One hundred and fifteen years ago this month, Clemente Soto Vélez (1905-1993) was born in Lares, Puerto Rico, the site of an 1868 revolt against Spain. The orphan son of landless peasants, Soto Vélez was a visionary poet, a surrealist, a socialist, an organizer and agitator for the independence of his island.
He was also a political prisoner. In 1936, the colonial government of General Blanton Winship incarcerated the leaders of the militant Nationalist Party and charged them with seditious conspiracy. Soto Vélez was the editor of the party newspaper. The statement on the masthead read: “Puerto Rican, the independence of Puerto Rico depends on the number of bullets in your belt.” This metaphor, in particular, was enough to earn him a six-year sentence, served in the federal penitentiaries at Atlanta and Lewisburg.
In the following poem, Soto Vélez confronts a political and emotional paradox: the fact that he lost his freedom for the love of freedom, cut off from his island for the sake of his island. The poet speaks of himself in the third person, and visualizes himself as a letter of the alphabet, sitting in isolation. This is poem #3 from Caballo de palo, or The Wooden Horse:
I met him
living like an h incarcerated in the honey of his bees,
but the bars of honey were bittersweet,
and because
he lost himself
in love with liberation,
and because he did not abandon
his love nor she her lover,
the earth for him is a hurricane of persecuted stars,
since liberation cannot
love anyone
except whoever loves
the earth, with its sun and sky.
-- Martín Espada
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