Everyonel who finds the beauty
and doesn't look at it
Soon
it will be poor (...)
Ifá says: The beauty and all gender
of happiness approach.
Anónimo(2)
I
The African migratory current
in America was forced by the necessity of introducing
the manpower that guaranteed the exploitation of the
enormous economic resources. the slavery meant the
arrival of countless African. The settlers and pro-slavery
European they denominated them ebony pieces and ignored
that with those men and women that disembarked in
America and were subjected to the slavery, a transculturación
process was beginning and still continues.
When they entered in Cuba, these
powerful African cultures that sustained very complete
bonds with the natural environment where they arose,
in a historical moment of sedimentation of other migratory
cultures (those of the settlers); their traditions
begin an invisible and silent influence in the society:
a form of life that respected and didn't attack the
relationship man-nature-spirituality it would cross
the forms of European life that were tried to trace
in the colonies and that they were dominant; it would
sweeten the flour of indigenous corn, would bring
other foods and ways of seasoning them, other forms
of enjoying scents and flavors of roots, fruits or
meats, it would mark with their pursued rhythms the
forms of making music, would enrich the popular beliefs
contributing liturgies and theogonies that would expand
quickly thanks to that their gods were so near to
the human thing, signando the environment that today
denominates The Caribbean - and I remind the concepts
wide envelope the Caribbean thing that they identify
common features from the south of the United States
of North America until very boarding schools in Peru,
Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil -; with the traditions
of towns ágrafos that would communicate its wisdom
and the teachings of their griots by means of the
speech, the song and the music, the religion, the
medicine, the hunt, the fishing, the war: the way
of life of African nations had reached high development
degrees, like it is the case of the towns yorubas.
Alive transmission of a culture, and inside all this
wealth, the transmission of their vision and plastic
representation of the world.
Without rigorous investigations,
we all can remember works of art that today is patrimony
of the human culture, created by American artists
with evident influences of plastic elements of the
African cultural context. The Cuban painters' Wifredo
Lam works, Ren Portocarrero and José Bedia that are
today in important museums of the world, having relating
characteristic of the plastic universe of the African
cultures.
(2)
Iwori Wotura is the name of the Oddú of Ifá that here
is exposed.
Taken of African anonymous Poetry", Anthology of Rogelio
Martínez Furé.
