Review of Algarabía. The Song of Cenex, Natural Son of the Isle Algarabíya by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera

Leonora Simonovis
3 days ago
4 min read

“I was to be cupcake femme,/ straighten my hair and dye my brows and roots/ with the rest,” says Cenex, the main character in Roque Raquel Salas Rivera’s latest collection, Algarabía, a bilingual epic poem— or song, as its title states— written in Puerto Rican Spanish with an alternative English translation— which in some instances reads closer to a transcreation. The poem follows the trajectory of trans character Cenex from his very origins:

Before the murder and renaming

I was Cenex before I was a number

Then a subject of debate.

Born to contradict my birth certificate,

To fuck with my poor creators, …

The book is divided into sections about Cenex’s story and perspectives; other characters are also introduced, as well a variety of places such as laundry rooms, shops, bars and streets where the mundane becomes a site of reflection about class, gender, and the consequences of colonization in today’s Puerto Rican society, particularly for trans people. The title of the book alludes to the noise and jubilance represented in the many voices that contribute to the poem’s storyline, but it’s also the name of a city in a parallel universe “where the salute of a conquistador’s statue/ welcomed me to the new world” and where Cenex tries to start a new life after escaping a complex where he was experimented on: “the treatments went unchanged— electroshock, pills, white gowns—.” The contradictions and ambiguities are endless, as is the power of Salas Rivera to experiment with language to bring them to life.

The use of a canonical form— the epic—to speak about characters who have been ignored by the canon, does not go unnoticed; neither does the fact that the Spanish version of the poem is written in Puerto Rican, and not Castilian, Spanish. This seems to suggest, not only a deviation from the norm (the “right” way to speak Spanish and the rules dictated by the Spanish Royal Academy, for instance), but also a challenge to what is considered valuable in the literary field, pushing against conservative perspectives on transgender writers and their stories.

Sound is an integral part of the book. For example, in the English version, the “I” used by Cenex switches to “AY” in some of the stanzas, which, rather than just representing a pronoun, allude to how the word would be written when transcribed into Spanish and how this phonetic representation is as effective as its English counterpart,

AY wanted to buy local! Really!

but could AY pay for food

with homemade bills?

There are no hierarchies in Salas Rivera’s poem, but rather, a cacophony of voices and sounds that dialogue with each other. Part of the complexity, and the attraction of this body of work, is that it constitutes a sort of carnivalesque parody of a society bent on enforcing binary hierarchies, offering a multiplicity of perspectives that give readers a 360 view of Cenex’s life and relationships with others and with the world. The author also experiments textually, incorporating narrative, dialogue, monologue, and black and white images, a reminder of critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of carnival

Carnival is a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators. In carnival everyone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act. Carnival is not contemplated and, strictly speaking, not even performed; its participants live in it, they live by its laws as long as those laws are in effect; that is, they live a carnivalistic life. ¹

Towards the end of the book, in the section titled “Cenex walks through the Party Supplies, Cards, and Gift Wrap aisle,” the reader is treated to images of the cards Cenex encounters as he browses, interspersed with his reactions. Each of the cards contain strange messages such as, “YOU ARE/WRONG/ABOUT/MOST/THINGS.//HAVE YOU/ALREADY/FORGOTTEN?” This causes Cenex to feel uncomfortable and turn back, only to have a panic attack as he seems unable to leave the store, until he realizes he needs to open the cards and move “beyond the covers.” As he does, the messages change and begin to look familiar, encouraging even,

I just wanted to let you know…!

I would

single-handedly

homoeroticize

my villain and foil

an evil plot to win

Exmasse…

just for you!

Salas Rivera’s characters are immersed in a world of ambivalence where meaning is contested and repurposed into something irreverent, yet in perfect alignment with the world built within the poem. The author pushes against tradition by deliberately choosing to play with the font, for example, bolding, italicizing, placing text in all caps, as well as exclamation marks in whatever way fits the narrative: Cenex’s world has its own rules.

¹In Problems of Dostoievsky’s Poetics.

Leonora Simonovis is a Venezuelan American writer, editor, and educator, and the author of Study of the Raft, winner of the 2021 Colorado Prize for Poetry and Honorable Mention at the 2022 International Latino Book Awards. Her work considers the intersections of myth, language, and story in connection to the land and to her experience as an exile. Leonora’s poems and essays have been featured in the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, About Place Journal, Amsterdam Review, Whale Road Review, SWWIM, and others. She has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from The Poetry Foundation, VONA, CalArts, the Vermont Studio Center, Esperimento Sul Respiro and Anaphora. Leonora lives in upstate New York.