Javier Aranda Luna: José Juan Tablada, the poet who brought us closer to the indigenous peoples

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Few poets are as relevant today as the 19th-century José Juan Tablada. Like thousands of young people today, he was a lover of all things Oriental, so much so that he brought haiku into our language, dressed in Yucatans, and practiced ideographic writing in front of his Japanese garden, which he built in Cuernavaca. He is known for his irreverent praises, which young people would celebrate, such as "Light me your vaccine, oh marijuana ," or disturbingly gothic ones like his famous poem " Black Mass ," which earned him expulsion from the newspaper El País and the animosity of Porfirio Díaz.

But Tablada's relevance lies beyond the anecdotes of his life. He found in the image itself the power of poetic impulse; an image beyond the plot that stifled it, according to Octavio Paz. Tablada is a visual poet, capable of capturing reality in three verses .

His incessant curiosity brought him closer to cinema, a medium in which he glimpsed the future of mass entertainment: 'The future will be illuminated by the light of cinema .' But in cinema he saw something else: the possibilities of constructing a discourse with images alone. Let me explain: that the montage of two images could result in a new one. Something similar to what Pound saw in Chinese writing, where, for example, the image of a heart next to the image of a closed door expresses the feeling of sadness.

If his poetry hasn't aged, it's because of the power of images beyond discourse. That's why it remains alive, ironic; concentrated like a fragrant herb, it resists the years and the tastes of the moment , even 80 years after it ceased to exist.

In this world so full of images, it's a little surprising that we don't remember him so much. A splendid 2019 exhibition, Passenger 21: The Japan of Tablada , at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, was the closest rescue of the poet. But in these days when official culture only speaks of indigenous peoples, reducing them to textile catwalks and food markets, it might well show how, from a high cultural perspective, Tablada was one of the first to value the richness of our indigenous culture.

In his verses and in his journalistic articles (more than 10,000 have been recorded) traditional cuisine and the remote past with its stone gods are present:

In the middle of the plain / there is a rock / that is taking the form / of the great sorcerer Tezcatlipoca.

Or in these verses from El Figón , where he highlights our culinary tastes: Delight of the moles / that the mestizas of Campeche cook / and in Puebla de los Ángeles, the Choles! / Joy of the succulent moles / green and dark and the red one / in whose marinade shines reflected / every happy advent .

Unlike López Velarde, whose verses have reached La mañanera del pueblo with his verso suave patria (The Morning of the People), Tablada has not, against all evidence, achieved the certification of nationality. He is not alone: Octavio Paz, to whom we owe one of the great essays on Mexican culture and whom Carlos Monsiváis admired, is regarded with disdain by new administrations, ignoring him while favoring and promoting writers of pallid mediocrity.

It's true that José Juan Tablada made his mistakes: he applauded Porfirio Díaz until he fell from the dictator's favor with his poem "Misa negra" (Black Mass ); he cynically attacked Madero, whom his friend Ramón López Velarde had otherwise admired; he wrote a panegyric of dozens of pages on Victoriano Huerta and, later, criticized the dictator during the Carranza era, whom he had castigated with his prose, and ended up working with him in the foreign service. These behaviors, moreover, are repeated under other names today, but unlike Tablada or de Novo, they are of dubious literary quality.

Despite our cultural amnesia, from which a handful of scholars occasionally liberate us, Tablada's poetry hasn't lost the freshness that characterized him, nor the capacity for surprise that never ceases to shock us with each new reading. His haiku (haikai in the plural, as we know) are a demonstration of visual impact and synthesis to such a degree that they always invite the reader to feel and reflect, like this one dedicated to the monkey: The little monkey looks at me... / He would like to tell me / something he's forgetting!

Frida Kahlo wanted to be remembered with her last painting, a still life of watermelons she called Viva la Vida (Long Live Life ) and painted a week before her death. Tablada, unintentionally, is often remembered with these cheerful and luminous verses with a rich fruity content: From summer, / red and cold / laughter, / slice / of watermelon!