SOURCE: "The Yoruban-Cuban Aesthetic, Nicolas Guillen's Poetic Expressions: A Paradigm," in Current Bibliography on African Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 4, 1985-86, pp. 301-7.

In the essay below, Purchas-Tulloch examines African folkloric, musical, and religious elements in Guillén's poetry.

The transplantation of the African slave to the Americas, and more specifically, Cuba, was to result in the offshoot of a folklore tradition prolific in African elements, forming an amalgam with the Cuban. Nicolás Guillén's Afro-Cuban grounding stems from this transplantation, and his work has been singled out here as a tribute to his fifty plus years of dedication to this field. His work, replete with Afro-Cuban folkloric elements, is representative of a twentieth-century Afro-centric trend in the arts.

The role of folklore in a provincial and rustic society is incomprehensible, illogical, and even obnoxious to many an outsider-onlooker. Black folklore has often been condemned by this sentence. Consequently...