Haitian descent, who was born and raised in the Afro-Caribbean community of Santiago de Cuba to descendants of black Haitian immigrants. He served his country as a diplomat in a number of countries, including Jamaica, and has been instrumental in promoting Afro-Cuban culture through his poetry. Cos Causse is a prolific writer whose distinctive literary oeuvre foregrounds the contributions of Afro- Cubans to pre and post-revolutionary Cuba, his own familiarity with his Afro-Caribbean cultural heritage, the significance of black icons like Marcus Garvey and Langston Hughes, issues concerning the politics of resistance agency, individual and national identity, love of country and the magnificence of the Cuban landscape.
Methodology
The study locates the cogent critical analyses within two salient and complementary theoretical constructs. The first is the theoretical position advanced by Edouard Glissant (1992), who maintains that in the depiction of landscape and place, the Caribbean writer cannot be complacent with simply describing nature, but must ascribe to place / landscape a position of pre- eminence, along with its centrality to Caribbean people, since both land and place, are indispensable to the understanding
This article fills an important gap in the information about black writing in Cuba. Although Cos Causse is very prolific, very little has been published about
his poetry, except this researcher’s articles which have appeared in international journals.
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Recognising Outstanding Researchers 2016