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Jose de Diego: No
www.americancorner.org.tw | 2013-01-21 15:08
Brief, solid, affirmative as a hammer blow, this is the virile word, which must enflame lips and save the honor of our people, in these unfortunate days of anachronistic imperialism.
Two or three years ago Doctor Coil y Toste wrote some brilliant paragraphs to demonstrate that Puerto Ricans do not know and ought to know the protest of an energetic affirmation. The knowledgeable doctor was wrong: our greatest moral affliction is an atavistic predisposition to the irreflexive concession and to weakness of will, which bend lovingly, like a rose bush to the sighs of the wind.
In truth, the affirmation has impelled and resolved great undertakings in science, in art, in philosophy, in religious sentiment: all the miracles of faith and love; the death of Christ and the life of Columbus; saintly wonders of affirmations, which were raised to the glorious summits of the rising spirit, to divine light.
In political evolution, in the struggle for freedom, the affirmative adverb is almost always useless and always disastrous, so soft in all languages, so sweet in the Romance tongues, superior in this sense to the mother Latin tongue. Certe, quidem do not have the brevity and the harmony of the Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese si and the French si, when the latter substitutes for oui in the most expressive sentences; si in singing, a musical note (B), an arpeggio of the flute, a bird's trill, noble and good for melody, for rhythm, for dreaming, for love: more for the protest and impetus, for the paroxysm, for wrath, for anathema, for dry fulminating hate, like the scratching of a ray of light, the no is far better, the rude, bitter O vast, like a roar, round and ardent like a chaos producer of life through the conflagration of all the forces of the abyss.
From the almost prehistoric uprisings of savage tribes against chieftains of Asiatic empires, the negative to submission, the protest against the tyrant, the no of the oppressed has been the word, the genesis of the emancipation of peoples: and even when the impotency of the means and the efficacy of the goals, as in our homeland, separate the revolutionary fire from the vision of the ideal, the no must be and is the only saving word of the freedom and dignity of enslaved people.
We do not know how to say "no," and we are attracted, unconsciously, like a hypnotic suggestion, by the predominant si of the word on thought, of the form on essence－artists and weak and kindly, as we have been made by the beauty and generosity of our land. Never, in general terms, does a Puerto Rican say, nor does he know how to say "no": "We'll see," "I'll study the matter," "I'll decide later"; when a Puerto Rican uses these expressions, it must be understood that he does not want to; at most, he joins the si with the no and with the affirmative and negative adverbs makes a conditional conjunction, ambiguous, nebulous, in which the will fluctuates in the air, like a little bird aimless and shelterless on the flatness of a desert. . . .
We have to learn to say "no," raise our lips, unburden our chest, put in tension all our vocal muscles and all our will power to fire this o of no, which will resound perhaps in America and the world, and will resound in the heavens with more efficacy than the rolling of cannons.
Two or three years ago Doctor Coil y Toste wrote some brilliant paragraphs to demonstrate that Puerto Ricans do not know and ought to know the protest of an energetic affirmation. The knowledgeable doctor was wrong: our greatest moral affliction is an atavistic predisposition to the irreflexive concession and to weakness of will, which bend lovingly, like a rose bush to the sighs of the wind.
In truth, the affirmation has impelled and resolved great undertakings in science, in art, in philosophy, in religious sentiment: all the miracles of faith and love; the death of Christ and the life of Columbus; saintly wonders of affirmations, which were raised to the glorious summits of the rising spirit, to divine light.
In political evolution, in the struggle for freedom, the affirmative adverb is almost always useless and always disastrous, so soft in all languages, so sweet in the Romance tongues, superior in this sense to the mother Latin tongue. Certe, quidem do not have the brevity and the harmony of the Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese si and the French si, when the latter substitutes for oui in the most expressive sentences; si in singing, a musical note (B), an arpeggio of the flute, a bird's trill, noble and good for melody, for rhythm, for dreaming, for love: more for the protest and impetus, for the paroxysm, for wrath, for anathema, for dry fulminating hate, like the scratching of a ray of light, the no is far better, the rude, bitter O vast, like a roar, round and ardent like a chaos producer of life through the conflagration of all the forces of the abyss.
From the almost prehistoric uprisings of savage tribes against chieftains of Asiatic empires, the negative to submission, the protest against the tyrant, the no of the oppressed has been the word, the genesis of the emancipation of peoples: and even when the impotency of the means and the efficacy of the goals, as in our homeland, separate the revolutionary fire from the vision of the ideal, the no must be and is the only saving word of the freedom and dignity of enslaved people.
We do not know how to say "no," and we are attracted, unconsciously, like a hypnotic suggestion, by the predominant si of the word on thought, of the form on essence－artists and weak and kindly, as we have been made by the beauty and generosity of our land. Never, in general terms, does a Puerto Rican say, nor does he know how to say "no": "We'll see," "I'll study the matter," "I'll decide later"; when a Puerto Rican uses these expressions, it must be understood that he does not want to; at most, he joins the si with the no and with the affirmative and negative adverbs makes a conditional conjunction, ambiguous, nebulous, in which the will fluctuates in the air, like a little bird aimless and shelterless on the flatness of a desert. . . .
We have to learn to say "no," raise our lips, unburden our chest, put in tension all our vocal muscles and all our will power to fire this o of no, which will resound perhaps in America and the world, and will resound in the heavens with more efficacy than the rolling of cannons.
