La Crica de Nemir Matos Cintron= Her End of Life Poem

THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE IN ILLO TEMPORE BY NEMIR MATOS CINTRÓN
Luz Maria Umpierre
In his doctoral dissertation entitled "Poetry Against Religion, Poetry As Religion," Matthew D.Mutter argues in terms of modernist poets that there exists in their writing a tension between following or rejecting religious practices and themes in their poetry: Hence they vacillate, he says, "between a desire to secularize aesthetic experience and a desire to reconstitute religious experience in aesthetic terms." (1) This tension that used to be called "binary" in Post Structuralism theory existed in the work of Puerto Rican Rosario Ferré, for example, and other Puerto Rican women writers in the late 20th century as I argued in essays. Many of these writers reacted against the division in Puerto Rican society "virgin and whore" that was part of the categories of compartmentalization made of women by Puerto Rican patriarchal society. In fact, in my article on Carmen Lugo Filippi's short story: "Milagros, Calle Mercurio," I purported that it is precisely the reading of this short story, in my estimation, following that dichotomy by Magaly Garcia Ramis that rendered the text limited to other possibilities en/coded by the narrative. (2)
This en/coding, however, was not followed by some of the island poets so that there was a marked difference between what was produced in the field of the novel and short story, and the output of poets on the island. One exception may have been the work of Ana Lydia Vega. It is by now a historical fact that in the early 1980s poet Nemir Matos Cintrón presented a rupture with that binary religious tension in her ovarian work: Las mujeres no hablan así. In it, she audaciously purports a Lesbian liberation from patriarchal dichotomies of angel-devil, virgin-whore, Eva-Maria, by openly treating the theme of Lesbianism and the erotic from a women centered perspective. This same aspect was followed later by Lilliana Ramos in her "Reróticas," and has produced a whole generation of younger poets in the 21st century devoted to the rejection of these categories.
As a critic of Puerto Rican literature and a poet myself, the secularization of the aesthetic experience away from religious dogma presented one of the most important advancements thematically among the "older" poets: Matos/Ramos and the newer generation: Ardin, Sevilla, Pagán, Arroyo, Colón, among others. It has been therefore especially surprising for me to read the newest poem written by Nemir Matos Cintrón, which has appeared in the anthology: Cachaperismos 2012 under the title "Illo Tempore." The poem, written as a response to Marilyn Cruz Bernal's erotic piece dedicated to Matos called in the original "Manos," was written in September of 2011 after Matos's visit to the island; a visit in which she met Cruz Bernal.
The title of Matos's new poem is already a sign of what brought me to read this new escrito with interest. Illo tempore is a term that was highly used in religious texts and to which Claudio Monteverdi dedicated his classical Mass. (3) Matos was not raised Catholic but as a Jehovah's Witness, I must clarify, but religious motifs permeated everyday life on the island regardless of the sect or religious group being followed. In the case of this text, the title itself becomes all the more interesting since after the publication of Otto's Theory of Numinosity in the book The Sacred and the Profane, illud tempus (Latin) also signals or signifies a daemonic dread or a sense of the uncanny. (4) Matos herself was attracted to this later topic as a television producer who developed a series called Insólito in Puerto Rican television in the last century that dealt precisely with the "unbelievable" and the "uncanny." Needless to say, the phrase also is meant to refer to the term "Once Upon A Time" with which many fairytales begin. (5)
Matos Cintrón's new poem begins when the poetic speaker manifests: "Me quedé suspendida." (6) Here the "suspendida" alludes to the embrace of a woman whose body is "ampuloso." The choice of adjectives suggests that this will not be a typical fairytale encounter since the term normally refers to "Hinchado, redundante, falto de naturalidad o sencillez" or in my reading: "pudgy" as in baby fat. In a perverse way, however, this reader is reminded of Shrek's wife and her contemporary description as a modern Princess whose actual body has all the same qualities suggested by the poem's choice of adjective. The poetic speaker is surprised that the "cuerpo ampuloso" woman requests a simple hug or quilt/cover embrace. The poetic voice admits that she would have preferred to "recorrer tu geografía," or erotically travel in the body/locality of the "cuerpo ampuloso." At the request of the "cuerpo ampuloso," the speaker plays the role of mother: "y fui madre arrullando tu miedo de niña abocada al abandono." However, given this "sacred "admission that would draw us close to the saintly motherly role towards the encountered woman, the speaker surprises us by suddenly confessing that she would have rather had "devorar tu cuerpo, /mordisquear la curva de tus labios y tu labia, /entrar en la tibia cavidad de tu chocha ensangrentada/ y libar de tu leche menstruada con descaro." This reminds me also as a reader of the fairytale motif in which "lobos/lobas" assume the role of "abuelitas" to enter the realm of the "child" creature that they wish to devour, like in Caperucita Roja. So the poem has traveled from the perceived sacred role of "ser madre" to the actual profane and incestuous realm of devouring the "chocha" of the daughter/cuerpo ampuloso.
The poem has arrived at an uncomfortable moment of profanity in what began in the realm of the sacred by using the terms "madre and niña" in the initial description and which now gets into an incestuous desire of the mother to "devour" that same daughter/niña/cuerpo ampuloso. In an art-form sense, the image reminds us of "Saturno devorando a sus hijos." This realm of the profane is saved if the reader of the poem takes heed in Mutter's arguments which began this essay. In a sense, although the poem on one level seeks to secularize an aesthetic experience—mother/daughter into loba/incesto-- the sacramental terms implied by "chocha" (carne; cuerpo; body) and "sangrienta" (wine; blood) bring us to a second level of meaning in which the religious takes over the aesthetic. The speaker can be perceived as longing for a communion with the sacraments very much in the Catholic tradition of the body and blood of a Christ-like figure. So the poem has gone from the Insólito: a mother wishing to devour a daughter in sexual pleasure, to a symbolic level in which the speaker is longing for a religious ceremony of belonging. The poem then turns on itself. If at the beginning it was the niña that needed the "abrazo" as a "cobija" or security blanket, it is now the madre who is seeking to reconstitute herself and penetrate or belong into the body which may be perceived as a Church, temple, or religion through her communion. The daemonic dread (incest) has been turned to the uncanny (belonging to a religious sect through a communion).
The ending of the poem sustains this symbolic level of meaning. In it the poetic voice recognizes that such relationship in the profane level: "Es un imposible". It is imposible because the daughter/niña/child desires a male rugged landscape far from the "sedosa suavidad" of the piel of the speaker. The heterosexual norm (sacred) prevails in one level: mothers do not devour their daughters in pleasure. The patriarchy or hierarchy of the Church symbolized by the appearance of the rugged landscape demands that a societal order be re-established and that the whore/secular returns to the realm of the virgin/religious through the mediation of a desired male body by the daughter.
The triangulation also re-establishes the norm and the speaker ends the poem with a troublesome assertion: her "sedosa piel" (enticing/seductive/Princess-like) has been returned to what I call the "calabaza" stage, as in the fairy tale of Cenicienta, by becoming "macilenta and inexorablemente surcada por el tiempo:" old, amorphous, temporare. The fairytale has ended: not with a transgression but with a return to the old order of things. The Once Upon A Time (Illo tempore) does not end this time with "They lived happily ever after." The religious meaning of the term has prevailed (mother-like) over the profane (incestuous). So the Mass in which transubstantiation was sought from mother to lover through a communion has ended with a return to the initial ceremony without any transformations: the monster, Saturno, the demoniac in a religious sense, has returned to being a motherly "mass" in a Mass in which no metamorphosis has occurred. The possibility of transformation is lost and we are only left in the realm of the uncanny or Insólito: as perceived by a heteronormative and religious society in which the idea that a mother would wish to turn to incest with her own child is perverse. The mother/daughter relationship is re-established in the realm of the possible by the convenient aparición of the father figure symbolized by the "cuerpo agreste y rugoso"---el hombre.
In her book on Queer Identities, Agnes Lugo purports those transgressions of the kind that the speaker in Matos's poem attempted, develop a sense of anxiety within the heteronormative establishment. "Those anxieties would reach a new point of resolution in a narrative of punishment: castigo against those who dare to alter the naturalized socio-cultural order ruled by laws of sexual differentiation. The threat to established norms, and the damnation it could entail is represented in the character of the 'mannish lesbian'." (7) In the end of Matos's "Illo tempore," the damnation is self inflicted by the poetic voice in total representation of her final character not even in a mannish-Lesbian way but in the form of an amorphous being insurmountably marked by the passage of time. What was potentially radical and subversive in the poem, as a revision of the sacred and the profane, falls short of the subversive transformation that could liberate the poem and its speaker from the traditional heteronormative binary that Mutter reiterates. If censorship in the arts, as Otto states, is paranoia, self-censorship in an art form is immolation.
In her poem, the possibility of a Lesbian mother/daughter relationship is brought to an end by the eruption of the daughter's Freudian desire of identification with the father, his body and desire as perceived by the speaker. The final verse of the poem: "por el tiempo," returns us to the title: to the (h) i (l) lo tempore, the thread of time that initiated the contemplation. And in this newer contemplation of a later time in life, Matos's speaker assumes a new role: both as mother and as "maci/lenta" and "surcada." It is ultimately her body which is also "ampuloso" and has been a surco or depository for both the birth of the daughter but also for the separation of the Lesbian connection mother/daughter brought about by the eruption of heteronormative desire and compliance to it in the daughter. The possible fairytale ended, the sacrilegious returns to the sacro, to the mass (with a small m), to the reconstitution of the paradigm in which Matos's speaker is now left in a new role because of the passage of time.
In my essay years ago on Lugo Filippi's short story, I had mentioned that the narrative voice of a male character appears in her short story at the end in the figure of Rada to save the heterosexual interpretation of the story for the normative or closeted reader. Similarly, in Matos's newest poem, the perceived desire for a male sexual partner by the daughter renders the relationship mother-daughter back into acceptable terms and those of religious dogma. Perhaps, in this tercera edad, Matos also wishes to return to a safe triangulation within a religious establishment rather than create a new and revolutionary paradigm in the realm of mother-daughter by which the Lesbian relationship destroys the patriarchy and the "father/God/figure." But this last is just speculation. However, this speculation may have a factual basis if one considers a solitary poem published by Matos on Facebook briefly and in which the poetic voice wishes to belong to a family triangulation, even if imperfect, because they were perfect to the poetic voice in this later stage in her life.
The return to the religious is not uncommon in poets who have taken daring literary risks in their oeuvre. What is surprising to this reader is the return to a triangulation: mother, daughter, father-man typical of the Catholic tradition of the Holy Trinity. It is as if the poem dedicated to her parents on Facebook signaled the poet's re-membering of herself not in the pagan traditions that populated her initial writings and the studies she carried as a Wiccan but into the realm of the "home," the past and a lost world of credence: a traditional religion.
Luz Maria Umpierre, Ph.D.
Poet, Neo-humanist, Edumanist, Scholar, Human Rights Advocate

NOTES
1) Mutter, Mathew D., Poetry against Religion, Poetry as Religion, Yale University,
Dissertation, 2009.
2) Umpierre, Luz Maria, "Lesbian Tantalizing in Carmen Lugo Filippi's `Milagros,
Calle Mercurio'." In ¿Entiendes? Emilie Bergmann and Julian Smith, Editors,
Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 306-314. Excerpts appeared in Gay Studies
Newsletter (Toronto, Canada), 1988. (Nominated for Crompton Knoll Award from
MLA, 1988).
3) Monteverdi, Claudio, Messa in Illo Tempore.
4) Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane. The Nature of Religion, Harcourt,
Inc., English Translation, 1959.
5) See newest Biography of Matos in Wikipedia.
6) Cachaperismos 2012, Carolina: Colectivo Revista Boreales, 2012, p.55. This reader
notes that the line "Me quede suspendida" may allude to my own poem: "for
Ellen" in which the term is used. I have studied the subject of The Anxiety of
Influence and The Anxiety of Mothering in many of my essays.
7) Lugo-Ortiz, Agnes I. (1998). "Nationalism, Male Anxiety, and the Lesbian Body in
Puerto Rican Narrative". In Hispanism and Homosexualities. Ed. Sylvia Molloy y
Robert McKee Irwin. 76-100. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.


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