Poetry and sugar. Representations of the sugar cane workers in poetic compilations from Tucumán, Argentina

Abstract

This article intends to underline the strong presence of the sugar cane world in a group of poetic compilations appeared in the 1950s and 1960s in Tucumán, a province whose economy is mainly based upon the sugar industry. It analyses, in particular, the representation of the figure of the worker in charge of cutting and peeling the cane, which is described on the poems as a victim of injustice and privations (using notes related to hunger, silence and even death), and which appears, at the same time, as a noble and heroic figure, connected to sugar and to cane plantations by a bond of full and loving identification. The article also examines the subject that enunciates the poems, who shows himself, in several occasions, as a poet who suffers while he writes the story of the worker and aspires to be his comrade (an image that evokes the “popular poet” from Neruda’s Canto general). The representations analyzed here are read as an impugnation of the optimistic and harmonic vision of sugar workers present in poetic compilations from the beginning of the century. That characteristic allows us to relate the corpus studied in this article with the so called “realistic poetics” of the 1960s in Argentina and their will to perform a profound revision of the dominant cultural representations.