Empire of Solitude
Inspired by the poetry of Julia de Burgos
Presented by Boricuas Unidos en la Diáspora and Raíces Brewing Co.
World Premiere Presentation at Buntport Theater August 4-18, 2024, in Denver, Colorado
CREW
Nare Cortes - Director
Jon Marcantoni - Playwright/Producer
Michael Castro -Lighting/Sound Director
ALLurr'em VelvIT - Stage Manager
Madeleine Snow and Angel Garcia - Box Office
Music by Michael Castro
CAST
Lucinda Lazo - Poetess
Shyan Rivera - Feminine
Gisselle Gonzalez - Revolutionary
Jordan Hull - Wife
Biography
Julia de Burgos (1914-1953)
Born in Carolina, Puerto Rico to a poor family where six of her siblings died due to malnutrition.
Was Afro-Puerto Rican on her mother’s side. One of the themes of her poetry was her pride in her African heritage, and she was known to advocate for Afro-Latino artists.
Was a leading figure in the Puerto Rican independence movement, serving as Secretary General for the Daughters of Freedom.
In 2005, the FBI released files on prominent Puerto Rican leftists from the Cold War era, revealing that Julia de Burgos had been under surveillance by the FBI in the last years of her life, particularly after the 1950 Revolution.
Aside from poetry, she wrote for several newspapers and journals, most notably The Cultural Page for Pueblos Hispanos in New York City.
Was married three times, and lived in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and New York City.
Her most famous poems are El Río Grande de Loíza, Yo misma fui mi ruta (I was my own path), and A Julia de Burgos (To Julia de Burgos).
Her sister had her admitted to a psychiatric hospital on Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island), where she wrote her last two poems, El sol en Welfare Island, and Farewell On Welfare Island. A month later, she left her house without ID or telling anyone where she was going, and nine days after that, she was found unconscious on a street in Spanish Harlem. A group of strangers brought her to a nearby hospital where she died hours later.
Since she had no identification on her when she died, she was buried in a numbered pauper’s grave. Eerily, her poem Dadme mi número (Give me my number), predicted this.
A month after her death, friends and family located her grave and had her transported to Puerto Rico, where she was buried in her hometown of Carolina.
The Play
Inspired by Brechtian and absurdist theatre of the 1950s, Empire of Solitude utilizes alienation techniques to signal that what we are watching is a fabrication, a heightened take on reality that is also commenting on its unreality. The characters, rather than being people, are manifestations of poetic themes on politics (Revolutionary), gender (Feminine), artistic expression (Poetess), and internalized racism and misogyny (Wife). By giving humanistic depictions to themes, the story explores how personality and identity are composed of self-mythologizing narratives in which the hero both triumphs over their obstacles and contains the seeds of its own discontent. That is to say, Julia is both hero and villain of her own mind. The constructs of each act are presented in fabricated worlds that do not progress in a narrative sense of going from plot point to plot point, but rather they progress the characters from life to death. By not following western narrative expectations, the play’s construction adopts Julia de Burgos’s audacious personality.
Act One takes place in a dining room that exists in a liminal space, where the themes are conscious of their artificiality. Act Two exists in two memories, one set in San Juan that is told from reverse chronology, and one set in Cuba told in chronological order, so that the two relationships form an endless cycle of tragic love affairs. The relationships are both representative of specific marriages and of all relationships with men, played out over a life where one can never escape their attraction to toxic masculinity, whether that toxicity is overt or subtle. Act Three exists in a bar of the soul, where the end of life is depicted as a final drink with the self, as the ego and the id come together to reconcile the contradictions of a life they are simultaneously exhausted by yet urgently cling to.
By creating an abstraction, the full person can be viewed from multiple perspectives, revealing the many layers of the human experience. Because the abstraction is tied to a single person, the viewer is able to access a universal struggle wherein Julia is herself and is every person who has ever felt unappreciated, lost, and without a place to call home.
Select Poetry featured in Empire of Solitude
Canción Hacia Adentro
¡No me recuerdes! ¡Siénteme!
Hay un sólo trino entre tu amor y mi alma.
Mis dos ojos navegan
el mismo azul sin fin donde tú danzas.
Tu arco-iris de sueños en mí tiene
siempre pradera abierta entre montañas.
Una vez se perdieron mis sollozos,
y los hallé, abrigados, en tus lágrimas.
¡No me recuerdes! ¡Siénteme!
Un ruiseñor nos tiene en su garganta.
Los ríos que me traje de mis riscos,
desembocan tan sólo por tus playas.
Hay confusión de vuelos en el aire?
¡El viento que nos lleva en sus sandalias!
¡No me recuerdes! ¡Siénteme!
Mientras menos me pienses, más me amas.
Inward Song
Don't remember me! Feel me!
There is only one trill between your love and my soul.
My two eyes navigate
the same endless blue where you dance.
Your rainbow of dreams in me has
always open meadow between mountains.
Once my sobs were lost,
and I found them, sheltered, in your tears.
Don't remember me! Feel me!
A nightingale holds us in her throat.
The rivers that I brought from my cliffs,
flow only along your shores.
There is confusion of flights in the air?
The wind that carries us in its sandals!
Don't remember me! Feel me!
The less you think of me, the more you love me.
A Julia de Burgos
Ya las gentes murmuran que yo soy tu enemiga
porque dicen que en verso doy al mundo mi yo.
Mienten, Julia de Burgos. Mienten, Julia de Burgos.
La que se alza en mis versos no es tu voz: es mi voz
porque tú eres ropaje y la esencia soy yo; y el más
profundo abismo se tiende entre las dos.
Tú eres fria muñeca de mentira social,
y yo, viril destello de la humana verdad.
Tú, miel de cortesana hipocresías; yo no;
que en todos mis poemas desnudo el corazón.
Tú eres como tu mundo, egoísta;
yo no; que en todo me lo juego a ser lo que soy yo.
“Tú eres sólo la grave señora señorona; yo no,
yo soy la vida, la fuerza, la mujer.
Tú eres de tu marido, de tu amor; yo no;
yo de nadie, o de todos, porque a todos, a
todos en mi limpio sentir y en mi pensar me doy.
“Tú te rizas el pelo y te pintas; yo no;
a mí me riza el viento, a mí me pinta el sol.
Tú eres dama casera, resignada, sumisa,
atada a los prejuicios de los hombres; yo no;
que yo soy Rocinante corriendo desbocado
olfateando horizontes de justicia de Dios.
Tú en ti misma no mandas;
a ti todos te mandan; en ti mandan tu esposo, tus
padres, tus parientes, el cura, el modista,
el teatro, el casino, el auto,
las alhajas, el banquete, el champán, el cielo
y el infierno, y el qué dirán social.
En mí no, que en mí manda mi solo corazón,
mi solo pensamiento; quien manda en mí soy yo.
Tú, flor de aristocracia; y yo, la flor del pueblo.
Tú en ti lo tienes todo y a todos se
lo debes, mientras que yo, mi nada a nadie se la debo.
Tú, clavada al estático dividendo ancestral,
y yo, un uno en la cifra del divisor
social somos el duelo a muerte que se acerca fatal.
Cuando las multitudes corran alborotadas
dejando atrás cenizas de injusticias
quemadas, y cuando con la tea de las siete virtudes,
tras los siete pecados, corran las multitudes,
contra ti, y contra todo lo injusto
y lo inhumano, yo iré en medio de
ellas con la tea en la mano.
To Julia de Burgos
People now murmur that I am your enemy
For they claim that in verses
I reveal your essence to the world.
They lie, Julia de Burgos. They lie, Julia de Burgos.
The voice uplifted in my verses is not your own: it is mine,
For you are garment and I essence;
And the greatest abyss lies between the two.
You are the cold-blooded puppet of social deceit,
And I, the driving splendour of human truth.
You, of courtesan hypocrisies…the honey; not I;
Whose heart is revealed in my poems…all.
You are like your world, selfish; not I;
Who dares all to be what I truly am.
You are merely the implacable, elegant lady;
Not I; I am life, I am strength, I am woman.
You belong to your husband, to your master; not I;
I belong to no one, or to everyone, because to all,
everyone,
In wholesome feeling and thought, I give myself.
You curl your locks and paint yourself, not I;
I am curled by the wind; brightened by the sun.
You are homebound, resigned, submissive,
Confined to the whims of men; not I;
I am Rocinante galloping recklessly
Wandering through the boundaries of God’s justice.
You are not in command of self; everyone rules you:
You are ruled by your husband, your parents, relatives,
The priest, the seamstress, theatre, club,
The car, jewels, the banquet, champagne,
Heaven and hell and… social hearsay.
But not me, I am ruled by my heart alone,
My sole thought; it is “I” who rules myself.
You, aristocratic blossom; and I, the people’s blossom.
You are well provided for, but are indebted to everyone,
While I, my nothingness to no one owe.
You, nailed to the stagnant ancestral dividend;
And I, but one digit in the social cipher.
We are the encroaching, inevitable duel to the death.
When the multitude uncontrolled runs,
The ashes of injustices, burnt, left behind,
And when with the torch of the seven virtues,
The throng to the seven sins gives chase,
I will be against you and against all
That is unjust and inhuman.
Upholding the torch… I shall be among the throng.
Love by Jon Marcantoni
Love.
On the bridge in Viejo San Juan
you met my parents and under the moonlight
you told me you love me,
what did you mean?
Did you love the ideas of my mind
or only when I agreed with you
defended you to friends
or had any thoughts of my own?
Love.
Did you love me on my bad days
when I could barely get out of bed and the sun seemed dark?
I sat in the corner of our room at midnight
looking up at the same moon, the same light that reflected off your face,
when you said I love you - but who did you love?
Did you love me when I made you breakfast
as much as when I was published?
As much as when I was with my peers
and I wasn't baby sweetie mi amor mi cariño corazón.
I was Julia!
My name on those essays, on those poems,
MY NAME receiving praise.
Did you love me then or only when we lied in bed
kissing my body or,
did you love me when we'd debate the finer points of Marx and Albizu?
Did you mean it when you laughed when I called myself a revolutionary?
Did you love me when you smirked at my dreams?
Did you love me in Havana, where we were free from our pasts,
walking along el Malecón, yes - yes - yes, this was love.
When I recited poetry to you,
the ocean spraying against my back,
you told me my words were like the waves
and your favorite thing was the sea.
If I were the waves, were you my moon?
That's the wrong question.
The question should be,
will you love me in turbulence and chaos as much as in calm seas?
Love.
I saw it in your eyes.
I know I wasn't deceived.
Havana, Viejo San Juan, my parents, the bridge, el Malecón -
In your eyes you loved me.
Farewell in Welfare Island
(Julia’s final poem and only one written in English)
It has to be from here,
right this instance,
my cry into the world.
Life was somewhere forgotten
and sought refuge in depths of tears
and sorrows
over this vast empire of solitude
and darkness.
Where is the voice of freedom,
freedom to laugh,
to move
without the heavy phantom of despair?
Where is the form of beauty
unshaken in its veil simple and pure?
Where is the warmth of heaven
pouring its dreams of love in broken spirits?
It has to be from here,
right this instance,
my cry into the world.
My cry that is no more mine,
but hers and his forever,
the comrades of my silence,
the phantoms of my grave.
It is has to be from here,
forgotten but unshaken,
among comrades of silence
deep into Welfare Island
my farewell to the world.