The Drumbeat, la ciudad y la Descarga: The Plurality of Willie Perdomo’s “The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon”
Author photo. Courtesy of Viking/Penguin.
A descarga can be defined as a spontaneous or programmed musical act, a jam session, usually including one or various artists before a very reduced, or even private audience. The importance of the descarga comes with immense meaning: it is an act of emotional release, a creative connection that transforms individuals into a collective musical force. Not only is la descarga a vital component in salsa and bomba, but it is also important in poetry. Willie Perdomo’s The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon brings forth una descarga like those of the jam sessions in Spanish Harlem where famous salseros such as Eddie Palmieri and Tito Puente were born and raised. However, Perdomo’s poetry goes further than bringing his audience into the middle of a descarga; his work also sends readers on a round-trip flight to Puerto Rico. The plurality of Perdomo’s work demands that readers see New York and Puerto Rico coexisting as transnational, bringing the drumbeat of academic Angel Quintero Rivera’s concept of salsa as “música contestaría” to the barrio, where his and other poets’ voices become el tambor that breaks the silence of the struggle for identity.
The ability that Perdomo has in bringing us these two worlds is easy to see: born in 1967 and raised in East Harlem, he “rose to prominence as the youngest member of the 1991 Nuyorican Poets Cafe Slam Team, and its sole Puerto Rican” (127).¹ The Puerto Rican pride that Perdomo expresses in his work blends with the heavy Afro-Caribbean influences of la isla del encanto. Having already released a variety of poetry collections, Perdomo published The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon in 2014 in honor of his uncle Pedro Perdomo or “Cortijito,” whom he never got to meet. The importance of music at home was indispensable for Perdomo, and he mentioned in his 2014 interview with Fordham University that music was a constant in the family: “One of the things that I remember is that as a child, whether at a baptism, celebrating a graduation, anything festive, or block party, as a kid, I would fall asleep while the adults kept hanging out, but the music was always still playing in the background… There was always a song being sung in the living room.” Salsa was essential for the family and became an imperative part of the background noise of el barrio.
The idea of music and poetry merging together to create concepts such as slam poetry and hip-hop is not new, but through the use of these heavy influences, Willie Perdomo creates a bridge from Puerto Rico and its history to New York and the streets of El Barrio. In his poem “Feliz Navidad,” Perdomo writes,
“At the most notorious intersection in
Santurce, Anacaona sits under a palm
Tree & picks sarcoma off her cheeks.
When she spots your taxicab, she dips
A sloppy open back to outside turn &
Breaks into a rumba of “Jingle Bells.”
She presses a super-sized Burger King
Cup against your window. Her eyes are
Spook-hollow, her habit trimester-big” (36).
In this poem, Perdomo analyzes the situation of the Puerto Rican people, who are oppressed and colonized like Anacaona. He also shows readers the poverty the island faces through the metaphor of Anacaona begging for money on the streets of San Juan. Readers are immersed in the scene of a stoplight, a car, and a homeless person struggling for survival.
Even here, Perdomo ends his poem with a beat, concluding it with a décima, described as “a poetic form popular in Puerto Rico. A particular trait of the décima is the introductory four-line stanza.”² Usually accompanied by the melody and rhythm originating in the mountains of the island, called seis, la décima becomes both poetry and lyric. In the poem, the turístico driver that the readers are accompanied by recites the following:
“When For Sale stops lying to paradise.
When Paradise says, Enough, no más—
Land goes free, blood black, and brother,
You just ain’t ready for that kind of noise” (36).
Anacaona, the Taíno name for golden flower, was a cacica born into a family of chiefs and was the sister of Bohechío, the cacique of Jaragua, one of the five chiefdoms in the island of Hispaniola. Her life and story are important to the oppressed people of the Caribbean, the Spanish-speaking islands, and particularly Puerto Rico, where Taíno culture and heritage is intertwined with multi-cultural influences that define the island. Cheo Feliciano, composer and singer of salsa and bolero music, was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1935. His song “Anacaona” is an excellent example of Quintero Rivera’s “música contestaria.” In his song, released in 1971, Cheo sings: “Anacaona, oí tu voz, como lloró cuando gimió / Anacaona oí la voz de tu angustiado corazón / Tu libertad nunca llegó.” Feliciano finishes his iconic song with the following lyrics, “La tribu entera la llora porque fue buena negrona. / Y recordando, recordando lo que pasó / la tribu ya se enfogona.” Feliciano’s song not only recounts the injustice of colonization but is a way of fighting back the silence that the colonizers so often force upon the oppressed within history.
In a 2015 interview discussing his book Salsa, sabor y control, Quintero explains the concept of the beginnings of salsa being “música contestaría,” based on the lyrics of Ponceño Héctor Lavoe’s song “Paraíso de dulzura.” Gaining strength in the ‘60s, salsa’s beginnings are intertwined with the diaspora. Quintero Rivera adds, “La expresión de los jóvenes latinos, principalmente los jóvenes puertorriqueños en Nueva York es clara. Están en una situación, por un lado, donde sus padres están buscando la tierra de oportunidades, pero por otro lado se encuentran un tipo de exclusión a la que no estaban acostumbrados y es una manera de expresarse en contra de eso.” The concept of this exclusion is not only seen in the feeling of Otherness, but also in the retelling of history, such as Cheo Feliciano's “Anacaona.” Quintero Rivera speaks on the importance of salsa in many Latin cultures, showing its strong influence further than just in Puerto Rico.
Quintero Rivera’s essay, “The Camouflaged Drum – Melodization of Rhythms and Maroonaged Ethnicity in Caribbean Peasant Music” focuses on the importance of the drumbeat in Puerto Rican music, which we see in Perdomo’s poetry. He writes, “One of the most vivid cultural expressions of plantation society was its music, characterized by the importance given to rhythm… which the European musical tradition—syncopated rhythm, dominates. This character was reinforced with the protagonic role of percussion instruments, mainly the drums. Plantation music became so identified with drums that in many different places of the Americas, as far as Paraguay, Ecuador, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico it was named bomba (or words with similar sounds) after the African word for drum” (27).
The drumbeat becomes the identifying sound for not only Caribbean plantation music, as Quintero mentions, but also in salsa. Percussion instruments became vital to the salsa movement, included in the songs of important salseros such as Ismael Rivera, Héctor Lavoe, Willie Colón, Cheo Feliciano, and others. While the beat was felt through its melodization and rhythm, slam poets came in and began to use their voice as the comparison to the beat of the congo, bongo, drum, or cowbell. This rhythmic percussion sound that is heard and felt in salsa and slam is Perdomo’s true way of merging the island and New York together into the concreteness of the two cities. His poem “The Was of Things” exemplifies the merge through the synchrony of word and rhythm,
“To boast with, I took my time in old darkness,
Made center from flag & fracture. Come fist
Came fight, I destroyed foe, fiend, all-star &
Saint—set-to-session, timbales-con-timpani” (14).
Uruyoán Noel touches on this specific theme of Perdomo’s contact with el vaivén, literally the coming and going of the people. He writes, “As Guillermo Rebollo-Gil, professor and poet, suggests, Perdomo’s “The New Boogaloo” works, as much as Lavoe’s music did, to bridge mainland and island, looking to expressive cultures as a way of forging translocal connections” (134). Perdomo’s poetry is a reminder of the transnational collective that is Puerto Rico. A constant aquí y allá makes Boricuas a part of various cultures that mix together, creating not only a sole Nuyorican or Puerto Rican culture, but a hybrid of both, being la nación en movimiento.
Perdomo’s section of The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon titled “Have It Your Way: Combo” begins with a poem called “Official Business.” He writes,
“Blunt lit, gaze ahead, puff waves & wait.
El Morro—your castle. The weed is so good
You swear that La Niña is on the horizon.
You say, Fuck it. Last set, time to bug out.
When Columbus steps ashore, you call him.
Negrito, you say. Take off the brim, lose the
Doublet, get rid of the girdle—it’s hot, bro” (35).
The scenario is a city scene with a view of the ocean, El Morro, a World Heritage Site, in the background. The imagery brings the conquest to readers, and although Perdomo writes with the slang of the city, the poem is strong enough that readers can smell the weed mixed with the sea breeze of where the island saw invasion sail towards her by the English, Dutch, and Americans. As they sit alongside the Santa María Magdalena de Pazzis Cemetery where prodigious Puerto Ricans such as nationalist revolutionary Pedro Albizu Campos and composer Tite Curet Alonso are buried, it is an indescribable scene of city and sea merged into one moment.
In his introduction for his book The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island & the United States, Jorge Duany writes, “While Puerto Ricans lack separate citizenship, they have a clear sense of national identity. Any definition of the Island’s political status must take into account the growing strength of cultural nationalism, as much as the increasing dispersal of people through the diaspora” (7). This “everywhere and nowhere” mentality of the diaspora and the island is not only seen in Perdomo’s work, but in his influences from the stars of salsa. Many salseros sang about Puerto Rico while watching her from a distance and dedicated countless songs, compositions, and descargas to her.
The connection between Puerto Rico and New York is undeniable and as Willie Perdomo shows us in his work, the influence of salsa’s plurality is enough to create lasting impressions on the cultures that listen. As Perdomo once said in an interview for Poets on Poetry, “I write poetry to combat the times I’ve been silenced.” While Perdomo writes to give the vaivén a voice, we recognize the drumbeat and sound that he was swayed by since childhood. The sounds of Puerto Rico, like the sleep-inducing melody of the coquí mixed with the smell of the city, create a desire for Puerto Ricans to be recognized and heard. The importance of knowing where we’re from, who we are, and how we can celebrate our culture to others is the key element in Perdomo’s breaking of that silence. I end this essay with the lyrics of Héctor Lavoe’s “Paraíso de dulzura:” “Vengo de la tierra de la dulzura / ¿Que pa' dónde voy? / Voy a repartir ricura / La sabrosura rica y sandunguera / Que Puerto Rico puede dar.”
Footnotes
¹ Noel, Urayoán. Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam.
² See Perdomo’s note (The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, p. 56)
Jacqueline Jiang is pursuing her Ph.D. in Asian and Caribbean Literature at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. An academic, educator, and writer, Jiang focuses on Puerto Rican diaspora identity poetics inside and outside of Puerto Rico. Her creative and academic efforts towards collective awareness of social injustices in Puerto Rico are invested in the nation’s future generations and their education. You can follow her on Instagram at @microfonoabierto or send her an email at jiang.c.jacqueline@gmail.com.