that’s what we expect, not just from food, but from life. Sabrosura. A reveling in the tastiness of what the senses provide, and a word that has sexual overtones. The concept is palpable in the Spanish Caribbean. Just listen to the music and watch the dancers. There’s a frankly sexual pleasure in the movement of the hips—which is actually how the hips move as the result of the dancers’ steps, something that outsiders often mistake as booty-shaking. There is sabrosura. And even beyond that, there is gozadera.
I was at an alternative art gallery in Havana once when I encountered the term in what I think is its richest context. The show was, outrageously, a series of penis caricatures. They were not clinically drawn, nor were they erotic. Instead, they seemed like the outpouring of a comic-book-addled mind, like one of those ’60s stoned American artists who combined a vernacular style with a total lack of inhibition. The penises were characters in some crazy-ass tableaux. I read the accompanying text, written by a Cuban art critic, in which he observed that all modernist Cuban art was distinguished by gozadera, a kind of visual molasses (the critic’s word) that enveloped the figures (Latin American Modernism was mostly figurative, not, like its US counterpart, abstract) and connected them to one another. He used as example Carlos Enríquez’s famous El Rapto de las Mulatas, the classical Rape of the Sabines transplanted to the Cuban countryside: a group of guajiros (Cuban peasants) on horseback, each carrying off a sexy half-caste young woman. There is no violation in this “rape,” which in this case means abduction, for though the men are bursting with machismo, the ladies are themselves bursting with wantonness. Even the horses’ expressions show arousal. And, yes, there seems to be an enveloping gauze of sugar-sweet brushstrokes that flow among the figures, all wrapped in and enraptured by a molasses-thick gozadera.
The verb gozar means to enjoy. It is often used in a sexual context, no more so than in a religious poem by the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St. Theresa of Avila in which she longs to “enjoy” her Lord. A shameless eroticism is the key metaphor for mystical union in the language of St. Theresa and her fellow poet and person of the cloth, St. John of the Cloth. So shameless that one can read them as sexy love poets. And here is the crux of the matter. A Spanish tradition, already “Creolized” by the fusion of Arabic, Jewish, and Christian poetic languages, migrates to the New World. It’s already a tradition in which the pleasures of the table, the bed, and the soul are indistinguishable from one another. Add to that mix the rich juices that flow from Native American and African attitudes and you get, to use culinary metaphor, a very tasty gumbo. An attitude toward food and sex and divinity that says laisser les bons temps rouler.
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