Luis Palés Matos was one of the premier lyric poets of Puerto Rico and one of the originators of the Afro-Antillean genre of Negroid poetry. This genre draws its inspiration from the lives, experiences, and culture of Caribbean islanders of Af-rican ancestry. Although these people have been an integral component of the fabric of Puerto Rican and Caribbean societies for centuries, racism and criticism have kept their culture, mores.
Background
Palés Matos was born in Guayama, a town located in the southeastern corner of Puerto Rico, on March 20, 1898. His father, Vicente Palés Anés, was a school-teacher; his mother was Consuelo Matos Vácil. The town of Guayama has historically had one of the largest enclaves of people of African ancestry in the island. This town is still called La Ciudad de los Brujos (The City of Witches) because many of its inhabitants still follow religious rituals and practices brought to Puerto Rico by African slaves. Although critics have downplayed Guayama's role in Palés Matos' life, his exposure to people holding these traditions undoubtedly influ¬enced his later work on Afro-Antillean poetry.
Education
Both of his parents were poets, who shared with their son their love for poetry. Palés Matos started to write during his adolescence. His father died when Palés Matos was a sophomore in high school and Palés Matos was forced to abandon his studies and go to work to help support his family. Throughout his life he held a variety of clerical positions and worked as a postmaster. His writing skills even-tually allowed him to become secretary to the president of the Puerto Rican senate. He was considered to be self-educated.
Career
Palés Matos' literary works are fairly limited; he published only two major books during his life. The first of these was Azaleas, which he wrote when he was 17. Literary critics assert that his poems in Azaleas reflect the influence of modernism, as the author tries to bring in influences from other countries, as well as postmodernism. In addition, as with many other writers of his time, his early poetry reflects his concerns with the political situation of Puerto Rico after the transfer of sovereignty from Spain to the United States and conveys his negative reaction to the colonial status of the island.
His other major book was Tuntún de pasa y grifería, which first introduced Palés Matos' work in the Negroid poetry genre. His poems are inspired by the cultural characteristics, lives, and rich heritages of black Puerto Ricans. His writing technique was rich and complex. Along with José de Diego Padró, he set forth a style known as diepalismo, a unique onomatopoeic technique where his verses imitate the archetypal accents and the sounds of people, animals, and the environment. His verses, filled with short syllables resembling accents and sounds, were structured with a highly rhythmic cadence that duplicates the essence of Afro-Antillean speech patterns and musical beats. Verses such as "ritma una conga bomba que bamba," illustrate the sound of the conga, one of the most important instruments used by Afro-Antilleans. Like Cuba s Nicolás Guillén, Palés Matos has been identified by critics and cultural historians as one of the first Caribbean writers to use the lifestyles and cultural products of people of African American ancestry as a source of literary inspiration. Puerto Ricans of all races and social groups value Palés Matos' poetry as perhaps one of the most unique literary works to emerge from the island during the early part of the twentieth century.
In 1944, Jaime Benitez, a literary critic and the legendary chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras for more than 25 years, appointed Palés Matos as the university's poet-in-residence. This appointment marked a third stage in Palés Matos' literary production. He wrote a series of romantic odes in which he depicted Iris platonic love and attraction for a mulatto woman known only as Fili Mele. While most of his critics never determined the identity of Palés Matos' muse, it was no secret that Fili Mele was one of his students at the university. In fact, until the 1980s, when this author was a student at the university, it was almost a tradition for students taking the basic Spanish literature courses at the University of Puerto Rico to receive a challenge from the professor asking them to identify Fili Mele. The alleged source of Palés Matos' inspiration eventually came to light when one of the most distinguished literature professors on the faculty wrote a book revealing her identity.
Personality
Palés Matos' Afro-Antillean poetry has a comedic, ironic and satiric tone that undoubtedly poses questions about the marginalization and racism of the African element in Puerto Rican society and in the Caribbean. Palés Matos dealt with the black element in terms of its cultural contributions rather than as social phe-nomenon of Caribbean and Puerto Rican society. He valued the presence of blacks within Puerto Rican and Caribbean culture and brought their legacy to the mainstream cultural establishment. Critics have questioned whether Palés Matos poetry is authentic in terms of his depiction of black Caribbeans, but his work should be valued for its artistic and creative merits, if not for its sociological ones. Palés Matos used the cultural products of blacks as a source of aesthetic inspiration and contemplation, rather than as a sociological artifact to be studied.