Visions of precolonial America in Melendez Kelson’s “Let America be las américas”

While Whitman’s poetry often works to define the United States of America as a nation, Maria Melendez Kelson’s poem “Let America be las américas” advocates for an unraveling of its nationhood and an unwinding of time, back to when the land that is America was a borderless part of a large, diverse continent.  Melendez Kelson prefaces the poem with a dedication of sorts that reads: “with Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman”.  Only, instead of a traditional dedication that begins with “for,” Melendez Kelson uses “with” to indicate that her poem should be read as a continuation of the poetry of Hughes and Whitman, instead of as a separate work that has been merely inspired by them.  To insert one’s poetry besides that of two of America’s most prominent poets is a bold and powerful move, and indicates that Melendez Kelson’s view of America should be considered with as much seriousness as Hughes’ and Whitman’s Americas.

A condor

Whitman dreams of an American that is great because it was the sum of so many diverse parts.  He extensively employs cataloguing in his poetry to name and describe the many different people that make up the fabric of his America: farmers, slaves, mothers, and many more.  As an example, Whitman’s use of cataloguing can be seen in the poem “I Hear America Singing”. Hughes’ vision of America is even more inclusive, as can be seen in his poem “Let America be America Again”.  In this poem, Hughes draws on the idea of America as a land where everybody can be free.  This is a Whitmanesque vision of America: in Hughes’ America, as in Whitman’s, there is a place for every person.  However, as a black man, Hughes did not have full access to this promise of American freedom, a sentiment which is echoed in the refrain of the poem: “America was never America to me.”  In other words, Whitman’s inclusive, democratic America did not actually exist for Hughes.

We find a curiously opposite sentiment in Melendez Kelson’s poem near the end, when she states “(america always was plural to me)” (WWMS 488).  Here she implies that the nation of America, as Whitman and Hughes dream of and criticize and attempt to outline, has deeper roots than either of these poets acknowledge.  In fact, it is not the nation but the land itself, and by extension the people who lived on it, that Melendez Kelson wants to dignify.  This distinction between America, the nation, and las américas, the land, can be seen in the lack of capitalization that Melendez Kelson uses to refer to the two concepts.  Melendez Kelson employs plentiful nature imagery and uses consonance to force her reader to consider her version of precolonial America.

A century plant, native to the Americas

She opens the poem with the image of “border-defying condors,” which are a type of vulture. Besides setting the scene of the poem to be in the desert, the image of a vulture begs the comparison to the colonizers who pick and pick at the native population of the Americas until there is nothing left.  She fills the poem with plants and trees that are native to the Americas, like the century plant, the candle tree, and the boojum tree. The inclusion of these plants and animals that are endemic or native to the Americas helps to paint a picture of the unspoiled land. The poem is filled with consonance, which has the effect of slowing the reader down so that they are compelled to consider this picture of the Americas that Melendez Karson paints.  For example, in the second stanza, the speaker says “pour us a tune of cottonwood caliche, / desert varnish and voles…”. The repetition of the hard “c” and “v” sounds draws attention to these phrases and helps them to stick in the reader’s mind. This poem offers a conception of America this is Whitmanian in tradition (as Langston Hughes’ vision of America was), but at the same time, predates Whitman and his tradition by uplifting a pre colonial America.