Diasporic Identities within Afro-Hispanic and African Contexts [1 ed.] 9781443883894, 9781443875592

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Diasporic Identities within Afro-Hispanic and African Contexts

Diasporic Identities within Afro-Hispanic and African Contexts Edited by

Yaw Agawu-Kakraba and Komla Aggor

Diasporic Identities within Afro-Hispanic and African Contexts Edited by Yaw Agawu-Kakraba and Komla Aggor This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Yaw Agawu-Kakraba, Komla Aggor and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7559-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7559-2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ............................................................................................... 11 Visions from the Margins: Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón and Ivor Miller’s Voices of the Leopard Uchenna Vasser Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 37 Negotiating Resistance: Writing Strategies of Indo/Afro-Nicaraguan Women Poets Tina Escaja Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 51 Identity, Solidarity and Autonomy: African Agency in Manuel Zapata Olivella’s Changó, el gran putas Samuel Mate-Kojo Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 65 Narrative Aesthetics and the Epistemic Violence of History: José Eduardo Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons Arthur Hughes Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 85 Galdós and Africa: A Spaniard Speaks for the Subaltern Michael Ugarte Chapter Six ............................................................................................... 95 The Dangerous Liaisons of Spain and Africa: Hybridity and Immigration in Contemporary Spanish Cinema Bernardo Antonio González Contributors ............................................................................................. 113

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank all contributors to this volume for their unfailing cooperation and enthusiasm. The Office of the Dean of Academic Affairs at The Pennsylvania State University-Altoona College and the Office of the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at Texas Christian University have sustained their support for the biennial International Conference on Afro-Hispanic, Luso-Brazilian and Latin American Studies (ICALLAS). This conference provided the impetus for the collection of essays presented in the book. Amanda Millar of Cambridge Scholars Publishing was patient and cooperative throughout the review and publication process, as was the entire team of editors.

INTRODUCTION YAW AGAWU-KAKRABA AND KOMLA AGGOR

Several scholars have explored with some degree of subtlety the question of diaspora and the difficult theoretical and practical problems that emerge in discussing this subject. In The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Dispersion and Evolution, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza indicate that the Greek word diaspora was used for the first time in 250 BCE by Jews of Alexandria to underscore their own dispersal from the homeland into galut, or collective exile. Other scholars including William Safran and Khachig Tölölyan have also taken as their point of departure the traditional definition of diaspora that once had an incontrovertible Jewish-focused significance. Recent studies on diaspora have, however, shifted its meaning and application. Acknowledging the fluctuating implications of the concept, Safran observes that [t]oday, ‘diaspora’ and, more specifically, ‘diaspora community’ seem increasingly to be used as metaphoric designations for several categories of people—expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants, and ethnic and racial minorities tout court. (1)

Yet, as David Chariandy points out, both Safran and Tölölyan still seem to ascribe to a much more literal—albeit coherent—meaning of diaspora, that is, its reference to the Jewish experience. Such a reference, Chariandy insists, subsequently accords diaspora a “presumably vague and worrying” metaphoric significance that brings to light the term’s connection with ethnic and racial minorities (n. pag.). What is problematic, Chariandy argues, is the challenge of finding an “ideal” or “original” conceptualization of diaspora. He poses a series of questions to highlight the problem: Can diasporas be created through voluntary migration, rather than traumatic exile? Must a diaspora have an extant homeland culture before

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Introduction dislocation, or can it develop or invent one retrospectively? Must people in a diaspora long to return home? If so, what type of return is this: physical or symbolic? (n. pag.)

In what one may consider a response to the question raised by Chariandy, Robin Cohen offers a rather open-ended evaluation of diaspora. In Global Diasporas, Cohen expresses his objective, namely, to loosen the historical meanings of diaspora in order to include the construction of these new identities and subjectivities (128). For Cohen, these unique identities and subjectivities do not relate to a specific “ideal” diaspora that is linked to a particular cultural group or experience of dislocation. He proposes a plurality of diasporas marked by the experiences or inspirations that create them. Cohen believes that, “instead of arising from a traumatic dispersal, a diaspora could be caused by the expansion from a homeland in search of work, in pursuit of trade or to further colonial ambitions” (57). Diasporas, for him, could include victim diasporas, labour diasporas, trade diasporas and imperial diasporas. The advent of ethnic and postcolonial studies has also added another dimension to the discussion of diaspora, with scholars in this field offering divergent perspectives on the issue of dislocation, including exile, diaspora and migration. Overall, postcolonial theorists have associated these phenomena with colonialism and its aftermath. Under the framework of colonialism, diaspora implies movement that is either permanent or temporary. Most importantly, postcolonial discourse is aimed at examining and responding to the cultural and historical legacies of colonialism and imperialism. It must be pointed out that, even though there is no easy agreement on what constitutes diaspora or what it does within the field of postcolonial studies, scholars such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Smaro Kamboureli, Diana Brydon and others believe that viewing diaspora through the lens of postcolonial studies enhances the ability to focus on the cultural practices and norms of migrant peoples who have gone into exile either voluntarily or by force. Diaspora studies, they believe, will not only contest what Chariandy refers to as ingrained misconceptions and assumptions about ethnic, racial and, particularly, national belonging but will also help to forge new links between emergent critical methodologies and contemporary social justice movements (n. pag.). The theoretical parameters that the foregoing strands of thought provide regarding the notion of diaspora can serve as a catalyst in grasping more profoundly the body of essays presented in this volume. The goal of this collection is not an attempt to argue for what constitutes a proper diaspora. Instead, what Diasporic Identities within Afro-Hispanic and African Contexts seeks to accomplish is to explore how diaspora, used in

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the broadest sense, including voluntary and forced migration as well as its postcolonial rendition, is manifested in the creation of diasporic identities in Afro-Hispanic and African milieus. For the purposes of this collection, therefore, diaspora carries multiple connotations. First, the term is used in its reference to a non-voluntary or forced migration, borne out of the traumatic dispersal precipitated by the violence of slavery. 1 Forced migration is also triggered by a series of crises that compels asylum seekers to move from the global South to the global North. These crises often include clashes in conflict-ridden areas such as Palestine, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and Sri Lanka. Other elements that also constitute crises that engender forced migration include genocide, wars, mass refugee movements as witnessed in Central Africa, and the segregation of hitherto ethnically mixed populations in the Caucasus region, Central Asia and other parts of the former Soviet Union and in the Balkans of former Yugoslavia (Van Hear 36). In some contexts within the present volume, the term diaspora denotes voluntary migration. Considered casualization by Graham Huggan, a leading scholar of comparative postcolonial literary and cultural studies, voluntary migration relates to groups of people who normally emigrate by choice. Such groups, often economically oppressed and marginalized, emigrate to urban centres in search of work or in the pursuit of a better life. Such is the case of labour migrants in North America, Europe, the Gulf States and, especially, the guest-worker programs in Europe in the 1960s. Considered as a form of diasporic transnationalism, this kind of migrating population typically has a continuous link with the homeland via transmittals and other kinds of transferrals and exchanges that also enhance return and circular migration. Glick Schiller and others consider immigrants in this category as a population composed of “those whose networks, activities and patterns of life encompass both their host and home societies” (1). Then there are cases in the collection where the term fully carries the undertones that current postcolonial discourse has bestowed on it. In The Empire Strikes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literature, Bill Ashcroft and others indicate that “diaspora does not simply refer to geographical dispersal but also to the vexed questions of identity, memory and home which such displacements produce” (217-18). In her study,



1 This perspective resonates Paul Gilroy’s position that, for most of the slaves who crossed the Atlantic, not only was that experience a de-territorialisation but also an experience of “a network of people, scattered in a process of non-voluntary displacement, usually created by violence or under threat of violence or death” (1997: 328).

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Creole Identity in Postcolonial Indonesia, Jacqueline Knör asserts that, in postcolonial nation building, Creole groups play an important role in Creole culture and identity since they “symbolize unity in diversity in a particular way, in their capacity to develop a new, common identity against a background of heterogeneity” (35). Put differently, postcolonial theory fully favours a new identity discourse that is cognizant of the destabilization and the fragmentation that are inherent in the concept of identity. Indeed, in Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line, Paul Gilroy argues that the idea of diaspora offers a ready alternative to the stern discipline of primordial kinship and rooted belonging (123). The alternative Gilroy sees, resides in diaspora’s value as an instrument of reassessing what he calls “the idea of essential and absolute identity.” Gilroy’s position stems from his belief that diaspora is incompatible with a specific kind of “nationalist and raciological thinking” (125). For Gilroy, then, diaspora should be conceived as a counter-current against the disabling assumptions of automatic solidarity based on either blood or land (133). The present collection of essays examines the violent dispersion of diasporic peoples and the ontological schism they face in their respective areas of settlement. The essays also underline ways in which African slaves have succeeded in influencing and determining the amalgamated social and cultural life in which they and their descendants have found themselves. The new community that emerged in an Atlantic world is circumscribed by its capacity to maintain components of its culture and identity while at the same time embracing elements of the culture with which it is now surrounded. Such is the case in Uchena Vasser’s essay, “Visions from the Margins: Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón and Ivor Miller’s Voices of the Leopard,” where the author addresses some of the core issues involving religious undercurrents of diasporic life. In her essay, Vasser examines how slaves in Cuba succeeded in fomenting several individual and collective identities crafted within the framework of African religions. In foregrounding the interplay between diverse components of African religious practices and the Catholic iconoclastic dedication to saints, the Virgin Mary and other Christian models, Vasser’s work reinforces the significance of the transculturation process, which actually transcends the sacred sphere. Surely, the question of identity, race and nationhood (not to forget creolization) looms large as she describes the Abakua system that draws attention to popular Creole customs as manifested in food, carnivals and music and in syncretic religious observances steeped in Creole languages.

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The collective identities to which Vasser alludes find resonance in Tina Escaja’s essay, “Negotiating Resistance: Writing Strategies of Indo/AfroNicaraguan Women Poets.” Escaja contends that Indo/Afro-Nicaraguan women poets such as Brigette Zacarías, June Beer and Yolanda Rossman Tejada resort to the poetics of self-affirmation in order to celebrate and to reclaim their identity as Afro-descendants. In Escaja’s view, the construction of a so-called Nicaraguan identity and of a national literary canon was based on idealized pre-Hispanic Amerindian interactions with Europeans. She affirms that these interactions specifically excluded Amerindians and Afro-descendants from the national discourse on identity formation. Relying on a series of linguistic and literary strategies, Escaja concludes that the women poets that she studies in her essay assert and ascribe to themselves identities that recognize their diasporic experiences while undermining, at the same time, the hegemonic trappings that sought to eradicate any form of difference and diversity. She explains how these poets challenge traditional narratives of identity in their unease with the cultural identities that have been foisted on the descendants of slaves. These women poets, then, successfully liberate themselves as well as other diasporic subjects who are now empowered to consider innovative and more effective means of self-expression. Samuel Mate-Kojo’s essay, “Identity, Solidarity and Autonomy: African Agency in Manuel Zapata Olivella’s Changó el gran putas” takes the question of identity further as he examines how Manuel Zapata Olivella seeks to establish Africans as dominant subjects and agents in the history of the Americas. Mate-Kojo refers to Zapata Olivella’s novel as embedded in an Afro-centric foundation, with African cosmology and causality as its organizing principle. This essayist contends that the novelist subverts the Eurocentric formulation of African identity and offers the possibility of an independent and unique identity formation. He stresses that, because the construction of the image of Africans in the Americas has been framed by imperialists, colonialists and neocolonialists, Africans have been excluded from national histories as agents and subjects. Consequently, Afro-descendants in the Americas have been forced to accept and to repeat biased narratives that falsely define their identity. Mate-Kojo’s goal is to establish how Zapata Olivella, a highly respected Afro-Hispanic writer, succeeds in articulating a new narrative for Africans in the Americas. It is a narrative, he believes, that seeks freedom on the basis of a revolutionary and existentialist ideal that hoists the issue of identity and personhood as a legitimate ingredient of the diasporic experience.

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The essays by Michael Ugarte and Arthur Hughes highlight diasporic identity formations when analyzed from the perspective of expatriate immigrants who inhabit colonized territories. The postcolonial rendition of diaspora that suggests permanent or temporary migration applies to both essays. In the case of Angola, it is Portuguese colonial and postcolonial immigration and the creation of a Creole community that are at stake. The Spanish invasion of Morocco, as articulated by Ugarte, spawned a Spanish colony and a subsequent diasporic Spanish expatriate community. Consequently, in “Galdós and Africa: A Spaniard Speaks for the Subaltern,” Ugarte questions what he characterizes as “the very notion of Spanish identity.” Subalternity, as conceptualized in postcolonial theory, underscores the denial of human agency of people who, by virtue of their social status, are at the margins of society. Deprived of genuine social platforms through which to represent themselves the African subalterns find in Benito Pérez Galdós, the nineteenth-century realist writer, a literary outlet of selfexpression which was not too common at the time. This artistic representation of African subaltern voices manifests itself in two novels: Aita Tettauen and Carlos VI en La Rápita, both of which are set within the context of the Tetuan War of 1859. Ugarte wonders if Galdós could rightfully represent the African in spite of his efforts to present the tensions that beset the subaltern-colonized subject and the superior imperial power. Ugarte underscores the complexity of subalternity and identity in his discussion of Galdós’s selected novels when he recalls Edward Saïd’s discussion of how the Eurocentric perception of Orientalism moulded the grounds for the domination of the “other” through colonialism. Ugarte believes that, in Galdós’s attempt to retell the inner workings of the Tetuan War from the perspective of a Moslem— seen as a Spanish renegade—he undermines the author’s and, for that matter, Spain’s position as colonizer who perpetuate their power over the “other.” In the same vein, the issue of what constitutes an identity that is Spanish is put into question. In “Narrative Aesthetics and the Epistemic Violence of History: José Eduardo Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleon,” Hughes discusses how individuals in a postcolonial Angolan society find themselves fixated upon the past in order to acquire respectability as the new elite or to forget the violence of past conflicts. Hughes highlights what he refers to as a palpable shifting condition steeped in an epistemological violence that parallels Angola’s recent traumatic past and this nation’s professed need to rebuild identities. Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleon enables Hughes to portray a postcolonial Angolan society in which, in order to reconstruct

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identities, a narrative of aesthetics is needed to create a new epistemology that shapes discourses on individual and collective strands of identity. Bernardo Antonio González’s essay, “Spain and Africa’s Dangerous Liaisons: Hybridity and Immigration in Contemporary Spanish Cinema,” studies immigration in contemporary Spanish cinema through the works of Montxo Armendáriz (Las cartas de Alou), Llorenç Soler (Said) and Chus Gutiérrez (Retorno a Hansala). Whereas conventional wisdom is that Maghrebi French diasporic filmmakers have made more of a contribution to particular national cinemas that deal with questions of migration on the basis of economic factors (Tarr 2005), Spanish filmmakers (such as those studied by González in his essay) have also made significant contributions to the contemporary Spanish filmic canon as they focus on the diasporic experiences of immigrants in Spain. Not only do filmmakers such as Armendáriz use special cinematic effects to emphasize the dangers of crossing the treacherous Straits of Gibraltar to Spain, but they vivify the emotional impact of the immigrants’ dreadful experiences. González’s discussion of the notion of a diaspora of casualization also brings to light the tensions that emerge in Spain whereby some Spaniards defend the local and national as they repel that which is foreign and nullify any kind of racial blending. The interlocking dichotomies of foreign-native, privatepublic and internal-external that González accentuates in his essay, correspond with a seemingly antagonistic opposition between the young and the old as manifested in the films that he studies. For González, this condition resonates with the sociological reality of African immigrants who settle throughout Spain in inner-city neighbourhoods inhabited by an aging native population. As non-diasporic filmmakers belonging to the majority culture, Armendáriz, Soler and Gutiérrez may not necessarily be in a position to capture and to articulate the collective memory and diasporic identity of African immigrants. However, as González points out, these non-diasporic filmmakers successfully make use of their cameras to transcend borders and capture images of the self and nation through the other’s eye. The six authors presented in this collection, then, approach the unified topic of identity in the diasporic context in a way that is as varied as it is intellectually engaging. From Cuba to Nicaragua through Morocco and Angola to Spain, the essays provide a varied geographical platform on the basis of which a thematically-varied critical analysis is sustained—from religion to the poetics of self-affirmation and to issues of political conflict, subalternity and migration.

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Bibliography Alexander, Claire. 2010. “Diasporas, Race and Difference.” In Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities edited by Kim Knott and Seán McLoughlin, 112-117. London and New York: Zed Books. Print. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. 2004. The Empire Strikes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Print. Chariandy, David. 2006. “Postcolonial Diasporas.” Postcolonial Text 2.1. http://www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/viewArticle/440/839. Cohen, Robin. 1997. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: U. of Washington P. Print. —. 2010. “Social Identities and Creolization.” In Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities edited by Kim Knott and Seán McLoughlin, 69-73. London and New York: Zed Books. Print. Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard U.P. Print. —. 2002 [1987]. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London and New York: Routledge. Print. Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, Cristina Blanc-Szanton. 1992. “Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration.” Annals of New York Academy of Sciences 645: 1-24. Print Hall, Stuart. 1994. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 392-403. New York: Columbia University Press. Print. Huggan, Graham. 2010. “Post-coloniality.” In Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities, 55-58. London: Zed Books. Print. Kamboureli, Smaro. 2000. Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada. Toronto: Oxford U.P. Print. Knör, Jacqueline. 2014. Creole Identity in Postcolonial Indonesia. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Print. Safran, William. 1991. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora 1.1: 83-9. Print. Tarr, Carrie. 2005. Reframing Difference: Beur and Banlieue Film making in France. Manchester: Manchester U.P. Print. Tölölyan, Khachig. 1996. “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment.” Diaspora 5.1: 3-35. Print. Van Hear, Nicholas. 2010. “Migration.” In Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities edited by Kim Knott and Seán McLoughlin, 34-38. London and New York: Zed Books. Print.

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—. 2002. “Sustaining Societies under Strain: Remittances as a Form of Transnational Exchange in Sri Lanka and Ghana.” In New Approaches to Migration: Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home edited by K. Koser and N. Al-Ali, 202-03. London and New York: Routledge. Print.

CHAPTER ONE VISIONS FROM THE MARGINS: MIGUEL BARNET’S BIOGRAFÍA DE UN CIMARRÓN AND IVOR MILLER’S VOICES OF THE LEOPARD UCHENNA VASSER

Abstract Two texts––Biografía de un cimarrón by Miguel Barnet and Voice of the Leopard by Ivor Miller––rework the relationship between history and literature as each problematizes Cuban hegemonic discourses on race and nationhood and on the positioning of Afro-Cubans within the contexts of socio-political and socio-cultural realities. This essay looks at both texts as commentaries on post-revolutionary Cuba, their contestations of authority, and the authors’ appropriation of the testimonial narrative to provide a personalized and Afro-centred vision of Cuban history from the margins.

Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón accomplishes more than the artful transcription of the words of a former slave. The text foregrounds Africanisms in relation to the specific mode of coming into being, a transmigratory worldview, religious motifs and the indomitable African spirit. In his effort to authenticate the variants of the African experience in Cuba and in the Americas in general, Barnet summons the phantoms of texts and contexts of the past. Texts such as Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiography, Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdes and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab provide the contexts through which Barnet deploys Biografía to interrogate Cuba’s colonial past. The goal is to arrive at an understanding of a Cuban national identity following the 1959 revolution. The fact that these interrogations are replete with the memorialized renditions of historical events by the Afro-Cuban, Esteban Mesa Montejo,

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indicates Barnet’s intentions to contest hegemonic discourses. He refers to these discourses as the “mangled, deformed interpretation of the past” (Biography 204). As is the case with Autobiography, Cecilia Valdes and Sab, Biografía focuses on the exploited and disenfranchised African underclass in Cuba. Yet, there is a fundamental difference between Barnet’s Biografía and those of Francisco Manzano, Villaverde and Gómez de Avellaneda. The texts of the three authors were written when a segment of the Cuban population was still in bondage. Barnet’s Biografía was, however, written when all Cubans were free. Nevertheless, Barnet’s work seemingly leaves us with more questions than answers regarding the state of African descendants in modern Cuba. Biografía’s inquietude is further intensified by Ivor Miller’s 2009 historical volume, Voice of the Leopard that is based on Cuba’s Abakuá. In this work, the historian argues that the pervasiveness of the Abakuá worldview demands a rethinking of Cuba’s national and cultural identities as preponderantly African. Miller’s work heralds a period of acute introspection in Cuba after decades of a socialist agenda and the resultant gnawing perception of the nation as a failed enterprise. In spite of Fidel Castro’s pronouncement of post-revolutionary Cuba as a non-racial state, there is, nonetheless, persistent racial inequality. Writing on this issue, Kevin Yelvington notes that: Ethnic relations in present-day Cuba demonstrate that political and economic revolution does not necessarily entail fundamental social change. ‘Race’ was a taboo subject in early revolutionary Cuba, as Fidel Castro tried to instil an official non-‘racial’ consciousness. The out-migration of an almost all-white Cuban oligarchy should have meant gains for blacks, even if by default. Indeed evidence provided by Alejandro de la Fuente (1995, 2001) suggests that the revolution was successful in equalizing the educational and health status of whites, blacks, and mulatos [sic], and there has been black and mulato mobility. But contradictions exist. Most of Cuba’s top occupations and government positions are still in the hands of whites (254).

Despite the political and economic inequalities, Cuba’s discourse on non-racial consciousness permitted the accommodation of variants of Afro-Cubanism in the broader Cuban culture. The official endorsement of blackness following the revolution, found its most fervent expression in the works of Nancy Morejón. Her emphatic “I”, claimed a place in the revolutionary process for Afro-Cubans, and particularly the Afro-Cuban female. In her analysis of Morejón’s poem "Amo a mi amo” Lorna Williams suggests that “Morejón’s willingness to invest her persona’s stance with symbolic significance is consistent with the renewal of interest

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in the African continuities in Cuban culture upheld by the revolutionary government” (137). Miller’s work signals a return to the theme of inclusion begun by Barnet in the mid-1960s. As in the case of Barnet’s Esteban Montejo, the attendant Africanism in Miller’s text is transmitted by a certain Andrés Flores Casanova, an Afro-Cuban blessed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Abakuá. Casanova lived long enough to witness how Cuba was once again faltering on the precipice of intolerance, marginalization and racism. Biografía and Miller’s Voice of the Leopard occupy, therefore, the spectrum of revolutionary Cuba, marking the beginning and the march towards its historic conclusion. Along the spectrum, Barnet and Miller rely on the orality of Montejo and Casanova as a litmus test to gauge the success, or lack thereof, of the socialist state. The narrations of these two Afro-Cubans are assessed through ethnographic approaches in order to elicit from the margins ignored and abhorred visions of Cuba. Interestingly, Biografía’s historicity is couched in a kind of literariness that forces Barnet to dub his work novela-testimonio. By the same token, Voice of the Leopard’s historiography is arguably fictional in regard to Flores Casanova’s observed recollection of Abakuá and the manner in which it was recounted to him. In the end, the works of Barnet and Miller engender an interesting study of the conflation of literature and history that entices the reader to examine Biografia for its historicity and Voice of the Leopard for its fictional quality. What then precipitated Barnet and Miller to appropriate tendentious Africanisms in Cuba? How is Cuba’s hegemonic discourse paradoxically upheld rather than dismantled by their recourse to ethnographic studies and the orality of Montejo and Flores? Are Barnet and Miller convincing in their usurpation of secular and non-secular African descriptives to redress Cuban post-revolutionary political and cultural imaginary? These questions underscore the re-reading of Biografía and the examination of its historicity through the lens of Miller’s purported Afrocentric history of Cuba.1 Roberto González Echevarría has argued that, as an archival text, Biografía takes us “back to the beginnings of writing, looking for an

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For sections of the essay pertaining to Biografía de un cimarrón, I have made use of two primary texts: Biography of a Runaway Slave, translated by W. Nick Hill, and the version of Biografía de un cimarrón (2010) edited by William Rowlandson. Hill’s version contains an invaluable afterword with Barnet’s important explanations of the content and scope of the testimonial novel. Likewise, Rowlandson’s text proffers a detailed analysis of Biografía with the addition of an “introducción” in which he explains the genesis of the project.

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empty present wherein to make a first inscription” (4). For Echevarría, the historical premise of Barnet’s text provides an essential platform for the methodical dismantling of dominant ideologies and for the construction of Cuban identity. Arguably, Echevarría’s notion of “an empty present” designed “to make a first inscription” could very well describe a postrevolutionary Cuba with a renewed fervour for self-definition. Historians Benjamin Keen and Keith Haynes have observed that, “during the first four years (1959-1962), the revolution consolidated its domestic political position, began the socialization of the economy, and established a new pattern of foreign relations” (438). Indeed, the revolutionary agenda, according to Barnet, led to “a violent subversion of traditional values” (Biography 204). For Barnet, the revolution was singularly “the greatest and most devastating experience of my life. With a brushstroke we became the spokesmen of an all-knowing view of the world and of our role in the life of our country” (Biography 204). The cataclysmic revolution effectively decimated Cuba’s imagined community that was fraught with inequalities and racial discord from independence. The revolution of 1959 served as a panacea for past ills and convulsed Cuba into a desire to promote a more homogenous society, if only culturally, by tapping into the cultural milieu of the Black underclass and of the miscegenated populace. For Barnet, Montejo became the historical figure whose words fuelled the articulation of a fundamental Cubanidad. As the compendium of Montejo’s historicity, therefore, Biografía deserves an analytical rereading to underscore several points. The first is Barnet’s wilful engagement with Esteban Montejo since he represents several facets of the African prototype in Cuba. He is Afro-Cuban, a former slave, a maroon, a freedom fighter, and a Cuban citizen gifted with a special mental acumen that allows him to recall events that occurred over an extended period of time. The second factor is Montejo’s embodiment of the concept of the noble savage. Stated more succinctly, he encapsulates a self whose primitive state and simplicity implies a certain purity of mind and veracity. Barnet is careful to remind the reader of Montejo’s incorruptibility. His isolation kept the cimarrón at the margins of Cuban society where he objectively observed historical events and ways of life. Montejo’s “objective” observation of history bestows upon him the respectable figure of the historian. The third element is Barnet’s own goal to construct a Cuban way of being that is defined by four principal elements: slavery, miscegenation, resistance and struggle, and independence. He notes: I am not a pure writer but something like the cross between a falcon and a tortoise. I have tried to bring together sociological-anthropological interest

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and the literary, convinced that they travel together in underground caverns, seeking each other out and nourishing each other in joyful reciprocity. If I move back and forth between these disciplines it’s because I believe it’s time they joined hands without denying each other (Biography 205).

Barnet’s confession is a warning shot to the reader. He intends to subvert established typology including genre, subject matter and aesthetics in order to produce a text whose deliberate nonconformity endows it with its singularity. Biografia’s debut in the 1960s was noteworthy since it emerged during a period of experimentalization of the written form in Latin America. Aside from proving antithetical to the hitherto Eurocentric forms that were appropriated by early twentieth century writers such as the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, Barnet’s choice of Montejo signalled a postrevolutionary Cuban ethos: it heeded Fidel Castro’s call for the creation of an inclusive society. To bring this to fruition, Barnet and others, including the likes of Nancy Morejón, opted to look inward by pursuing autochthonous materials and themes. Barnet was not, however, interested merely in producing a work of fiction. He sought to write an all-embracing text that weaves a Cuban socio-cultural history along with the personal experiences of Montejo in order to fill what William Rowlandson in his introduction to Biografía calls “the missing archives of Cuban history” (3). In this regard, Rowlandson’s observation resonates with Echevarría’s critique of twentieth-century Latin American literature that Echevarría characterizes as archival. The archival modality propelled writers to view their literary productions as contestations of history through which events were reappraised and deconstructed. The Barnetian aestheticism in Biografía deconstructs Cuban history through ethnographic inquiries into the pervasive, albeit ignored, Afrocubanisms. Biografía incorporates the words of Montejo after a series of interviews in which the centenarian “allows his memories to follow their own direction” (Biografía 2). This takes him back to life as a slave at the sugar plantations, his defiance of the status quo and his escape into the mountains to sojourn as a cimarrón. It also includes his eventual reemergence to fight among the mambi for Cuban independence as well as his status as an emancipated slave and Cuban citizen. Indeed, the act of appropriating Montejo’s words underscores Barnet’s unconventional strategy of reframing a post-1959 Cuban national identity. For Echevarría, Barnet’s unwriting of history is a rewriting of Latin American history from an anthropological or ethnographic perspective in which “the previous writings of history are undone as the new one is attempted. . . ” (15). Thus, when Barnet, to quote Echevarría, “pretends to turn himself into Esteban

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Montejo” (15), he is contesting hegemonic discourses and their discordant representations of the past. The history of Cuba from the nineteenth century to the postrevolutionary era has been dominated by several key factors: slavery and the push towards abolition, saccharocracy, struggles for independence and ultimate independence. These factors inform the titular demarcations within Biografía as Montejo avails the reader of his life story. To be sure, the sugar plantations in colonial Cuba served as laboratories that established the groundwork for the evolution and construction of constitutive elements of modern Cuba. In a study co-authored with Naomi Lindstrom, Barnet observes, and quite accurately, that “sugar made Cuba coalesce” (38). He goes on: “The culture that grew around it is today the national culture. The sugar plantation seedbed–germ cell–contributed to the fusing-together of all the values that gave rise to our country” (38). The booms and bursts of the sugar industries at the beginning of the nineteenth century determined every facet of Cuba’s socio-political and economic structures. It included the decision to emancipate slaves in 1886 and the emergence of indentured servitude during post-emancipation. But what Barnet invokes through his relationship with Montejo are not only “the values” embedded in the cultural codes that typify the Afro-Cuban milieu but also that which he believes “gave rise” to his country. In spite of, or due to, his condition as a slave, the African in Cuba has, over the years, developed several attributes: a spirit of resistance, a culture of nation-building, and a societal culture suffused with religious practices and artistic expressions. To be sure, Montejo—Barnet’s alter ego—begins his narrative in Biografía with a philosophical exegesis that delineates the contours of life and the mystery that circumscribes humanity’s existence in nature: Hay cosas que yo no me explico en la vida. Todo eso que tiene que ver con la Naturaleza para mí está muy oscuro, y lo de los dioses más. Ellos son los llamados a originar todos esos fenómenos que uno ve, que yo vide y que es positivo que han existido. Los dioses son caprichosos e inconformes. Por eso aquí han pasado tantas cosas raras. Yo me acuerdo que antes, en la esclavitud, yo me pasaba la vida mirando para arriba, porque el cielo siempre me ha gustado mucho por lo pintado que es. (Biografía 63) [There are things in life I do not understand. Everything about Nature seems obscure to me, and the gods even more. They’re the ones who are supposed to give birth to all those things that a person sees, that I see, and that do exist for sure. The gods are willful and ornery. That’s why so many strange things have gone on around here. I remember from before, during

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slavery, I spent a lot of time looking upwards because I’ve always really liked the sky—it’s so full of color]. (Hill 17)

Montejo’s simplicity of thought, however, underscores several ideas: the origin of the Afro-Cuban and his reinvention in a New World context that has been facilitated by his steadfastness to the African deities. Thus, in Montejo’s first utterances, the words “la naturaleza” [nature], “los dioses” [the gods], and “la esclavitud” [slavery] can be taken as symbols of the Cuban essence. The origin of the Afro-Cuban is founded in slavery, “la esclavitud,” a vivid reminder of the early sixteenth-century forced transportation of Africans to the new colonies in the Americas. Undoubtedly, the success of the European colonizing enterprise in the Americas ensured the exponential growth for the demand of manual labour from Africa. The devastation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of Saint Dominguez’s sugar-dependent economy created the opportunity for Cuba’s transformation into an economic force. With Cuba assuming centre stage in sugar production, there was an increase in the demand and supply of slaves from Africa in the late eighteenth century. David Murray notes that between 1790 and 1821, approximately 250,000 Africans were transported to Cuba (134). In addition to the numbers cited by Murray, Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson observe that over 100,000 Africans were reportedly shipped to Cuba from the Bight of Biafra during the same period (333). It is significant to underscore the importance of the slaves who came from Old Calabar, the main port of the Bight of Biafra. Among these slaves were the Efík who became the central actors in birthing Abakuá in Cuba. As is the case of other African ethno-nations, slavery constituted a violent rupture of the Efík from their place of origin. This violent departure impacted their cultural continuity and attendant worldview. In order to make sense of their predicament, Africans relied on the memorialized vestiges of their past. Montejo’s assertion that there are things in life that he does not understand echoes a fundamental African philosophical thought: the interconnectedness between terrestrial and celestial realms, or between “la naturaleza” and “los dioses,” guarantees the wellbeing of humans in their environment. In his extensive study of the Ifá corpus, Wande Abimbola uncovers the ardent belief of the Yoruba in the inextricable bonds that tie their existence to the gods. In Abimbola’s view, “the wisdom and understanding of Ifá is believed to cover not only the past but also the present, and the future. By consulting Ifá, the Yoruba find meaning and purpose in the past, present, and the future” (10). Most of the Yoruba slaves who arrived in the Americas brought along an intact belief system. Wole Soyinka emphasizes the symbiotic qualities that

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underpin the dynamic relationship that will emerge between this guarded belief system and the Christian principles soon to be discovered in the New World: “Symbols of Yemaja (Yemoja), Oxosi (Ososi), Exu (Esu) and Xango (Sango) not only lead a promiscuous existence with Roman Catholic saints but are fused with the twentieth century technological and revolutionary expressionism of the mural arts of Cuba, Brazil, and much of the Caribbean” (1). Montejo was not unfamiliar with the mayombe, a game infused with African religious symbolism and undertones: El juego de mayombe estaba amarrado a la religión. Hasta los propios mayorales se metían para buscarse sus beneficios. Ellos creían en los brujos, por eso hoy nadie se puede asombrar de que los blancos crean en estas cosas. En el mayombe se tocaba con tambores. Se ponía una nganga o cazuela grande en el medio del patio. En esa cazuela estaban los poderes, los santos. (Biografía 69) [The game mayombe was linked to religion. Even the overseers got involved, hoping to benefit. They believed in ghosts so that’s why no one today should be surprised that whites also believe in those things. You played mayombe with drums. You put a nganga or big pot in the middle of the patio. All the powers, the saints, were in that cazuela.] (Hill 27)

The distinctly African mayombe, replete with wizards, potions and saints drew the attention of not only slaves seeking spiritual gains, but also the overseers tasked with controlling the slaves. The democratizing effect of a syncretic African belief system remains an important causation in Barnet’s articulation of a Cuban cultural identity. This syncretic system further engendered forms of resistance expressed in rituals and dance, particularly during Catholic festivities, feast days and on Sundays. Note how Montejo recalls festive Sundays on the plantations: Los días de más bulla en los ingenios eran los domingos. Yo no sé cómo los esclavos llegaban con energías. Las fiestas más grandes de la esclavitud se daban ese día. Había ingenios donde empezaban el tambor a las doce del día o a la una. En Flor de Sagua, desde muy temprano. Con el sol empezaba la bulla y los juegos y los niños a revolverse. El barracón se encendía temprano, aquello parecía el fin del mundo. (Biografía 71) [Sundays were the noisiest days on the plantations. I don’t know where the slaves found the energy. The biggest fiestas during slavery took place on that day of the week. There were plantations where the drum began at noon or at one. At Flor de Sagua it started very early. At sunrise the noise

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began, and the games, and the children began to spin around. The barracoon came to life in a flash. It seemed the world would come to an end. (Hill 30)

Sundays witnessed the most intense expression of Africanization of the sugar plantations. Instead of the church bells, it was the “tambor” or drum that summoned the Africans. Barnet concludes that the process of Africanization was precipitated by the African’s need for survival, an act accomplished by anchoring and adapting autochthonous African cultural impulses in response to an imposed European ideological paradigm. In a study with Naomi Lindstrom, Barnet observes: Faced with the flimsy Christianization campaigns on the plantations during the nineteenth century, faced with the imposition of gods unknown to him, the black man responded by working out his own models; he substituted, establishing exact or approximate equivalences, worked with parallel concepts, related matching features, associated colors and symbols. He was affected by Western culture, was permeated with it, had to speak its language, adopt the crucifix, learn by rote a new set of behavioral norms, but he heroically preserved his concepts of family, his cuisine, his songs and dances: his culture. (43)

Barnet’s argument is a simple one: the African presence in Cuba and his machinations to survive the brutal conditions of slavery instilled in him some exemplary qualities. Furthermore, by their sheer numbers, it was inevitable that African contributions and attitudes would invariably permeate the cultural fabric of Cuba. Montejo highlights the different ethnic groups that constituted the typical sugar plantation: En los ingenios había negros de distintas naciones. Cada uno tenía su figura. Los congos eran prietos aunque había muchos jabaos. Eran chiquitos por lo regular. Los mandingas eran medio colorauzcos. Altos y muy fuertes. Por mi madre que eran mala semilla y criminales. Siempre iban por su lado. Los gangas eran buenos. Bajitos y de cara pecosa. Muchos fueron cimarrones. Los carabalís eran como los congo musungos, fieras. (Biografía 76) [In the plantations there were blacks from different nations. Each one had his own traits. The Congos were dark though you also had many lighter, fair-skinned mulattoes. They were short on the whole. The Mandingos were slightly reddish-colored. Tall and very strong. I swear on my mother’s grave they are crooks and a bad bunch. They always went their own way. The Gangas were good folks. Short and freckle-faced. Many

20

Chapter One were cimarrones. The Carabalís were fierce like the Musungo Congos.] (Hill 37)

With African, Chinese and Filipino populations, the sugar plantation became central to the formation of a truly multinational Cuban identity. Barnet notes that Cuban “identity as a people is the gift of the plantation system of sugar-cane farming, especially as it existed in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Back population outnumbered the white” (39). What precipitates Barnet’s intention to conceptualize a totalitarian approach to Cuban historiography are the conditions under which the African lived both in the colonial past and his marginalized state in the present. While lauding the plantation system as “the gift” for a Cuban identity, Barnet recognizes the same system as the setting for the scourge on millions of Africans who, in their discomfiture, sought every avenue for escape. The physical resistance of the African against an oppressive system and his attendant indomitable spirit are key attributes that Barnet highlights in Biografía. As to be expected, Montejo’s desire for freedom is innate: A mí nunca se me ha olvidado la primera vez que intenté huirme. Esa vez me falló y estuve unos cuantos años esclavizado por temor a que me volvieran a poner los grillos. Pero yo tenía un espíritu de cimarrón arriba de mí que no se alejaba. (Biografía 80) [I have never forgotten the first time I tried to escape. I failed that time and so I remained cornered for several years for fear of being handcuffed again. But I held on to a runaway slave’s spirit that never left me.] (My translation)

Montejo lived and breathed the idea of cimarronaje. Indeed, the idea of the indomitable African spirit as an important theme for Afro-Latin writers populates the pages of literary texts from the early twentieth century onwards. Writers such as the Afro-Colombian Manuel Zapata Olivella would appropriate the ideology of the African’s epic struggle for liberty and justice in the Americas to fashion his concept of africanidad. His ideology of africanidad in America was synonymous with freedom and resistance: Así como la indianidad emblematiza la defensa de la tierra y la cultura, y el criollismo la independencia. Desde que el primer africano desembarcó en este continente, las cadenas de sus puños amenazantes se constituyeron en símbolo de rebeldía y libertad. Perdida la esperanza del retorno, América le

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significaba vida, mujer, familia y nueva patria. Convertido en guerrero, su lucha contra la opresión es la epopeya de la libertad. (La rebelión de los genes 56) [Just as Indianness is emblematic of the defence of land and culture, so is Creolism synonymous with independence. Since the first African landed on this continent, his chained and menacing fists have been symbols of rebellion and freedom. Without the hope of a return, America signified life, woman, family and a new homeland. Turned warrior, his struggle against oppression is the epic of freedom.] (My translation)

What Zapata Olivella and others do is to articulate the foundations of a new America that comprises the distinct attributes of the three principal racial types: the European, the indigenous, and the African who embody the ceaseless pursuit of freedom and justice. Barnet finds perplexing the historical elision and effacement of the African element within the American ethos. In this regard, Barnet’s literary cimarronaje, as aptly expressed in his own words, aims to “reveal the human heart, the heart of the men that traditional historiography has marked with the sign of a proverbial fatalism by writing them off as ‘people without a history’” (Biography 206). In other words, Barnet aims to subvert and dismantle mainstream ideological constructs. He is emphatic: “I no longer believe in genres, as the people have never believed in them” (Biography 206). In the end, Barnet aligns Montejo’s visions with Cuba’s revolutionary ideals. Rowlandson suggests that the concluding statements in Biografía define Montejo’s revolutionary consciousness: Todo el mundo tiene que fijarse en eso. Ahí está todo. Y yo me paso la vida diciéndolo, porque la verdad no se puede callar. Y aunque mañana yo me muera, la vergüenza no la pierdo por nada. Si me dejaran, ahora mismo salía a decirlo todo. Porque antes, cuando uno estaba desnudo y sucio en el monte, veía a los soldados españoles que parecían letras de chino, con las mejores armas. Y había que callarse. Por eso digo que no quiero morirme, para echar todas las batallas que vengan. Ahora, yo no me meto en trincheras ni cojo armas de ésas de hoy. Con un machete me basta. (182) [Everybody should pay attention to that. It’s all there. And I’ll keep on saying it as long as I live because you shouldn’t silence the truth. And though I may die tomorrow, I wouldn’t give up my sense of honour for anything. If I could, I would tell the whole story now, all of it. Because back then, when you were dirty and naked in the hills, you could see those crisp, clean Spanish soldiers with the best weapons. And you had to keep quiet. That’s why I say I don’t want to die so that I can fight all the battles

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Chapter One yet to come. I won’t get into the trenches or use any of these modern weapons. A machete will do for me.] (Hill 200)

Montejo’s philosophy about the end of life can be construed as a rhetorical insertion into the broader discourse on the Cuban revolution. The symbolism of the machete is particularly poignant because, in insisting that “con un machete me basta,” [a machete will do for me], the Afro-Cuban affirms his/her unmistakeable kinship with the revolutionaries of 1959. The machete also serves as a tool that establishes the African’s important role in the sugar-based economy and in his/her struggle for genuine independence. Arguably, the tidy end to Biografía obfuscates the reality of the revolutionary agenda that adopted the habit of determining which elements of Afrocubanism could support the newly-erected hegemony. Rowlandson’s analysis of Biografía underscores the revolutionary machinery’s concerted effort to prohibit social clubs because of the belief that their presence undermined the socialist state’s endeavours towards a unified Cuba. In spite of their primary role as centres for Abakuá practice, the official pronouncement, nevertheless, saw them as “barbarous, underdeveloped and primitive. To that extent, they were at odds with the progressive social reforms of the revolution” (Rowlandson 47). Yet, in 1991 when Miller arrived in Cuba to study Abakuá practices, he noticed the latent presence of many of these hitherto-banned centres of civic engagement and their underpinning Abakuá elements including music, commerce, and civic responsibilities. During his period of research in Cuba, Miller encountered several members of Abakuá. Among them were Andrés Flores Casanova, Gerardo Pazos “El chino Mokongo” and Aberlado Empegó. With the exception of Flores Casanova, the other two were leaders of Abakuá lodges in Havana. It was, however, Flores Casanova who volunteered much of the information on Abakuá in several interviews that Miller conducted. Flores Casanova was born in Old Havana and claimed Calabar, a city in south-eastern Nigeria, as his ancestral home. At the time of Miller’s encounter with Flores Casanova, the Afro-Cuban was ninety-four years old. He told the story of how the founders of Abakuá came to Cuba and how his ancestors and his immediate family related that story to him (37). While both Miller and Flores Casanova acknowledge the earlier works of Fernando Ortiz and Lydia Cabrera on Abakuá lore, they both reject these early attempts as fundamentally inspired by prejudice since they fail to treat Abakuá as “an important national sociological phenomenon” (15). Miller’s interview with Flores Casanova provides the nonagenarian with the opportunity to rectify inaccuracies related to the Abakuá:

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There are many legends written about the origins of Abakuá in Africa, but none of them are based on the treaties and their concepts. Each writer tells it their own way, based on their imagination, but until now no one has written anything that the Basaibekes [wise men] of Abakuá can reaffirm. The Abakuá never told the truth to those who came despotically seeking for information. Even the plazas [title-holders] would send the obonekues [first-level initiates] away on errands in order to do their works in secrecy. (Quoted in Miller 23)

Flores Casanova’s conversations with Miller underscore the interconnection between Abakuá secrecies and those of the Ékpè male secret society in Nigeria. In Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade, Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson highlight the involvement of the Ékpè male secret society in the lucrative slave trade in Old Calabar in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They refer to the secret society as a “cartel who maintained control of trade and society through secret knowledge, including literacy in English and use of indigenous script” (349). Their study specifically looks at the alliance between British merchants and members of the secret society. It was an alliance forged to ensure the efficacy of the trade in goods and slaves at Old Calabar, and the institution of human pawnship designed to guarantee trade compliance: Whether for debt enforcement or other things, the society’s council had the power to ‘blow’ Ékpè, that is, impose summary justice on offenders, which could involve seizure and sale into slavery or execution of the accused and his family. Often, Ékpè held families collectively responsible for the actions of its members. (348)

The understandable rivalry between communities and Ékpè lodges to dominate trade with the British often occasioned the kidnappings of members and leaders of rival groups for sale into slavery. Lovejoy and Richardson point to the tragic consequence of such rivalry in the 1767 massacre of three hundred inhabitants of Old Town during the struggle with neighbouring Duke Town to dominate the trade in slaves. While Lovejoy and Richardson are clearly focused on the economy of the slave trade from the Nigerian hinterland, of particular interest are their observations on the Ékpè secret society and the conclusion that could be drawn about how the organizational skills of the society and its cartel-like qualities somehow found their way to Cuba during slavery. Certainly, Miller’s work has been informed by the widespread nature of the Ékpè secret society in Cuba and its eventual transformation into Abakuá. In Cuba, Miller learned about the many recognizable terms that originated

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from the Ékpè region of the Cross River. In Cuba, Ékpè became known as Abakuá, after an ethnic term used in Calabar. Ékpè was multi-ethnic and it was practised throughout the Cross River region in spite of the many languages such as Bibí, Ápapa, Bríkamo, and Suáma that were spoken. With the awareness that these languages were mutually intelligible, Miller reconnects Abakuá with its African origin. Consequently, Voice of the Leopard adopts as its primary focus the Abakuan-Ékpè links through linguistic registers. Miller’s extensive study of the Abakuá chants linked its origins to the African Nsibidi. Lovejoy and Richardson indicate that the Nsibidi, a system of writing indigenous to the Cross River region, was used to enforce Ékpè society decrees. They write: Although it is not clear when Nsibidi were first used, the spread of Ékpè, together with its rituals and symbols, required mechanisms for announcing decrees that resulted in the evolution of the system. Nsibidi were drawn on calabash gourds and walls, and signs were placed on roadways. By the end of the nineteenth century, at least Ékpè members sometimes kept accounts and held court proceedings in Nsibidi. (348)

The irrefutable links between Abakuá and Ékpè indigenous scripts are evident in the Abakuá ritual incantations and songs that have been transcribed into Spanish. Miller notes that his interaction with West African Ékpè members began in 2000 after he published samples of Abakuá phrases from a commercially recorded album. According to him, shortly after this publication, resident members of the Nigerian Cross River Ékpè society in the United States contacted him to express their recognition of phrases such as “Efi Kebuton” as part of their own history (12). Miller, who later became an initiate of a Calabar Ékpè lodge, recognized, first in music, and later in civic organizations in Cuba, the undeniable transformation of Ékpè into the Cuban Abakuá. He goes on to say that Africans from the Cross River region who were brought to Havana formed local councils or cabildos. By the same token, the Ékpè society initiates among them continued to engage in Ékpè rituals: Ékpè functioned as a multi-ethnic practice that enabled mercantile interaction and safe travel between autonomous settlements with distinct ethnic identities but speaking Efík as a lingua franca. Following this model, Cuban Abakuá members cultivated a practice of autonomous lodges with clearly defined ‘ethnic’ lineages. At the base of this system were well defined codes of ritual authority passed from African-born Ékpè teachers to creole offspring. (64)

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After establishing the preponderance of Abakuá through chants and place names, Miller underlined the doctrine’s pre-eminence in the articulation of a Cuban national identity. To begin with, he was wary of earlier studies on the Abakuá presence in Cuba that had detained its relevance at the level of the folkloric. Instead, Miller imbibed Flores Casanova’s epistemic orality on who, or what, was Abakuá in order to counter the documented and officially sanctioned versions. Flores was equally aware of those previous studies on Abakuá and summarily diminished their veracity. He was emphatic in his rejection of Eurocentric hegemonic discourses on Cuba and insisted on the existence of a different version of history for the descendants of Africans in the New World. Flores Casanova’s position reflected that of Miller who believed that the other version of history must be presented as “a different history, one that begins in Africa and does not have Europe at its centre” (37). Flores Casanova’s version of history intimated a Cuban society which was fully functional at the margins of the dominant culture. His historical account describes Havana as a society fully immersed in the practice of Abakuá to the degree that neighbourhoods were denominated to accommodate the existence of different lodges: The servants and slaves of the dominant class who lived within the walled city became self-organized, even renaming their barrios. Instead of the official Catholic names of Belén, San Francisco, Santo Angel, and Santo Cristo, they chose La Pluma [the Feather], La Lejia [the Lye], Campeche [Yucatan], Cangrejo [Crab], Los Doce Pares de Francia [Twelve Pairs from France]. Many of the Africans and their descendants who built the city’s structures and fortressed walls remained living within them. By renaming the city and its barrios, they indicated a parallel social system operating underneath the official one. (69)

The parallel social system functioning alongside, or at the margins of the dominant society, is also present in Biografía, as evidenced in Montejo’s description of life on the plantations: Pero eso de los conucos fue lo que salvó a muchos esclavos. Lo que les dio verdadera alimentación. Casi todos los esclavos tenían sus conucos. Estos conucos eran pequeños trozos de tierra para sembrar. Quedaban muy cerca de los barracones; casi detrás de ellos. Ahí se cosechaba de todo: boniato, calabaza, quimbombó, maíz, gandul, frijol caballero, que es como las habas limas, yuca y maní. También criaban cochinaticos. Y algunos de estos productos se los vendían a los guajiros que venían directamente del pueblo. (Biografía 68)

26

Chapter One [But it was the small gardens that saved many slaves. They provided them with real nourishment. Almost all the slaves had their canucos. They were little strips of dirt for gardening. They were real close to the barracoons, almost right in back [sic]. They grew everything there: sweet potato, squash, okra, corn, peas, horse beans, beans like lima, limes, yuca and peanuts. They also raised piglets. And so those products were sold to the guajiros who came straight from town.] (Hill 26)

Even with the heavily regimented lives of slaves on the plantations, the desire to wrest control from an oppressive system was constant as slaves sought avenues to invent autonomous communities. The arduous labour notwithstanding, the plantation slaves were able to find time to keep gardens and to plant crops which they traded with the indigenous populations from neighbouring villages. It is tempting to speculate whether Esteban was Abakuá. Of course, one would never know. It is, however, noteworthy that Montejo confirms the presence on the plantation of the group of Africans known as Carabalís who “were fierce like the Musungo Congos” (Biography 38). In their study of Abakuá, Jorge and Isabel Castellanos identify the Carabalís as originating from the region of the Nigerian hinterland known as Calabar: El nombre de Calabar, aplicado a toda esta región, comienza a aparecer en los mapas holandeses del siglo XVII. A los esclavos extraídos de esta región se les llamó al principio calabares, que pronto se convirtió en carabalíes. (203) [The name Calabar, associated with this region, began to appear in Dutch maps of the 17th Century. Those slaves taken from this region were initially called calabares, which was soon changed to Carabalís.]

Montejo knew and admired the Carabalís for their efficacy and good business sense: they didn’t kill pigs except on Sundays and the days of Easter. They were good at business. They ended up killing pigs to sell, and they didn’t even eat them. Because of that a song was made for them that went: ‘Carabalí, very needy, kills a pig every Sunday’. I got to know all these newly arrived Africans better after slavery ended. (Biography 38)

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Evidently, Miller’s incursions into Abakuá lore are not unique; not even the linkages he purports to (re)establish between Abakuá and Ékpè.2 Earlier writers such as Lydia Cabrera, Alejo Carpentier and even Barnet recognized Cuba’s African presence but appeared reluctant to articulate its prominence or parity as a socio-politico-cultural phenomenon. Indeed, since the late nineteenth century, most of the serious studies on African cultural expressions in Cuba focused more on Afro-Cuban nefarious and criminal activities. As Edna Rodríguez-Mangual remarks, the Cuban culturalist and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz “began to study Afro-Cubans in order to explain the cause of crime in Cuba” (30). Ortiz was eager to uncover the variances of Afro-centred religions in Cuba and the propensity of the practitioners of these religions to engage in criminal activities. In some of his early works such as Los negros brujos, for instance, Ortiz’s fundamental focus was the cancerous spread of a latent Africanism through religio-cultural practices and miscegenation that threatened the foundations of a Cuban national identity. Unlike Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera was noncommittal in her approach to Afro-Cuban culture. Beginning in the 1930s with Cuentos negros de Cuba, Cabrera showcased African mythology and folktales that were transplanted in Cuba. Critical approaches to Cabrera’s voluminous production on Afro-Cuban culture have tended to respond to two important questions: whether Cabrera’s motives were tied to her affinity with European aestheticism of the early twentieth century that exoticised Black and African cultures, or if she was sympathetic to elements of Cuban culture that had remained marginalized and misunderstood. The answer to the first question undergirds the focus of Michele Guicharnaud-Tollis’s study of Cabrera’s Cuentos negros as the expression of a new Latin American literary aestheticism that fuses the European with the autochthonous. According to Guicharnaud-Tollis, Cuentos negros introduces “otra moralidad, otras valoraciones distintas de las de los europeos” (551) [other morality, other distinct assessments of the Europeans]. On his part, Richard Jackson sees Cuentos negros as being much more concerned with the budding Black consciousness in Cuba in the early twentieth century. What he sees as the early expression of Afrocriollismo “arose at that moment in Cuban history in response not simply to the European avant-garde but to political problems at home as well” (22). Whatever the case, Cabrera published significant works on Abakuá, including La sociedad secreta Abakuá and Anaforuana: Ritual y símbolos de la iniciación en la sociedad secreta Abakuá. These works

 2

See the detailed history of Abakuá by Jorge and Isabel Castellanos in which they trace the origins of this mutual-aid society back to Africa.

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were the result of interviews conducted with members of Abakuá who, though bound by the secrecy of their male-only society, voluntarily provided Cabrera with the Abakuá mythos. Such works by Cabrera, Ortiz, Barnet and Miller constitute what González Echevarría refers to as the canon of the anthropological discourse of early twentieth-century Latin American narrative. Echevarría believes that for these writers, anthropology provided the “methodological instruments, the rhetoric or discourse to be both there and outside” (157). Miller’s ethnographic investigations take him on a different route from his predecessors. He conducts extensive fieldwork in Cuba and West Africa to document ritual languages and practices that survived the Middle Passage and evolved into a unifying charter for transplanted slaves and their successors. Miller’s final and key point in Voice of the Leopard is his disagreement with Cuba’s official pronouncement of Cubanidad that has paid scant attention to, and denigrated, African contributions and presence. His assertion is driven home by a fellow Ékpè initiate, Bassey Efiong Bassey, who pens the foreword in Voice of the Leopard. Bassey Efiong Bassey excoriates the European for his deliberate mischaracterization of an African cultural import to Cuba with the aim to subvert or discredit its relevance: The Abakuá system of Cuba was exported from Calabar, the area endemic with Ékpè/Mgbe. The Abakuá account of how the system came into Cuba is in concert with Ékpè/Mgbe practice. Only those who have attained a certain minimum grade have the spiritual authority to effect a transfer of Ékpè/Mgbe from one territory to another. Ordinarily Ékpè/Mgbe or Abakuá is sedentary until energized into action by a spiritual authority. Perhaps the words secret or brotherhood more appropriately describe Abakuá and Ékpè/Mgbe groups. Secret, not because they are sinister…In Calabar of old, only Ékpè initiates were trusted with community assignments requiring steadfastness, secrecy, and valour. They made good in soldiering. Military commanders were ranked members. Contrary to modern belief, they were not selfish, but public spirited (xx).

Bassey makes two important points. First, as in the case of Lovejoy and Richardson, Bassey addresses the preponderance of the Ékpè secret society in all spheres of operation, within and around Old Calabar. Second, the ubiquitous society would suggest that vast numbers of the male population may have been conscripted. As Lovejoy and Richardson note “by the 1790s, virtually all males at Old Calabar were being forced to purchase membership in Ékpè if they did not join willingly” (348). Bassey’s argument is partly true: the degree of connectivity between the West African Ékpè and Abakuá is the result of the grade level attained by

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enslaved initiates. He insists that these initiates would be endowed with the spiritual authority to continue the practice in a new setting and undertake the founding of a lodge. Also true are the sheer numbers of slaves transported from Old Calabar to Cuba who were Ékpè initiates and who may or may not have attained a significant grade level in the hierarchical structure of the secret society. The presence of the multitude of Ékpè members in the New World in the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries offers a strong probability of the survival of their worldview. Miller pinpoints three spheres of influence of the Abakuá in Cuba. In the first instance, “Africans in Cuba created cabildos de nación by collectively re-establishing fundamental aspects of their homeland practices, in the process laying the foundation for the existing Africanderived religions and their sacred music traditions” (76). Not only did these cabildos play “a foundational role in Cuban society receiving African migrants in a communal urban context” (77), they also became repositories for the conservation of African languages and cultural practices. The cabildos thrived in urban settings such as Matanza and Havana where the Ékpè members, according to Miller, sponsored the Abakuá society among creoles (77). Miller underscores the fact that a burgeoning Abakuá presence in Cuba coincided with the emergence of barrios in Havana: The emergence of Abakuá coincided with the expansion of Havana into barrios outside the walls. Lodges became identified with particular barrios, becoming a social club for men; an informal school for historians, musicians, and dancers; a vehicle for organizing labour; as well as a place to hold funerals. (89)

Ultimately, through the cabildos and lodges, Abakuá established an expansive underground network that united multiple communities, including freed Blacks, Black Artisans, African nation groups, militia members, urban fugitives and the Black curros, that is, the Ladino migrants from Seville, Spain. An examination of Biografía and Voice of the Leopard reveals a fundamental theme that arguably supports the claims by both writers that these texts were important addenda to Cuba’s discourses on nation, race, and culture. If Miller insists on the underlying characteristics of Abakuá in Cuba, Barnet makes the African presence the crucible for any articulation of Cubanidad. The authentication of both authors’ assertions lies in their artful appropriations of the testimonials of two geriatric Afro-Cubans: Montejo on slavery and the conditions relating to its practice, cimarronaje, emancipation, and citizenship; Flores Casanova on the transcultural

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African worldview. The similarity ends here, however. In Montejo and Flores Casanova, one gleans two unofficial perspectives of the Cuban imaginary: one that is accommodating, and the other that is subversive. I argue that Barnet’s historical narrative is accommodating in terms of its contestation of authority when viewed in tandem with the Miller/Flores Casanova historiography. It is clear that Miller accepts Flores Casanova’s testimonial at face value for its historical veracity rather than detains it at the level of the personal as Barnet does. Furthermore, Flores Casanova is elevated to the level of the historian, as Miller assures us that his account of Abakuá history is passed on not only by his ancestors but is corroborated, albeit by limited entries in official records. Furthermore, Flores Casanova’s historiography exposes the subversive nature of Abakuá and its mechanism to collapse dominant ideological constructs. Invariably, a complementary relationship between Biografía and Voice of the Leopard is evident as Miller’s work illustrates Abakuá in the continuum of rewriting Cuban history, a task begun by Barnet. By the same token, Voice of the Leopard becomes the framework for Biografía’s critique vis-à-vis the interplay between the dominant power and the marginalized and the insider/outsider binary. Barnet’s work poses several important questions. Cited as the foremost expression of testimonial narrative, Biografía has had its share of critical analyses. The author offered the following as the definition of his novelistic style: [A] conjunction of styles, a coming together of approaches and a fusion of objectives, a confrontation of problems within the American context: violence, dependency, neocolonialism, the falsification of history by means of schematisms, applied and reapplied. The testimonial novel critically examines not only ethnic, cultural and social stereotypes, but it also reworks several traditional concepts of literature: realism, autobiography, the relationship between fiction and history. (Biography 204)

Elzbieta Sklodowska departs from critics who insist the work is apocryphal and question Barnet’s deliberate conflation of forms to situate her argument on the ethical exigency that would have compelled Barnet to appropriate a form and thematic that specifically addressed Cuba’s sociocultural concerns following the successful revolution: Podemos sacar una conclusión de que la selección de la forma novelesca por el escritor es un acto cargado de obligaciones no solamente estéticas, sino también éticas, porque las expectativas establecidas por la novelística existente ponen de manifiesto la importancia del contexto social en la fibra misma de la forma. Las maneras de tejer esta fibra para lograr un diseño significativo varían según lo demuestra la riqueza de novelas creadas a

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pesar de los recurrentes pronunciamientos sobre la muerte del género. Consideramos la novela-testimonio como una de las posibles maneras de descubrir, explorar y evaluar la materia histórica. (25) [We can conclude that the writer’s decision to resort to the novelistic form is an act formented not only by aesthetic necessities but also ethical ones, since the parameters established by existing novelistic norms underscore, in their very essence, the importance of social contexts. The ways in which this essence is woven in order to achieve a specific meaning varied as evidenced by the artistic wealth of the novels that have been created despite the recurring pronouncements on the death of the genre. We consider the testimonial novel as one of the possible ways to discover, explore and to evaluate the historical subject.] (My translation)

But do Barnet and Miller achieve the objective of foregrounding Cuba’s attendant Africanisms? The idea of Barnet and Miller lending their voices to the often marginalized Cuban Black underclass is at the core of this interrogation and adds to the ongoing polemic since the late 1980s (and before) when Gayatri Spivak posed the question of who can speak for the subaltern. Barnet and Miller through their texts cause serious concerns about power relations in Cuba and how the power structure continues to operate either explicitly or implicitly. One is intrigued by the narratives of Montejo and Flores Casanova. Yet the writers’ claims of advancing notions of Afro-Cuban culture from their privileged positions of the elite class force one to take a closer look at those assertions. Montejo’s words or the fantastically mythical description of Abakuá offered by Flores Casanova bring to mind the question of orality and the synergetic relationships between the interviewer and interviewee. Orality, as the preferred mode of composition, has its origins in the distressed conditions of Blacks in Cuba precipitated by enslavement and disenfranchisement that deprived them of participation in Cuban society. Clearly, like so many of the Black underclass, Montejo and Flores Casanova are uneducated. Their version of Cuban history remains in the realm of the memorialized, passed on from ancestral lore or first-hand witnesses. Understandably, certain cultural referents and nuances conveyed by the interviewees may be misinterpreted or disregarded by the interviewers. Kwasi Wiredu is worried by the reliance of Flores Casanova and Montejo on the abilities of Miller and Barnet to transform their spoken words into written language, and sees in such relationships between interviewee and interviewer the risk of the “superimposition of a Western category of thought on African thought materials” (9). As is the case of most interviews, the responses by Montejo and Flores Casanova to the questions posed by their interviewers are intended to address the predetermined agenda of the interviewers.

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Indeed, Barnet alludes to the attendant machinations of trying to “fit” Montejo’s words into the author’s predetermined ideas: “en todo el relato se podrá apreciar que hemos tenido que parafrasear mucho de lo que él nos contaba” (61) [one can notice that, in the whole story, we have had to paraphrase a lot of what he told us (my translation)]. How probable is it, then, that Miller and Barnet are able to capture the systems of thought and interpretations conveyed in the spoken words? This concern leads Rowlandson to contemplate how far Barnet’s creative act succeeded or failed in representing the voice of Esteban and if Barnet himself avoided “folk rhetoric,” and if so, how? (39). Rowlandson concludes that Barnet’s voice in Biografía, based on his coaching of Esteban and the paraphrasing of his subject’s words, does not negate the old man’s recollections of a historical past nor does that of Flores’s in Miller’s case. Cognizant of criticisms of the misinterpretation or misrepresentation of Montejo, Barnet asserted that his citizenship in the Cuban polity conferred on him an affinity with its constitutive parts. With these credentials, Barnet believed that he was armed with the requisite access to engage in an exercise that is necessary in order to understand himself and the rest more fully (Biography 205). He continues: “I am a Latin American to the extent that I am Cuban. If my work has taken on some resonance it is due to the fact that I have tried to present an image of my country in all its powerful authenticity, stripped of provincial folklore” (Biography 205). Biografía and Voice of the Leopard are two texts that rework the relationship between literature and history. In their transcription of the memoirs of Montejo and Flores Casanova into written form, Barnet and Miller contest established formulaic ideals of form and content. In its history and literary expressions, Cuba had disdained, ignored or abhorred the African presence and contributions. One need only look at the 1933 novel Ecue-Yamba-O by Alejo Carpentier as representational in its treatment of the Afro-Cuban ethos. Carpentier was eager to explicate his choice of an Afro-centred subject matter as “cosa novata, pintoresca, sin profundidad—escalas y arpegios de estudiante” (3) [“something refreshing, picturesque, without profundity—a student’s scales and arpeggios” (my translation)]. Specifically, therefore, Biografía and Voice of the Leopard thread an important relationship between Cuba’s origins and its present attempts to engage and to revisit the incontrovertible African elements in contemporary Cubanidad ideology. What also makes Miller and Barnet interesting proponents of this intersection of history and literature is their recourse to a style of writing that deliberately subverts the demarcation between historical and literary texts. In Barnet’s case, for instance, he warns the reader of Biografía that the work is a “conjunction

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of styles, a coming together of approaches and a fusion of objectives, a confrontation with problems within the American context: violence, dependency, neo-colonialism ...” (Biography 204). In the end, Biografía and Voice of the Leopard serve as discursive points of departure on the links between history, literature and nationmaking. Barnet usurps the age-old tradition of the literary text as foundational to nation-(re)building. His novela-testimonio highlights the critical historical events that dot the trajectory of Cuban history from the mid-nineteenth century. In a sense, Barnet appropriates the trope of barbarism versus civilization in which Montejo, replete with primitive religiosity and crude ludic forms represents the barbaric as Cuba marches towards civilization and modernity through the unshackling of the chains of colonialism. Barnet’s “biography” of Cuba is complemented by Miller’s metonymic Abakuá practices. Arguably, the decisive death of barbarism occurs with the successful revolution. In the new Cuba that emerges, Africa, socialism, civic responsibilities, justice and equality become inscribed within the new political imaginary.

Bibliography Abimbola, Wande. 1976. Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus. Ibadan, Nigeria: Oxford U.P. Print. Barnet, Miguel, and Esteban Montejo. 2010. Biografía de un cimarrón edited by William Rowlandson. Manchester, New York: Manchester U.P. Print. Barnet, Miguel, and Naomi Lindstrom. 1980. “The Culture that Sugar Created.” Latin American Literary Review 8.16: 38-46. Print. Bassey, Efiong Bassey. 2009. Foreward to Voice of the Leopardࣟ: African Secret Societies and Cuba. Jackson: U.P. of Mississippi. Print. Carpentier, Alejo. 1977. Ecue-yamba-ó. Buenos Aires: O. Sello. Print. Castellanos, Jorge E., and Isabel Castellanos. 1992. “La sociedad secreta Abakuá: Los ñáñigos.” Cultura Afrocubana 3: 1-80. Web accessed 10 April 2013. González Echevarría, Roberto. 1988. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. Durham: Duke U.P. Print. Guicharnaud-Tollis, Michèle. 1988. “Los Cuentos negros de Cuba de Lydia Cabrera: desde la tradición hasta la criollización.” Caravelle: 7677. Print. Hill, W. Nick. 1994. Biography of a runaway slave, translated by Willimantic, CT.: Curbstone Press. Print.

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Jackson, Richard L. 1988. Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America. Athens: The U. of Georgia P. Print. Keen, Benjamin, and Keith Haynes. 2004 (7th edition). A History of Latin America. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Print. Lovejoy, Paul E., and David Richardson. 1999. “Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade.” American Historical Review 104.2: 333-55. Print. Luis, William. 1990. Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative. Austin: U. of Texas P. Print. Miller, Ivor. 2009. Voice of the Leopardࣟ: African Secret Societies and Cuba. Jackson: U.P. of Mississippi. Print. Montejo, Esteban. 1994. Biography of a Runaway Slave. 1st Am. ed. Willimantic, CT.: Curbstone Press. Print. Murray, David R. 1971. “Statistics of the Slave Trade to Cuba, 1790-1867.” Journal of Latin American Studies 3.2: 131-49. Print. Okafor, Stephen O. 1982. "Bantu Philosophy: Placide Temples Revisited.” Journal of Religion in Africa, 13.2: 83-100. Print. Ortiz, Fernando. 1983. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. La Habana, Cuba: Editorial de ciencias sociales. Print. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Print. Rodríguez-Mangual, Edna M. 2004. Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity. Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P. Print. Sklowdoska, Elzbieta. 1985. “Aproximaciones a la forma testimonial: La novelística de Miguel Barnet.” Hispamérica 40.14: 23-33. Print. Soyinka, Wole. 1976. Myth, Literature, and the African World. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge U.P. Print. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1994. “How to Read a ‘Culturally Different’ Book.” In Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen, 126-50. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Print. Vasser, Uchenna P. 2002. Nationalism and the African Worldview in Changó, El Gran Putas. Diss., UNC-Chapel Hill. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Dissertation Services. Print. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P. Print. Williams, Lorna V. 1999. “The Revolutionary Feminism of Nancy Morejón.” In Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejón edited by Miriam DeCosta-Willis, 131-52. Washington, DC: Howard U.P. Print.

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Wiredu, Kwasi. 2009. “An Oral Philosophy of Personhood: Comments on Philosophy and Orality.” Research in African Literatures 40.1: 9-18. Print. Yelvington, Kevin A. 2005. “Patterns of ‘Race,’ Ethnicity, Class, and Nationalism.” In Understanding Contemporary Latin America edited by Richard S. Hillman. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Print. Zapata Olivella, Manuel. 1997. La rebelión de los genes: El mestizaje americano en la sociedad futura. Bogotá: Altamir Ediciones. Print.



CHAPTER TWO NEGOTIATING RESISTANCE: WRITING STRATEGIES OF INDO/AFRONICARAGUAN WOMEN POETS TINA ESCAJA

Abstract This essay examines the poetics of Indo/Afro-Nicaraguan women poets who resort to several theoretical strategies to critique the standardized political, literary, linguistic and ethnic norms that have historically excluded indigenous people and Afro-descendants from participating in the larger debate about what constitutes the essence of Nicaraguan identity. With the construction of a national identity based on idealized preHispanic Amerindian interactions with Europe, Indo/Afro-Nicaraguan poets question the fallacy of an official discourse based on a harmonious racial identity.

Recent cultural theories that reinforce theoretical and linguistic norms are inadequate in explaining the viewpoints of authors whose ethnicities and languages alternate between a hegemonic stream of discourse (Spanish, English, and “Mestizo”) and attempts by such authors to articulate an identity that is marginalized (Miskita/“Kriol”). Such is the case of Latin American indigenous women writers and those of African descent who have to negotiate linguistic adaptations that influence not only their creative processes but also the patriarchal canons within which they function. Despite the apparent difficulty in circumventing the hegemonic conditions that circumscribe these writers, Indo/Afro-Nicaraguan women writers such as Brigitte Zacarías, June Beer and Yolanda Rossman Tejada have succeeded in deploying several strategic approaches that legitimize their own artistic and literary techniques as they problematize the standardized political, linguistic and ethnic norms from which they have been historically excluded.



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The marginalization of these authors is both geographic and cultural. Coming from the “costeña” Atlantic region of Nicaragua whose terrain is rather difficult to access, not only do these writers deal with their geographic isolation but also with ethnic and linguistic complexities.1 This unique location and its cultural condition have led to an intellectual and historical marginalization from the official Nicaraguan paradigm and to its exclusion from participation in the wider construction of Latin American nationalisms that systematically suppressed their indigenous and African characteristics. Other factors have also contributed to the literary sidelining and scant recognition of Indo/Afro-Nicaraguan writers. Most of these cultures are traditionally oral, and their writing format is relatively recent. Indigenous languages such as Miskito and Rama started to be transcribed for religious and educational purposes primarily by Moravian missionaries at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. In their introduction to the literary compilation, Miskitu Tasbaia/La tierra miskita, Adán Silva Mercado and Jens Uwe Korten draw attention to the region’s literary marginalization, its small population of “costeños” (“apenas seis habitantes por kilómetro cuadrado” [14]) [hardly six inhabitants per square kilometre] and the poverty prevalent in the area and in the country at large. They observe that “el oficio de escritor en la más difícil región del segundo país más pobre de América, es un lujo” (14) [The work of a writer is a luxury in the most difficult region of the second poorest country in America].2 They also note the limited publication opportunities, indicating that although there are writers who produce good literary works, they are not accessible since their works are unedited and very few people know them (16). Basic education started in the late 1960s and was initially conducted exclusively in Spanish, which not only changed the social and economic prospects of many but also led to the flight of young people in search of better opportunities (Silva and Korten 14). Indeed, this phenomenon plays itself out in Margarita Antonio’s short story, “Así como hablo yo” [This is how I Speak]. In this story, as is the case of many young people, the son of a Kriol mother and a Miskito father leaves behind his culture and languages for the city once he graduates from school in order to be different and “para ser alguien” (113) [in order to be someone]. “Ser alguien” is an

 1

The “costeña” region is home to indigenous languages such as Rama, SumoMayangna, and Miskito. Others include Kriol and Garifuna of African origin, and Mestizo of Spanish speaking/Indo-European origin. It is worthwhile to mention that Miskito and Garifuna also share Indo-African ethnicity, as evidenced in their languages. 2 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Spanish into English are my own.



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implicit attainment of a privileged status: that of an Indo-European mestizo, a Spanish speaker who fits within a hierarchy circumscribed by official Nicaraguan culture that historically has dismissed and excluded Indo/African diversity. As Luis Rocha, General Secretary of the Nicaraguan Writers’ Centre, acknowledges in his preface to Miskitu Tasbaia, “para muchísimos nicaragüenses La tierra miskita sigue siendo una tierra incógnita” (5) [for many Nicaraguans, La tierra miskita remains an unknown land]. This reference suggests a hierarchy of distinctions and cartographies between the Pacific (the cultural centre, where Rocha resides) and the Atlantic (the periphery, “tierra incógnita”). For Rocha, the interest and passion of Uwe Korten towards the Miskitu Tasbaia project, financed by the Norwegian Writers’ Association and the Norwegian Agency for Development, was “[u]na verdadera lección para nosotros los del Pacífico” (6)3 [a true lesson for those of us from the Pacific]. The distinction between a cultural centre and a dismissed periphery reflects a deliberate construction of a uniform definition of national identity that locates what it means to be Nicaraguan in the Pacific region with Managua as the base. Studies such as Juliet Hooker’s have interrogated the idea of uniformity within the “mestizaje.” These studies unmask the official persistence of the Nicaraguan Mestizo as a fallacy that contradicts the pioneer autonomy status granted to the Atlantic region in 1986 by the Sandinista government. That legal status recognizes and staunchly defends the nation’s diversity of languages and ethnicities. In fact, this legal status generated a debate on Nicaraguan racial, ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity, raising questions about a constructed national identity based on the fallacy of a harmonious racial homogeneity. In his study, “Presencia de Rubén Darío en los discursos del mestizaje,” Eric Blandón intimates that the Nicaraguan and Latin American canon constructed a national identity based on idealized pre-Hispanic Amerindian interactions with Europeans (174). That idealized construction did not only deliberately minimize the true presence of Amerindians and Afro-descendants but also the violence associated with the “mestizaje” process itself. Using gender metaphors, Hooker notes perceptively that the Nicaraguan avant-garde writers presented the Indo-European “mestizaje” “as a heterosexual romance between active Spanish fathers and passive indigenous mothers” (16).

 3

Many other publications about the area, such as the Antología poética de la Costa Caribe de Nicaragua, have been made possible by foreign aid from the Finish coalition organization KEPA. Compilations, including Aisanka prana nani/Expresiones Bellas and Tininiska, were financed with the support of the European Union.



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Embedded in such a discourse is the barbarism versus civilization dichotomy to which fin-de-siècle intellectuals subscribed. Indeed, it is worthwhile to note José Martí’s rejection of any form of diversity. He proposes not only stripping the Amerindians of their land but also questions the true role of subaltern subjects such as Indians, women and Afro-descendants. For Martí, these subaltern subjects are “los sujetos preocupantes de la modernidad industrial a quienes los gobiernos debían de mantener vigilados y en última instancia transformar a través de políticas sociales” (Camacho 433) [the worrisome subjects of industrial modernity who governments need to watch and, ultimately, transform through social policies]. Blandón also remarks that, in a constructed utopia, the Amerindian becomes Spanish, guaranteeing the supremacy of an elite that is ashamed of “los componentes perturbadores de su hibridez racial: los africanos e indígenas” (176) [the disturbing components of their racial hybridity: Africans and the indigenous people]. For the elite, the only way to suppress differences is to make a conscious effort to eradicate them. As Alexis Bhagat and Lize Mogel have noted, “invisibility is not merely an absence, but an active process of erasure, an agent of repression” (10). Given this privileged univocal male-dominant and racist sense of official Mestizo over a feminized, oral and hidden tradition of Afro/indigenous presence, Indo/Afro-Nicaraguan women writers deploy a variety of poetic and linguistic strategies to express themselves and also to ascribe to themselves a certain level of poetic authority devoid of hegemonic underpinnings. One of the strategies used by authors such as Brigitte Zacarías is to write first in Spanish and later to translate their work into Miskito, their native language. This seemingly counter-intuitive strategy is common among writers from minority languages who resort to the dominant language while subverting and resisting it at the same time. In an interview, Zacarías states: La lógica de escribir primero en español y después en mi lengua natal se debe a que el español fue la primera lengua que aprendí a escribir. Pienso en miskito, escribo en español y lo traduzco. . . [El español] no me limita, lo contrario, en español lo pienso, me lo imagino en miskito y luego lo trazo en grandes líneas; en la noche la pienso, me levanto, pienso en miskito, lo traduzco mentalmente, lo comento con alguna amiga y así hasta plasmar la poesía. [The logic of writing first in Spanish and later in my native language is due to the fact that Spanish was the first language I learned to write. I think in Miskito, write in Spanish and translate it . . . I am not constrained by Spanish. It is the other way round. I think in Spanish, imagine it in Miskito and later clearly articulate it; I think about it at night, wake up, think in



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Miskito, mentally translate it, and discuss it with a friend until it is transformed into poetry].

The dominant language that is learned at school is considered to be the literate and intellectual language. It is also the language of choice for many Indo/Afro-descendants, particularly women who finally have access to primary education. Indeed, the espousal of the dominant language also reflects a history of collaboration with the official power, a collaboration that contradicts the discourse of rebellion, which post-colonial studies in particular have brought to light. In an essay, “The Local Politics of Indigenous Self-representation: Intra-ethnic Political Division Among Nicaragua's Miskito People during the Sandinista Era,” Eric Rodrigo Meringer observes that Western ideas of indigenous “authenticity” (based on rebellion and resistance) neglected a “history of integration and collaboration with the state” as was the case of Miskito people during the Sandinista era (3). According to Meringer, this history of collaboration and integration was “silenced by intra-ethnic political rivals among the Miskito leadership and by a complicit Western scholarship that at the time was engaged in promoting subaltern voices in Central America as stories of ethnic rebellion” (1). Indeed, many Afro/Amerindian writers, including Brigitte Zacarías and the artist and Kriol poet June Beer, openly support the official politics of Sandinismo in their works despite the conflictive relationship of the Atlantic region with the central government. Within this paradigm of collaboration, authors of Indo/African descent such as Yolanda Rossman Tejada, Brigitte Zacarías and Andira Watson do not problematize the use of the Spanish language as a medium of poetic or literary expression. Post-colonial theorists such as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, however, believe that once a dominant language is appropriated to highlight a post-colonial sensibility, the end result is resistance. For them, “the appropriation of the language is essentially a subversive strategy” (262). Whereas such a position might apply to most post-colonial writers, this is not the case of the Nicaraguan Indo-African women writers who live within a conflict-free multilinguistic Nicaraguan context where the use of Spanish as the official language becomes an act of liberation. Indeed, the Costeña poet and critic Rossman Tejada, who consistently writes in Spanish, attests to her feeling of liberation as a writer and as a woman who has acquired the Spanish language while holding intact her own personal and multi-ethnic tradition. In Lágrimas sobre el musgo, she affirms: Me encantó la posibilidad de conocer los secretos que me permitieran dibujar con las palabras. . . . Ser mujer y poder hablar, escribir y compartir



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Chapter Two lo que piensas, en lo que crees, lo que vives, es un paso a la libertad, un paso a quebrar esquemas y dejar huellas. (38) [I was excited by the possibility of knowing the secrets that allowed me to draw with words . . .To be a woman and to be able to speak, write and share what you think, what you believe in, and how you live, is a path to liberty, a path that enables you to break down structures and leave footprints behind].

Rossman Tejada pointedly concludes by quoting the Kriol writer, June Beer, who declares in an Internet blog, “nuestro pueblo tomó la palabra, la resucitó, le dio vida" [our people seized the word, resurrected it and gave it life]. It is critical to point out, however, that, in this act of liberation through the acquisition of the literate word, a series of factors emerges that complicates the process of conversion of, to use the words of Taiwo Oloruntoba-Oju, the “translating self,” that is, “translating one’s thoughts and one’s creative being into a language that seems to distort that being and that experience” (274). In his reflections on African women’s writings, Oloruntoba-Oju points out that the woman writer tends to bear a triple burden, as she is confronted, first, with this general problem of translating a personal and creative experience from her mother tongue into an Other language of expression; second, with the need to establish authenticity through exploration in African oral forms; and third, with the need to skirt land mines of language and culture in those indigenous texts in which occurs what we might call a sign of gender. (275)

According to Oloruntoba-Oju, the African writer pre-textually considers the possibilities for translation and then, “[i]f there appear to be no translation possibilities, or if translation would diminish the creativeaesthetic essence of potential texts, the originating thought or idea aborts prematurely” (274). The distance or “gap” between thought and expression broadens in these instances, limiting or even cancelling the textual creation. The “land mines” to which Oloruntoba-Oju refers assume a more profound dimension when one considers the self-translation practices by these Nicaraguan writers into a language with strong canonical implications. The pinnacle of this canonical construction is Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan poet who initiated the Spanish-American literary movement known as modernismo that flourished at the end of the nineteenth century. As the principal architect of this movement, Rubén Darío was linked to the construction of an essentialist national identity of Indo-Hispanic “mestizaje” that suppressed differences (Blandón 171). At the same time,



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his modernista movement also suppressed women’s agency and authority and reduced them to mere modernista objects. 4 Consequently, for Indo/Afro-Nicaraguan women writers who have been traditionally silenced and historically excluded from the Nicaraguan literary canon, the act of writing functions as an act of resistance and subversion. The analysis of a poem such as “Preciosa Caoba” by Miskito writer Zacarías (67), along with other poems by Indo/Afro-Nicaraguan women poets, allows for the recognition of personal as well as socio-historical and, ultimately, eco-feminist-inclusive strategies of legitimacy and resistance: PRECIOSA CAOBA Quise defenderte, Pensé que quizás hubiese alguien más que te amase como yo a ti. Aquí estoy, debajo de tí [sic] acariciando tu fuste precioso, protegiéndote con mis manos contra quienes dicen amarte. ¡Mentira! Te ven sangrar y se ríen al llenar sus bolsas con dólares, de tu dolor. [I wanted to defend you, I thought that perhaps there was someone who also loved you as much as I do. Here I am, lying under you, caressing your precious shank, protecting you with my hands against those who say they love you. Lies! They see you bleeding and they laugh filling their bags with dollars, with your pain.]

 4



See Tina Escaja, Salomé decapitada.

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In the aforementioned interview with Zacarías, she elaborates on this poem: A los trece años yo vivía con mi padre en el norte de Nicaragua en el municipio de Nueva Segovia donde él extraía madera, es decir, trabajaba con una empresa maderera. Los dueños eran extranjeros, algunos españoles, otros norteamericanos. Generalmente sólo extraían CAOBA, eso me causaba un dolor muy inmenso, ahorita mismo lo estoy sintiendo, tiemblan mis manos y se me nubla la vista. Me sentaba muy cerca del próximo árbol que el motosierrista cortaría y me ponía a jugar y a acariciar sus fustes y un tiempo que derribaban al hermoso árbol me iba hasta la copa ya caída a hablarle. Poco a poco me di cuenta de que era necesario hacerle una poesía. [My emphasis] [When I was three years old, I lived with my father in northern Nicaragua in the Nueva Segovia municipality where he extracted timber, that is, where he worked for a timber company. The owners were foreigners: Spaniards and North Americans. In general, they only extracted MAHOGANY and that caused me profound pain. In fact, I can still feel the pain as my hands tremble and tears well in my eyes. I would sit next to the tree that the chainsaw would cut down and begin to play and caress the tree’s shank. When the beautiful tree was cut down, I would walk over to its leaves and branches and talk to it. I slowly realized that it was necessary to dedicate a poem to it.] (My translation)

The explicit need for poetic expression in the face of the systematic and selective destruction of natural resources, and by extension, of cultural and territorial resources by predatory foreign interests and their autochthonous allies, is a political, ecological as well as a semantic strategy of resistance. The meaning of “preciosa caoba” [precious mahogany], as emphasized in the title, entails, on the one hand, the beauty and appreciation associated with the Miskito oral tradition of praise and integration with the environment, while referring, on the other hand, to the material value coveted by the main foreign interests in the region that are exploiting the natural and cultural resources within a neo-colonialist framework. The poetic voice in this poem confronts this exploitation, first as an Indo-African recipient of an oral tradition of assimilation with nature and, secondly, as a woman in an erotic exchange common in Miskito oral tradition: “acariciando tu fuste precioso” [caressing your precious shank]. At the same time, one encounters a sense of pride and political agency that, although solitary, condemns as a lie the often touted notion of economic development. Through such denunciation, the author challenges a system that is intent on destroying her, as is the case with the precious mahogany. One notices an apparent “liberating” re-appropriation within



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the context of Rossman Tejada’s above-mentioned definition regarding the use of the Spanish language and literacy. An implicit, yet intentional contradictory stance emerges as the poetic voice simultaneously adopts the language of repression (Spanish) for her purpose of denunciation while resorting, at the same time, to the Miskito oral tradition that she incarnates and represents. With the use of the synecdoche, the poetic voice is transferred to the speaker’s hands that “protect” the precious mahogany and, by design, Miskito-oral identity. The act of writing, then, allows the author to inscribe within her text the requisite authority that enables a critique of cultural and linguistic exploitation by patriarchal, neo/colonial and capitalistic interests. In Zacarías’s poetry, denunciation is one of the main strategies that she uses to express her sense of commitment and presence. Although her poems laud the Sandinista government, they also question the Sandinistas’ unwillingness or inability to put in place laws designed to provide autonomy for her region. Such is the case in the poem “Anticipo 2000”: Autonomía, Será que la palabra esta [sic] mal escrita, auto-NO-MIA. entonces, si no es mía, ¿para qué la mencionan? ……………………………… Te vas al mar y lo que pescas no es tuyo. Te vas al bosque y lo que derribas, no es tuyo. (70-71)

[Autonomy, Could it be that the word is badly written? Auto-NOT-MINE. So, if it is not mine, why do they mention it? ……………………………… You go fishing at sea and what you catch is not yours. You go to the forest and what you cut down is not yours.]

As Meza Márquez observes, the failure of the process of autonomy that has been denounced by many authors from the Atlantic region is equally the failure of the utopian project for the region and for women in general: “Autonomía” represents for the inhabitants “un lugar libre de discriminación, racismo, expropiación y exclusión, elementos que han estado presentes en la historia de la Costa Caribe” (8) [a place devoid of discrimination, racism, expropriation, and exclusion, elements that have



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been present in the history of the Caribbean Coast]. For Meza Márquez, Costeña women poets are committed to the “Autonomía” project as a site for “women’s Utopia” (8), and it is within poetry that this is effected: “Construimos ese lugar ideal que queremos, desbordamos la imaginación para sustentarla y creer en ella” (Meza Márquez 8) [We construct this ideal place which we want. We flood our imagination in order to sustain it and believe in it]. Defending the “Autonomía” is imperative because it offers a feminist agency for the political and historical visibility of not only women but also of the multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multilinguistic realities for which costeña women poets are champions. Through celebration and denunciation, Indo/Afro-Nicaraguan women poets such as Zacarías embrace a poetics of self-affirmation as a mechanism to establish a project of historic legitimacy. Indeed, in a poem such as “Reclamo de negritud” by Andira Watson, she celebrates and reclaims her identity as an Afro-descendant. For June Beer, it is in a poem such as “Chunka Faam” that one notices both celebration and condemnation within denunciation amidst the conversational and quotidian: Mango, rosaaple, cashu, lime, plum, breadfruit, cassava, coco, dashin, yampi, conconut, plaantin a little a dis a little a dat we go fron year to year so. ………….. But dat banka wit de slipry smile give me jus enough money to put me in de hole an tek meh faam. (n.pag)

In their bid to resist the explicit and reductionist construction of a national identity that deliberately denies diversity, Indo/Afro-Nicaraguan women writers insist on a poetic exaltation of their land, their sexuality and their multi-ethnicity. In this respect, they vindicate a historically suppressed consciousness and also liberate it through inclusion and through what Joana Sabadell refers to as a theory of “feminación” that is inviting and inclusive of the national ethos (8). To be sure, poems such as “Love poem,” by June Beer, and “Torre de Babel,” by Yolanda Rossman, destabilize the official Nicaraguan myth of Indo-European homogeneity and its patriarchal, linguistic and territorial imposition. These works seek to engage a broader discourse that is inclusive and welcoming through their diversity and search for a pluralistic society.



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DIVERSIDAD es mi nombre Y en mi lengua… habita la TORRE DE BABEL. [DIVERSITY is my name And in my language . . . lives the TOWER OF BABEL.] Yolanda Rossman Tejada, Nocturnidad del Trópico (63)

As Rodrigo Meringer has noted, by virtue of their intentional act of inclusion, Indo/Afro-Nicaraguan women poets resist the politics of definitive constructions of national identity and those Western cultural theories ever ready to emphasize a discourse of resistance. By presenting in their poems a reality that is polyphonic and complex, these authors dismantle not only the fixation of a uniform national ethos, but also those academic agendas that tend to be linguistically and politically complicit in following the convenient uniformity of the canon.

Bibliography Aisanka prana nani/Expresiones Bellas. 2003. Edited by Ana Rosa Fagoth. Bilwi: Asociación Cultural Tininiska. Print. Antología poética de la Costa Caribe de Nicaragua. 1998. Eds. Víctor Obando Sancho, Ronald Brooks Saldaña and Eddy Alemán Porras. Managua: URACCAN. Print. Antonio, Margarita. 1997. “Así como hablo yo/Yang Aisanki Na.” In Miskitu tasbaia: aisanka yamni bara bila pranakira miskitu wih ispail ra wal ulban/La tierra miskita: Prosa y poesía en miskito y español, edited by Adán Silva Mercado and Jens Uwe Korten, 109-17. Managua: Centro Nicaragüense de Escritores, Fondo Editorial de Asociación Noruega. Print. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. 2005. “Language.” In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 261-62. Routledge: London & New York. Print. Beer, June. 2007. “Love Poem/Poema de amor.” In Mujeres de sol y luna. Poetas nicaragüenses 1970-2007, edited by Helena Ramos, 12-13. Managua: ANE Noruega CNE. ---. 1987. “La parcela/Chunka Faam.” In IXOK AMAR-GO: Central American Women’s Poetry for Peace, edited by Zoë Anglesey, 314-15. Penobscot, Maine: Granite Press. Print.



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Bhagat, Alexis and Lize Mogel. 2007. Introduction to An Atlas of Radical Cartography, 6-11. Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press. Print. Blandón, Erick. 2011. “Presencia de Rubén Darío en los discursos del mestizaje.” Chasqui 40.2: 171-83. Print. Camacho, Jorge. 2009. “Contra el peligro: José Martí, la crítica modernista y la justificación de las políticas liberales en el siglo XIX”. MLN 124: 424-37. Print. Escaja, Tina. 2001. Salomé decapitada: Delmira Agustini y la estética finisecular de la fragmentación. Rodopi: Amsterdam, New York. Print. Herra Monge, Mayra. 2011. “Los Creoles de la costa Caribe de Nicaragua: entre la subalternidad y la hegemonía.” Cuadernos Inter-C-a-mbio 8.9: 193-206. Print. Hooker, Juliet. 2005. “‘Beloved Enemies’: Race and Official Mestizo Nationalism in Nicaragua.” Latin American Research Review 40.3: 1439. Print. Meringer, Eric Rodrigo. 2010. “The Local Politics of Indigenous SelfRepresentation: Intra-ethnic Political Division among Nicaragua's Miskito People during the Sandinista Era." Oral History Review 37.1: 1-17. Print. Meza Márquez, Consuelo. La diáspora afrocaribeña en Centroamérica: Identidad y literatura de mujeres. PDF. Oloruntoba-Oju, Taiwo. 2009. “Translation Shifts in African Women’s Writing: The Example of Nigeria.” In Translation of Cultures, edited by Petra Rüdiger and Konrad Gross, 273-89. Amsterdam/New York: Print. Rocha, Luis. 1997. “Prólogo.” In Miskitu tasbaia: aisanka yamni bara bila pranakira miskitu wih ispail ra wal ulban/La tierra miskita: Prosa y poesía en miskito y español, edited by Adán Silva Mercado and Jens Uwe Korten, 5-6. Managua: Centro Nicaragüense de Escritores, Fondo Editorial de Asociación Noruega. Print. Rossman Tejada, Yolanda. 2008. Lágrimas sobre el musgo. Managua, Nicaragua: ANE-CNE. Print. ---. 2010. Nocturnidad del Trópico. Managua, Nicaragua: ANE-CNE. Print. ---. “Seducida por la palabra.” Labrujuladigital.com Web. Agosto 21, 2013. Sabadell Nieto, Juana. 2011. Desbordamientos. Transformaciones culturales y políticas de las mujeres. Barcelona: Icaria. Print. Silva Mercado, Adán. 2003. Tininiska. Recopilación boletines de cultura indígena de la Costa Atlántica de Nicaragua, años 95-99. Tomo II. Bilwi: Asociación cultural Tininiska. Print.



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Silva Mercado, Adán y Jens Uwe Korten. 1997. “A manera de introducción.” Miskitu tasbaia: aisanka yamni bara bila pranakira miskitu wih ispail. ra wal ulban/La tierra miskita: Prosa y poesía en miskito y español, 10-21. Managua: Centro Nicaragüense de Escritores, Fondo Editorial de Asociación Noruega. Print. Watson, Andira. “Reclamo de Negritud.” Andirawatson. blogspot.com Web. Agosto 21, 2013. Zacarías Watson, Brigitte. Interview with Tina Escaja. Unpublished. —. 1997. Miskitu tasbaia: aisanka yamni bara bila pranakira miskitu wih ispail ra wal ulban/La tierra miskita: Prosa y poesía en miskito y español, edited by Adán Silva Mercado y Jens Uwe Korten Managua, 67-75. Centro Nicaragüense de Escritores, Fondo Editorial de la Asociación Noruega. Print.





CHAPTER THREE IDENTITY, SOLIDARITY AND AUTONOMY: AFRICAN AGENCY IN MANUEL ZAPATA OLIVELLA’S CHANGÓ, EL GRAN PUTAS SAMUEL MATE-KOJO

Abstract Manuel Zapata Olivella abandons the commonly-understood history of peoples of African ancestry in the Americas by focusing on the Changó myth of the Yoruba and places it at the hermeneutic and heuristic centre of the narrative universe in Changó, el gran putas. The novel proposes a reorganization of the historical paradigm that establishes Africans as dominant subjects and agents in the history of the Americas. This reading demonstrates how the Afro-centric foundation of the novel’s narrative universe that is grounded in African cosmology and causality as its organizing principles, displaces the Eurocentric formulation of African identity and offers the possibility of an independent and unique identity formation.

The marginalization of all things African in the politics of identity in the Americas that began with the advent of the slave trade and European imperialism continues to this day. African culture, along with the peoples of African descent, have historically been marginalized and assigned a very minor role in the identity narratives of the Americas. The construction of the African in the Americas and, indeed, of all Africans, has been framed by slavers, imperialists, colonialists and neocolonialists. Aside from their exclusion from national histories as agents and subjects, Afro-descendants in the Americas have also had to accept and to repeat these narratives that circumscribe their identity. These constructed identities within the discursive and social realms consider Afrodescendants as the marginal others who occupy the periphery and are inserted into hierarchies of value in which their pigmentation is deemed

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the most important element of evaluation. The overwhelming presence of these extrinsic narratives makes it difficult for some African descendants in the Americas to create their own collective narrative of the self and, consequently, to understand their own place in the history of the Americas as positively engaged subjects and agents. If one were to accept the idea that the nature of human systems of knowing is nothing but constructs, it would be equally acceptable to postulate that perceived reality and knowledge are also the result of social processes. Indeed, because identity creation functions in a similar fashion, it could be argued that it is also similarly based on the consequences of social interactions. Two theoretical and methodological paradigms have been relied on in studying identity formation among Africans in the Americas: first, the archaeological instruments that tend to highlight the negative and demeaning formulations of African identity generated from outside the African community, and, secondly, a recourse to the same archaeological and forensic processes to discover and disseminate other histories, narratives and artefacts that define a very different relationship between Africans and their history in the Americas. Zapata Olivella’s seminal work, Changó, el gran putas takes a different approach. It proposes a new model for the understanding of the African presence in America by providing new causality and a new focus on the will, ideas and actions of African protagonists. Zapata Olivella represents the struggle for freedom without concerning himself with analyzing the archaeology of repressive social and discursive practices. Instead, he formulates a new narrative for Africans in the Americas that calls for freedom based on a revolutionary and existentialist understanding of identity and personhood. Changó, el gran putas is an epic tale that includes the history of the Americas from the days of slavery to contemporary times. In the novel, Zapata Olivella rereads the story of Africans in the Americas by using an African mythic understanding of facts and events. It inserts the triangular trade and chattel slavery into an epic tale told from a purely African perspective. In Changó, el gran putas, slavery and exile are penalties imposed on his people by an irate African God, Changó, for perceived betrayal and disloyalty. The estranged Africans must by their own efforts create a new history and a new collective identity for themselves in the land of their exile. In Zapata Olivella’s work, the discussion of Africans in the Americas shifts from a mere catalogue of features, events, and facts to an in-depth interrogation of the very structure of the meaning-making processes in American history that offer an empowering alternative narrative. In order to claim an Afro-centric, free-standing and autonomous identity for Afro-America, Zapata’s text creates a narrative hierarchy in

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which the master text is beyond the agency of Eurocentric discourses. The departure from the Eurocentric paradigm de-centres established histories and mythology associated with the presence of Africans in the Americas. Instead, it subverts and delegitimizes the accepted Eurocentric schemas and political constructs about Africans. More importantly, it responds to the need for Africans in the Americas to articulate an identity free from Eurocentric narratives and biases. This effort is crucial in providing a more cogent expression of the African presence in the Americas as well as the role that Afro-descendants have played and will play in the construction and propagation of an identity discourse determined by their historical experiences in the Americas. If it is accepted that the most important element in the process of identity formation is the socially-constituted relations of power, and that hegemony (and the struggle against it) is important in both political and discursive terms, and if history, as text, is also the product of relations of power, then, in order to examine the role of history in the creation of identity, one must go beyond valuing history solely as a succession of acts and events that are strategically located on a linear chronology with clear interrelationships that are based on their relative locations along the continuum. More importantly, the discourse of history necessarily establishes structural hierarchies among those acts and facts and among the people to whom they relate. Elements of this plot structure operate as schema and function in both a constitutive and a regulatory manner to generate the narratives-within-narratives that also become part of the repertoire and baggage of cultural identity. The regulation of history is, therefore, important in the formulation of narratives regarding individual and collective identities, including those of Africans in the Americas. In Changó, el gran putas, Zapata Olivella creates a new allegory of the history of the Americas and establishes the basis for African identity as self-constituted and independent of Eurocentred and racialist political constructs. His simple yet powerful strategy is to use the Changó myth and traditional African narrative practices to re-tell African history. This approach weaves historical events into an identity narrative based on the fight for freedom. It is also firmly rooted in the conservation of the African persona as a subject and agent in a narrative that presents him or her as the dominant character in his or her own history rather than as a mere ancillary or supporting character as is the case of most Eurocentric narratives. The history that Zapata Olivella proposes in his text is a new one that subsumes, absorbs, and, ultimately, accepts the history of slavery. However, this new history also asserts the limited representational significance of slavery as a marker for identity and the definition of the

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Black experience in the Americas. In Changó, el gran putas, slavery is explained as a consequence of events that transcend the five hundred years of chattel slavery and all the surrounding ideological constructs that have been institutionalized around it. These racialized ideological formulations constitute individually and collectively, a series of representations that work together to impose a negating definition of the African experience in the Americas. As Chancellor Williams in The Destruction of Black Civilization affirms, the steady conquest and enslavement of a whole people made it imperative to create both religious and ‘scientific’ doctrine to assuage the white conscience. Their phenomenal success in the industrial world at once supports and justifies their philosophy, the supremacy of the fittest. (36)

African civilizations and peoples were physically destroyed, productive agents were forcibly extracted and creative energies forced into the dynamics of mere survival. The resultant poverty was then written into hierarchies in which Africa and Africans were defined as the lesser and subaltern other, waiting and needing to be brought into modernity by the application of imperialist economies and institutions. In Changó, el gran putas, Zapata Olivella interrogates the history of Africans in the Americas as it is commonly conceived today. He then rejects that history as incomplete and fragmented by insisting on hitherto neglected aspects of African life in the Americas that show Africans as self-conscious and active in the defence of their persons, communities and cultural legacy. Zapata Olivella seems to suggest that African selfassertion in the fight against slavery and against the denial of African cultural practices is the primary marker of agency and identity. In the novel, the Africans are never passive bystanders in their oppression. They fight the slavers at all levels. In the first part of the novel, African captives on a slave ship plot a rebellion and demonstrate other forms of resistance. They starve themselves to death, strangle their own children to save them from slavery, take their own lives by jumping into the sea and attack their owners at every opportunity. In the second part, set in Cartagena—the main Spanish entry port for slaves on the South American mainland— Zapata Olivella describes life in a colonial city. The city that he describes has Africans who are slaves, runaway slaves who have flown from slavery into the forests and mountains to create their own societies, and freed Africans who live and work in the city. These three groups of Africans are separated by different social conditions, yet they manage to construct a society within colonial society through the preservation of the traditions of their distant homelands as they organize to resist the yoke imposed upon

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them. The colonial society that Zapata Olivella describes in the novel sets up the conditions of the Africans’ exile and their reactions to slavery. The Afro-American historical figures that populate the novel can be defined by four representative activities that span the duration of the modern African presence in the Americas: the armed struggle against slavery, the fight for national independence from European imperial centres, the post-abolition fight for justice and, finally, the artistic, cultural and scientific achievements. Benkos Bioho, Denmark Vessey, Nate Turner and Gabriel Prosser, for example, confront slavery directly. Toussaint L’Ouverture, Nicholas Biddle, José Morellos, Antonio Maceo and José Prudencio Padilla fight for national independence inspired by the promise of ending slavery. The need to deal with the aftermath of slavery moves civil rights activists such as Sojourner Truth, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X. Paul Robeson, George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker represent the world of culture. The entrenched historical preservation of African identity, traditions and religious practices in the Americas directly reflects Changó’s mandate to engage actively in fighting for freedom from the oppressive practices of the societies in which the Africans find themselves in their new land. In recounting the history of America as an emanation of the Changó myth, Zapata Olivella places it at the centre of his narrative universe. He uses both Africa and Changó as an ontological trope and relates them to notions of self-identity, solidarity and autonomy. He proposes a vision of American history that suggests a new and a more expansive understanding of the African presence in the Americas. This new articulation of African history is designed to critique and to undermine those Eurocentric historical paradigms and discursive formulations as well as those narratives that have been used to legitimate the exclusion of Africans in the Americas as agents of their own history. Writing in “Spanish Black Atlantic: Complications in the History of Modernity,” Wlad Godzich highlights the ambiguities that result from a self-conscious modernity that measures itself against its historically-inherited concept of self-awareness. Referring to Jean Lyotard’s grands récits or grand narratives, Godzich illustrates the manner in which an ideological master-text infuses and determines self-defining narratives. For him, “such narratives would indeed interfere with history writing inasmuch as they had determined beforehand who were the proper subjects of history and what actions counted and what were merely the noises of modernization” (168). Godzich suggests that narratives are extracted and inherited from history. A grand récit can thus be conceptualized as a form of predetermined self-

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making narrative that defines and conditions the dominant subjects and actors in the discourse of history. For Afro-descendants, a grand récit is one that has been fashioned by a Eurocentric discourse that constructs African identity based on the historical experience of slavery and all its negative and demeaning manifestations. What Zapata Olivella’s novel accomplishes is to deconstruct Eurocentric slavery narratives and political narratives that have denied and displaced the possibilities of agency for Afro-descendants. In order to achieve a new foundation for the selfdefinition of Afro-Americans, Zapata Olivella deploys in his novel a narrative technique that seeks new elements of cognition and language to shape the representation of the identity of African descendants in the Americas. In his translation of the novel into English, Jonathan Tittler notes that the novel immerses the reader in “an alien Afro-centric cosmos.” According to Tittler, this Afro-centric cosmos affects both the form and the content of the novel. With regard to content, he remarks that “the novel conflates history and myth, defying the expectations of the reader’s intent on reading within the bounds of one genre or the other” (xi). In the introduction to Jonathan Tittler’s English translation, William Luis agrees when he affirms, “Zapata Olivella’s acclaimed work is post-modern, and hybrid, subaltern, and post-colonial, and it de-centres any notion of Western discourse” (xiv). This is also the reading of Antonio Tillis, who dedicates a chapter of his Manuel Zapata Olivella and the Darkening of Latin American Literature to the consideration of Changó, el gran putas as a post-modern text. He focuses on the mechanics of the text and the way history is incorporated into its narrative discourse. Tillis observes that, [i]n essence the entire exercise of writing fiction ‘laced’ with historical references is one of the major tenets of postmodern literature. Historical writing represents one ‘truth’ among many; historical literature too can reveal a number of ‘truths’ within the confines of the bound pages. (75)

Tillis examines the manner in which historical events and personalities are incorporated into the text and fictionalized into the mythic ideological construction of the narrative. He recognizes the centrality of Yoruba cosmology in Changó, el gran putas and the role it plays in the displacement of Eurocentric history while underscoring the postmodern meta-fictional narrative techniques of the novel. The differences in both discursive resources (plot, narrative point of view, use of oratory, mixture of objective and mythic narrative conceits) and content (the story as constructed through characters and personalities, events and settings) indicate Zapata Olivella’s departure from the historical status quo and his intention of creating a master-text that

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establishes a new and original aesthetic and narrative foundation for the relationship between Afro-America and the history of the Americas. Indeed, the novel becomes the location for the construction of a new collective consciousness and trans-national African and African-American identity. The text provides points of reference and the necessary guideposts for the reconstitution of the personhood of the African in America through a series of recurring ancestral figures such as Nago, Ngafuá, Kanuri Mai, Sosa Illamba and Olugbala. Together, they uphold the cosmological system of the text and provide elements of continuity, coherence and cohesion associated with the storehouse of ethnic history, collective memory, the strength of ancestral numen and the attendant imperative to struggle for freedom. This new identity describes a purposeful active agent rather than a purposed object of continuous manipulation by exogenous forces. The text achieves a new ideological framework against which both old and new facts, events and narratives associated with the African presence, history and identity in the Americas can be measured and read. From fractured and arbitrary experiences, Changó, el gran putas creates a new ordering and understanding in which the figure and legend of Changó is the cornerstone. Changó’s unique position offers constitutive, normative and regulatory platforms for the new discursive ordering of the phenomena affecting the lives, minds and experiences of Africans in the Americas. Zapata Olivella uses as the point of departure, the original Changó myth. In his version, Changó, one of the founding fathers or ancestors of the Yoruba people of West Africa, is presented as an ambitious and powerful ruler whose love of glory in war has led him to abuse his own people. Out of jealousy, he sets his two most successful generals, Gbonka and Timi, against each other, hoping that they will destroy each other. His plot fails when one of them, Gbonka, survives. The victorious Gbonka takes the head of his friend and comrade, Timi, and lays it at the feet of Changó and then, overcome by sadness, he abandons the imperial city of Ile Ife. According to the myth, the intervention of other divine beings creates dissention among the people and Changó is rejected and driven out of the city. The frustrated and angry god curses his own people to be captured and suffer exile as punishment for his own suffering. The consequence of this curse is the horror of enslavement and exile to a strange land. However, Changó also wills his people to establish for themselves a new beginning by fighting for their own freedom and offers to help them in their redemptive enterprise. This African myth, coupled with the role Changó plays in it, extends over the whole of the African experience in the Americas and projects it

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towards the future. Zapata Olivella does this by incorporating peoples, places, associations and spirit beings from other African traditions into the original Yoruba myth. The link between Changó, slavery and the fight for freedom places Changó at the centre of a narrative universe where the fractured, dislocated, and diverse African histories are reconstituted and given an American identity. The Changó myth, therefore, provides the narrative framework and an epistemological system around which Zapata Olivella constructs and articulates his formulation of an Afro-centric history of African descendants in the Americas. Beyond Yoruba mythology, Changó and his myth are symbolic representations of the African world-view and cosmology. Yvonne Captain has observed that “[t]he African-American strength of the work lies in the existence of slavery, which binds people of African descent together as Americans” (142). Slavery is the key to the novel’s political centre. As a narrative, it is the single most important prism through which Africans on both sides of the Atlantic have been perceived and fashioned since the sixteenth century. Indeed, Chancellor Williams, John Henrik Clarke, Cheikh Anta Diop and others who have written about the way in which Africa and Africans are perceived and documented in Western texts, art, and politics have linked the totality of such narratives and representations with the need for an ideological underpinning of the slave trade and colonialism. Zapata Olivella’s work provides a new beginning and a new way to narrate, ideologize and own the historical fact of slavery and the human cost it inflicted on Africans and African descendants. Through his text, Zapata Olivella lays the foundation for the mental liberation and emancipation of Africans and their descendants in the Americas. The story of Changó, el gran putas offers an alternative and logical cause for the fact of slavery, that is, for the ire of an African deity. In this story, slavery is just a first act to be followed by the physical and mental liberation from the shackles of bondage and their demeaning ideology. The story starts with enslavement on the African mainland, followed by the crossing, then disembarking in the Americas, and then service in fields or homes. At each stage of this journey, Africans are called upon to challenge the status quo and affirm their own personhood and an alternative history of liberation that will include all who reside in the Americas. Zapata Olivella places these events of slavery and oppression within a wider context in which slavers, colonists and racist institutions become players on a stage that they have had no hand in building. The imperialist power structures, the profiteers and the racist ideologues that justified their inhuman behaviour and provided the “science” that legitimized chattel slavery and the reification and alienation of whole races are also subject to the imperative

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set in motion by Changó in a series of events that are outside the purview of European history and knowledge. Indeed, the importance of the Changó figure and his mythical role in Afro-identity formation can be likened to what has been said about African religious practices such as Santería and its role in the conservation of African religious identity. Anthony Attah Agbali conceptualizes the importance of Santería in identity formation in what he calls the “realignment of habitus.” “The realignment of habitus,” he suggests, “is produced by the reflexive efforts’ intent on retrieving from historical antecedent certain valuable social iconoclasts that are useful for the creative (re)production of novel identities within the contingent framework of evolving and succeeding events” (299). Agbali’s term is, therefore, a historical practice that stores a corpus of remembered events and acts as well as their symbolic representations. When put under individual and collective stress, these elements can be evoked to secure, restore, and reconstitute an eroded identity. For Agbali, “Santería reifies the African ritual order by intentionally privileging and cognitively legitimating the African ontology and cosmology as the hegemonic purview of its ritual practices” (297). He further acknowledges that, despite the presence of syncretic elements in Santería practice, it is an organized African cosmology and a hermeneutical paradigm that have far-reaching consequences beyond mere religious expression. In other words, as a traditional African religious practice, Santería is a form of Africandominated social action that directly influences the sense of Afro-identity and history by creating a space where Africans are active subjects applying their creative, spiritual and organizational abilities. In the same way that Santería provides a space where African cosmology and hermeneutic practice provide the dominant structural and political paradigm, Zapata Olivella’s use of the Changó myth also offers a new master-text for the analysis of the history of Africans in the Americas. Slavery, oppression and the struggle for freedom form the core of the narrative around Changó, el gran putas and provide a unity of ideology and structure. The fact that the novel spans the beginning of the slave trade to the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States is not fortuitous. The Afro-centric unity of purpose creates a narrative string that unites all African arrivals on the American continent in the past, present and necessarily the future. In his study, “The Scattering of Odudua’s Children,” Faola Ifagboyede alludes to divine myths and defines them as accounts that serve a dual purpose for explaining how the world came to be and why it is the way it is. Rather than reinforcing the embedded ethnocentrism in the divine myth,

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Changó, el gran putas, redefines it within the context of a universal humanistic paradigm. The novel’s grand récit replaces all the exclusionist schemas about African life and history in the Americas with a masternarrative that provides a coherent discursive unifier that explains past events and present experiences. Zapata Olivella’s divine myth calls for positive action at the individual and collective levels on the part of African-Americans. It urges them to struggle for freedom both on a physical and an intellectual level. At the same time, this divine myth serves as a vehicle for the liberation of humanity by offering a new paradigm that effectively de-authorizes the racialized schemas of conventional historiography. At the end of Godzich’s study cited above, he affirms that Africa and African descendants are an important part of modernity because of their special historical experiences and their undeniable contributions to art, culture and history. These contributions are recognizable and intrinsic elements of modernity in spite of historical exclusions practised by hegemonic discourse. Zapata Olivella’s text is replete with historical personalities, events and places. In the grand order of the text, they function more as points of reference and elements of shared experiences that are remoulded and relocated in the novel to carry the message of African agency in the Americas. Writing on the relationship between historical texts and literary texts, this is what Hayden White says of historical narratives: They succeed in endowing sets of past events with meanings, over and above whatever comprehension they provide by appeal to putative causal laws, by exploiting the metaphorical similarities between sets of real events and the conventional structures of our fictions. By the very constitution of a set of events in such a way as to make a comprehensible story out of them, the historian charges those events with the symbolic significance of a comprehensible plot structure. (91-92)

He argues for the similarity between history and fiction as processes of narration that organize a series of related or disparate events into a plot and a comprehensible story. Zapata Olivella’s combination of historical events, personalities and places—mixed with African cosmology— challenges Eurocentric histories at the structural, cognitive and political levels. In a speech that examined the relevance of deconstructive methods for the study of the colonial world, the politics of difference and the question of voice in texts that deal with colonialism, Josaphat Kubayanda affirms, “…deconstruction intensifies critical thinking and liberates the discursive act from the apparently iron-clad hold of the centre. It destabilizes received formulations and enables the marginalized to return

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at least to haunt the marginalizer” (1992). Kubayanda is interested in the power of deconstructive theory and practice as an instrument to subvert and de-legitimize extrinsic narratives—particularly those related to colonial studies—designed to relegate marginalized categories. Zapata Olivella achieves his deconstruction by telling a different story using the same elements—events, places and characters. He foregrounds what Eurocentric narratives about American history and identity fail to show. The story of Changó, el gran putas frees African-American identity from the shackles of racialist history created to justify the economic, political and social institutions of slavery, colonialism and contemporary American society. It proposes a new foundational “myth” that is not based on an essentialist definition but rather on the necessity to engage actively in identity formation based on African traditions. Zola Ni Vunda buttresses this point when he notes: Fuera de la acción, Changó llega a llenar un vacío de graves consecuencias al tratarse de la edificación de la conciencia colectiva de millones de negros, el vacío de un proyecto cohesionador. El autor se ha vuelto hacia las figuras de su panteón triétnico, en busca de elementos cosmológicos y de los grandes principios del orden moral y social, capaces de fundar una nueva convivencia en América. (23) [Beyond the story, Changó fills a serious need regarding the construction of the collective awareness of millions of black people, the need for a unifying project. The author has turned to the (symbolic) figures of his triethnic pantheon to look for the cosmological elements and the great principles of moral and social order that are capable of cementing a new form of co-existence in America.] (My translation)

According to Zola ni Vunda, Changó, el gran putas is Zapata Olivella’s effort to create a new basis for interaction and interrelationships among the peoples of America. This new narrative is firmly grounded in active engagement in the fight for freedom and justice and a new collective identity forged through solidarity among all Americans. Zapata Olivella’s text fulfills an important need for an agglutinating project in the collective consciousness of African descendants in the Americas without alienating or excluding other Americans. The novel reverses the tendency to consider Africa as modernity’s other from a de-centred, peripheral, and marginalized space. Rather, Changó el gran putas places Africa and the figure of Changó at the centre providing a hub around which all other discursive constructs, projections, and formulas can be measured and read. Changó wills on his people the fate of separation and suffering in an alien land, but he also wills them to fight for their own liberation and, in so

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doing, create for themselves a new identity and a new destiny. This new paradigm or framework can, in theory, either legitimize or delegitimize all other narratives concerning the history of the presence of African descendants in the Americas and the constitution of their collective and individual identities. The Changó myth, or its incorporation into the novel, functions, in this sense, as a germinal narrative that organizes the textual world in terms of time and space, and, in that space and time, all causality is subordinated to an Afro-centred cosmic order providing a generative matrix for both content and organization. To a large extent, what Zapata Olivella does in his work is to achieve what Simon During believes defines post-colonialism and post-colonial subjects. During suggests that “post-colonialism is regarded as the need, in nations or groups which have been victims of imperialism, to achieve an identity uncontaminated by universalist or Eurocentric concepts and usage” (125). Zapata Olivella’s novel achieves undiluted autonomy by situating causality for the liberating historical enterprise of identity formation for Africans in the Americas beyond the scope of imperial discourse. Writing on Afro-centric discourse and literary acts, Ian Isidore Smart notes that the literary act for black Americans is “the ultimate act of self-assertion, and rejection of the racist paradigm” (77). Smart argues that writing as a manifestation of the self is, in essence, an act of liberation. Beyond its post-modern and post-colonial purpose, Changó, el gran putas has a deeper ontological personality because it is constructed within a hermeneutic that is determined by an essentially African existential project. Basing the narrative of the African presence in the Americas on an African ontological imperative provides a discursive and political autonomy that offers the possibility for an independent and unique identity formation.

Bibliography Agbali, Anthony Attah. 2005. “Ritualizing Identity, Santería and Globalization: Yoruba Imageries and Creole Paradigms.” In Orisa. Yoruba Gods and Spiritual Identity in Africa and the Diaspora, edited by Falola, Toyin & Genova, 259-319. Trenton: Africa World Press. Print. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tifflin, eds. 1995. The Postcolonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Print. Bagliolo, François. 1978. La nègritude et les problems du noir dans l’oevre de Manuel Zapata Olivella. Dakar-Abidjan: Nouvelles éditions africaines. Print.

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Barton, Paul Alfred. 2002. A History of the African Olmecs: Black Civilizations of America from Prehistoric Times to the Present Era. Philadelphia: Xlibris. Print. Bromer, Stephen Eric. 2011. Critical Theory. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford U.P. Print. Captain-Hidalgo, Yvonne. 1993. The Culture of Fiction in the Works of Manuel Zapata Olivella. Columbia: U. of Missouri P. Print. Cartwright, Keith. 2005. Reading Africa into American Literature. Lexington: U.P. of Kentucky. Print. Curran, Andrew. 2011. The Anatomy of Blackness. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P. Print. During, Simon. 1995. “Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today.” In The Post-colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, 125-129. London: Routledge. Print. Falola, Toyin and Anne Genova, eds., 2005. Orisa. Yoruba Gods and Spiritual Identity in Africa and the Diaspora. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press. Print. Godzich, Wlad. 1999. “The Spanish Black Atlantic: Further Complications in the History of Modernity.” In Breaking Borders: African-Hispanic Encounters, edited by Gustavo Mejía. New Orleans: U.P. of the South. Print. Ifagboyede, Faola. 2005. “The Scattering of Odudua’s Children.” In Orisa. Yoruba Gods and Spiritual Identity in Africa and the Diaspora, edited by Toyin Falola and Anne Genova, 225-41. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press. Print. Jackson, Richard L. 1988. Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America. Athens: U. of Georgia P. Print. Jackson, Shirley. 1986. “African World View in Five Afro-Hispanic Novels.” Afro-Hispanic Review 5.1-3: 37-42. Print. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1979. La condition postmoderne. Raport sur le savoir. Paris: Éditions De Minuit. Print. —. 1992. The Post-modern Explained. Correspondence 1982-1985. Eds. Julia Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P. Print. Mose, Kenrick. 1988. “Changó, el gran putas y el negro en la novelística del colombiano Zapata Olivella.” Afro-Hispanic Review 7.1-3: 45-48. Print. Smart, Isidore. 1966. Amazing Connections. Kemet to Hispanophone African Literature. Washington: Original World Press. Print.

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Tillis, Antonio. 2005. Manuel Zapata Olivella and the Darkening of Latin American Literature. Columbia: U. of Missouri P. Print. Vunda, Zola ni. 1990. “La función del proemio en Changó, el gran putas.” Afro-Hispanic Review 9.1-3: 18-24. Print. White, Hayden. 1978. Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P. Print. Williams, Chancellor. 1987. The Destruction of Black Civilization. Third World Press. Print. Wuthenau, Alexander Van. 1982. The Unexpected Faces in Ancient America, 1500 BC–AD 1500. The Historical Testimony of Pre-Columbian Artists. New York: Crown Publishers. Print. Zapata Olivella. 2010. Changó, The Biggest Badass. Trans. by Jonathan Tittler. Lubbock: Texas Tech U.P. Print. —. 1991. “Los ancestros combatientes. Una saga afronorteamericana.” Afro-Hispanic Review 10. 3: 51-58. Print.

CHAPTER FOUR NARRATIVE AESTHETICS AND THE EPISTEMIC VIOLENCE OF HISTORY: JOSÉ EDUARDO AGUALUSA’S THE BOOK OF CHAMELEONS ARTHUR HUGHES

Abstract The English title of José Agualusa’s book, The Book of Chameleons, raises both thematic and pragmatic questions that converge on the question of identity. Where the original Portuguese gives prominence to and clearly signals one character as the protagonist, the translation highlights a medium and multiple protagonists. This change points to a more collective body, suggesting that the question of identity is on a broader scale than is implied in the original title. A reading of the text portrays an entire society fixated upon the past, either in order to acquire respectability as the new elite or to forget the violence of past conflicts. Palpable in this shifting condition is the epistemological violence that mirrors Angola’s recent traumatic past, and a perceived need to rebuild identities. The means of achieving a viable response to this need is the creation of a narrative of aesthetics that seeks to mould a new epistemology, a way of shaping discourses on individual and collective identity. .

The English title of José Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons, set against the literal translation of the original Portuguese, The Seller of Pasts, raises both thematic and pragmatic questions that converge on the question of identity. Where the original Portuguese title, (O Vendedor de Passados), gives prominence to, and clearly signals one character as the protagonist, the translation highlights a medium (The Book) and multiple protagonists (Chameleons). The Angolan, Félix Ventura, is a seller of pasts: he invents past histories, family trees and genealogies for his clients to make them

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more respectable. The Portuguese title is a clear reference to the protagonist, Ventura, and his profession. The Book of Chameleons, the English title, therefore, seems to be an attempt to personify the act of inventing histories and identities in a creature that symbolizes change. It is worthwhile to note that chameleons change coloration and markings according to their environmental needs in order to avoid being prey, or to disguise their predatory intentions. It is, however, in this very personification that the English title becomes more ambiguous, since it opens up the protagonism of the text and forces the question of the chameleon’s identity. One clear contender for this role is the geckonarrator, whose autobiographical reflections reveal the metamorphosis from a previous life as a human being to a reptile. This chameleon-like change accentuates the dissonance triggered by the absence of the specific word “chameleon” in reference to the narrator, who is identified simply as a tiger gecko. The gecko-narrator’s candidacy for the title role of the English translation falls apart with the species change from gecko to chameleon, and from singular to plural. Further reading of the novel provides a third alternative in which Ventura’s clients are presented as the chameleons whose shape-shifting identities are the closest human equivalent to that of the Chamaeleonidae genus. The novel treats in detail the case of one such client, Pedro Gouveia, and, to a lesser extent, that of an unnamed Minister for Breadmaking and Dairy Products. It is inconceivable to believe that the English title is based on the translator’s unawareness of the differences between geckos and chameleons. One can only speculate that the translator’s intention is not only to make the title more attractive but also metonymical. What is indisputable is that the English translation shifts protagonism away from Félix Ventura, the seller of pasts, to an abstract conception, a book by/about chameleons (which are literally non-existent in the novel), and, subsequently, to a diffused group of subjects to whom the reptilian classification may be loosely applied. The change produced by the translation points to a more collective body, suggesting that the question of identity is much more expansive than is implied in the original title. A reading of the text portrays an entire society fixated upon the past, either to acquire respectability as the new elite, to forget the violence of past conflicts or to suppress its role as perpetrator or victim. The list of characters with multiple and/or changing identities is endless—from the protagonist, Félix Ventura, to the Angolan president and the suspicions about his multiple identities, and to bit players who are mentioned only briefly, as is the case of the prostitute Madame Dagmar: “When she woke up, she was called Alba, or Aurora, or Lucia. In the evening, she was

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Dagmar. At night: Estela” (33). Félix Ventura has issues with his own identity: an orphan and an albino, he evolves from selling used books to making up past documents. The gecko-narrator of the novel has a past as a human, although this history is presented rather selectively, thus preventing a clear picture of an emerging self. Together, these individuals represent a society in which identity has either been detached from a fixed referent and subsequently acquires multiple forms or is free-floating and endlessly transferable. What is palpable in this shifting condition is the epistemological violence that mirrors Angola’s recent traumatic past and a perceived need to rebuild identities. The means of attaining a viable response to this need is by creating a narrative of aesthetics that seeks to forge a new epistemology, a means of shaping the discourses on individual and collective identity. Implicit in the creation of a new epistemology is the commodification of a past that, as a product, can be purchased or taken up at will. Choosing one’s past, in this instance, becomes a way of denying the past, repressing the violence it represents, and, ultimately, charting a new future. However, when this process confronts a situation in which real events and the memories that go with them impinge upon personal and collective identities, that process then calls into question what constitutes identity. The process also interrogates reality and fiction, the sensuous and the rational, as well as the distinction between percepts and perceptions (Deleuze and Guattari 164). Indeed, in Agualusa’s text, the play between reality and fiction, and between aesthetics and consumerism, results in a violent re-enactment of the past that usually leads to the difficulty of comprehending reality, a situation that sometimes leads to death. In order to explore fully the question of identity and the need to reconstitute it as presented in Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons, it might be worthwhile to examine the questions of continuity and differentiation as evidenced in the works of Roy Baumeister and Simon Gikandi. Roy Baumeister believes that identity is a definition, a description of self that throughout history has changed its variables and methods (4-6). For him, identity was not problematic in pre-modern times because of the difference in paradigms that structured human belonging. People in the past had their identities, but not in the problematic way construed by the modern age. An individual was born into a determined social class that defined what that individual would become in the future. By the same token, the individual’s role within the context of inter-social relations was equally predetermined by that class. For Baumeister, an increasing perception of the uniqueness of individuals—as opposed to the former view of a defined place in the world—becomes the key to changes

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in perception of modern identity. It is for this reason that he identifies differentiation and continuity as the pivotal determinants of identity in modern times.1 Each individual is considered different in a unique sense, since the outcomes of one’s fate are not preordained. Neither are interpersonal relations predetermined. This situation opens up a whole set of options, since one is master of one’s own destiny, thus setting into motion the agony and complexity that accompany this search. Continuity, on the other hand, is a linguistic apprehension of the self as the same across time and space (Baumeister 15). This dynamic goes beyond the presupposed physical continuity of the body to encompass the acceptance of that body’s experiences as self-same, that is, as pertaining to the same “I”. It is through these experiences that the individual cobbles together a meaning that characterizes the self in a coherent fashion, tying together fragmented experiences in the past to compose a whole that is viewed as constant in time and space. Identity is a linguistic construction, as it is based on the meanings one derives from one’s experiences (Baumeister 15). Baumeister’s account of the evolution of identity in the modern and pre-modern West makes no reference to the issue of blackness and identity. As the author himself acknowledges, his work is solely based on Western archives and thus makes no attempt to extend his historiography to nonWestern cultures. Simon Gikandi agrees with this differentiation, to the extent that it helped to explain the differences among German, British, Greek or Spanish peoples. Gikandi argues that there was a deeper foundational difference that was unspoken and yet permeated the entire European culture as it struggled to come to terms with its identity. In Slavery and the Culture of Taste, Gikandi postulates a strong connection between the apparently separate worlds of aesthetics—the culture of taste—and the slave trade. According to him, slavery (and commerce in general) brought unprecedented wealth to Europe, thereby enabling a culture of consumption that in turn became the standard for measuring individual identity and the notion of personhood. The end of the seventeenth century initiated the search for, and development of, discursive practices and principles that would rationalize behaviour in an



1 Roy Baumeister sees differentiation and continuity as the bases for identity. Continuity underscores the need for a narrative of the past that presents a coherent sense of self: the acceptance of that body’s experiences as self-same, i.e., as pertaining to the same “I”. It is through these experiences that the individual cobbles together a meaning that characterizes the self in a coherent fashion, tying together fragmented experiences in the past to compose a whole that is viewed as constant in time and space (14-15).

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age when old standards were at variance with the new order of commerce (20). In Gikandi’s view, eighteenth-century England in particular developed discourses on culture as an epistemological category that would allow the modern subject to reconcile the opposing demands of the production of goods as well as the slaveholding and trafficking that produced these goods (16). Manners, taste, beauty and sensibility, Gikandi adds, become vital in the making of the new social order (20). The ability to surround and immerse oneself with books, art and material refinement became a way of affirming one’s identity against the background of the dissolution of former social and class hierarchies. Where taste formerly differentiated social classes because of limited financial access, the vast riches brought about by commerce, fuelled by slave labour, propelled a radical mind shift; hitherto considered impossible, taste now signified social mobility (Gikandi, 18-19). 2 In effect, taste was elevated into a political discourse through which other concerns of the age, including its anxiety about commerce, could be processed, mediated and regulated (Gikandi 18). Crucial to Gikandi’s hypothesis is his assertion of the role that slavery played in the construction of the culture of taste and the attempts made to repress and suppress this reality. He notes that, despite the numerous discernible traces in the West’s historical records of the contribution of black slaves to modernism in the area of paintings and writings the explanatory framework of modernity considers them incapable of modern identity. The slaves, Gikandi suggests, “are in effect constituted as unmodern subjects or simply objects of modern trade” (36). For Gikandi, this state of affairs is explained by a shift to the aesthetic in the definition of modern identity, thanks to the burgeoning commerce and wealth spawned primarily by the slave trade. The middle and lower classes benefited immensely from this commerce and began to rub shoulders with the aristocracy, undermining society’s hierarchal structure and increasing the nervousness already felt as a result of the seismic changes produced by the consumption enabled by the profits of the slave trade. The culture of taste, as Gikandi explains it, is a key mediator between British modernity and its repressive tendencies—for concealing the connection between

 2

By the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, for example, birthright and rank were no longer considered to be the golden standards in determining modes of behaviour or social relationships. Where before social rank had been the determinant of one’s position in society, the consumption of culture now determined the character and quality of the self. Evidence of this dissolution of previous standards is the disappearance of sumptuary laws, now considered an affront to personal liberty (Gikandi 18).

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modern subjectivity and the political economy of slavery (17). Commerce enables culture, art and taste. These in turn become deployed as modes of cultivation and politeness, enabling a differentiation of the subject of taste from the savagery and barbarism of a previous time and of other cultures and experiences (23-24). Gikandi posits that modernity is to a large extent predicated upon blackness in the “unstructured institutions that underlay people’s fundamental assumptions about who they were and who they could be” (36).3 This belief leads Gikandi to question the use of difference and hybridity as a means of deconstructing colonial myths, to see alterity as a way of reaffirming post-colonial agency (41). José Eduardo Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons connects the two identity poles of continuity and differentiation to an instrumentalisation of culture in post-civil-war Angola, albeit within very different circumstances and with different results. The novel highlights the complexity of identity in general and of Angolan identity in particular within a post-colonial and post-conflict context. If identity is based on a body’s experiences that, in turn, look to the past for legitimacy and justification, what happens to identity when this past is denied or altered? By focusing on the diffused nature of identification, the English translation of the novel’s title underscores the legitimacy given to reality and fixed essences and the perceptions that accompany them. This fact is in contrast to the Portuguese title whose apparent transparency still contains all of the ambiguities detailed above. What is identity? And how is this constructed? How do the past and the present interplay with the proffered identity? Once forged, is it immutable throughout an individual’s life? What role does the past play in shaping this identity construct? Lastly, how do the socio-economic conditions of a post-conflict society struggling to come to terms with the violence and horrors of its past mediate, or condition, identity? Félix Ventura’s profession of inventing pasts for his clients is a direct contradiction of what is commonly thought to be the fixity of history as past. This is a claim that most historians put forward in their quest to differentiate history from literature: that nothing is invented, and that historical record is just the recording of events. This historiographical view is what Ventura puts into practice with his claim of a difference

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Christopher Brown speculates in Moral Capital that abolitionism in Britain is the counterpart to Gikandi’s culture of taste: British moral guilt about slavery, always on the backburner, suddenly comes to the fore after losing the American war of independence. The need to reconcile the opposing demands of the morality of slavery and the profits generated by commerce becomes a tipping point that leads to the adoption of another British identity as the champion of the freedom of the undeveloped world, its imperial mandate (5-12).

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between forging and inventing dreams. As he puts it, this difference is evident the moment one form crosses the line of legality, that is, where it impinges upon present reality and affects inter-social relations. From this perspective, forgery may be equated with a wholesale distortion of the broad events of the past, while inventing dreams is a form of interpretation of that same past. Put differently, inventing dreams would constitute a micro-reading of a history that does not alter the broad sweep of events. Instead, it takes liberties with acts that fall beneath the radar of the historical lens because of their marginality or omission in the record of events. The extra-diegetic differences between the English translation of the title The Book of Chameleons and its original O Vendedor de Passados closely reflect the question of identity at the heart of Agualusa’s novel. Narrated by a reincarnated human-in-a-gecko-body in full possession of its previous memories as a human, the text suggests that change in the present is a constant of nature and that the only constant is the past, everything else being mutable. The gecko, however, changes this view later in relating Ventura’s encounters with his clients: You could argue that we’re all in a constant state of change. That’s right, I’m not quite the same as I was yesterday either. The only thing about me that doesn’t change is my past: the memory of my human past. The past is usually stable, it’s always there, lovely or terrible, and it will be there forever. (At least, this is what I thought before I met Félix Ventura). (55)

Through a series of dream interludes, the reader witnesses moments in the previous life of the gecko. Of particular interest is the scene where the former human is sent to his father’s mistress to lose his virginity. The revulsion he feels at the image of his father with the mistress haunts him even to the present. In spite of multiple experiences with other women in his later life, he nonetheless suggests that this revulsion has contributed to his never falling in love with any woman (33). Yet he contradicts this affirmation of the role of the past in affecting the present by offering an alternative possibility: “Either that, or it was no more than a careless mistake” (34). The gecko’s memory process is one example of the identity structure in which continuity over time, especially of a crucial event, is supposed to build a sameness of experience. It is a consistency that solidifies with other similar events and transforms them into a form of identity. While this condition foregrounds the linguistic nature of identity, in that the subject chooses narratives that have continuity and consistency in explaining behaviour, it does not negate the fact that these are choices that one makes in self-defining narratives. Even if one were to accept the

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plausibility of reincarnation, it is noteworthy that the exact relationship between the human identity of the gecko and his present form is never clearly established. The gecko’s belief––that his present reptilian form is punishment for not having ever fallen in love––does not establish a causal relation, creating a tension between the past and the present. The link between the gecko’s childhood (his revulsion at the image of his father with a prostitute) and his later years (his mother’s jealousy of women he dated because she considered them rivals) is never a casual one: neither sufficiently explains why he never falls in love. After the gecko dies from a scorpion sting, the text finally identifies the narrator as Eulálio, leaving the reader in doubt about the source of this piece of information and the identity of the narrator of the remaining text. If the identity of gecko-Eulálio is knotty and uncertain, so is Félix Ventura’s own identity, which is presented as indeterminate and ambiguous in terms of ethnicity and origins. As is the case in many African countries with a large white population, the question of one’s skin colour in Angola is still a problem. When Ventura initially refuses to forge documents for Gouveia, he explains that Gouveia is white and asks: “if you’ll pardon my bluntness, wouldn’t it be difficult to invent a completely African genealogy for you?” Gouveia challenges this interrogation by retorting that Ventura is whiter than he is, in reference to the forger’s albino condition. Ventura chokes up at this response and tries to justify his blackness: “No, no! I’m black. Pure black. I’m a native. Can’t you tell that I’m black?...” (18). Given his orphan history—raised by a mulatto widower who finds him abandoned in a box on copies of Eça de Queirós’s The Relic—Ventura cannot be certain of his biological parentage, complicated further by the lack of pigmentation.4 Gouveia’s certainty of his biological origins does not erase the instability of his identity. Though born in Lisbon to Portuguese parents, Gouveia’s participation in a “factionalist” strain of Angola’s revolutionary movement makes him and his pregnant black wife targets of torture by his adopted country. Instead of helping the Portuguese citizen and his pregnant wife leave Angola, the Portuguese consul turns them over to state spies. His wife dies in prison after giving birth to his daughter there. Tortured by his adopted country and betrayed by his birth country, this double denial of identity places Gouveia in a no-man’s-land. For Ventura, albinoid whiteness is a

 4

The reference to Eça de Queirós’s The Relic is highly relevant to Ventura’s identity not only for the doubts surrounding the Portuguese novelist’s identity but also the resonances with the book’s protagonist’s orphanage and upbringing. It also subtly underscores the cross-fertilization between literary traditions on both sides of the Atlantic and their continuing tensions regarding Angolan identity.

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congenital disorder characterized by the absence of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes. Gouveia’s response suggests that his (Gouveia’s) white skin can equally be considered a genetic defect, and that, under the white skin, he is as Angolan as Ventura. This exchange between the white Gouveia and the albino Ventura highlights the issue of skin colour as well as the role of Creole identity in Angola.5 Ventura’s white skin raises the issue of whether ethnicity is entirely a matter of skin colour. While this exchange is brief and unremarkable in the entirety of the novel, it suggests that the question of Angolan identity is still unsettled. The gecko’s remarks that Gouveia even laughs like an Angolan (55) after his new identity has been invented by Ventura, suggest that skin colour is no impediment to Angolan-ness. Arrived at through a commodification of the aesthetic, Gouveia’s identity nonetheless highlights the fine line between fiction and reality. A sense of continuity, even in an invented past, evinces what Baumeister calls the linguistic construct of self-identity. Ventura’s profession further confounds the already complicated notions of continuity and differentiation in The Book of Chameleons. While Gikandi aims to show how the culture of taste—and the aesthetisation of narrative—derives its possibility from the commerce generated by slavery and slave labour, the underbelly hinted at in Agualusa’s text is the violence and corruption of the independence and civil war conflicts. Additionally, this repressed violence emerges again through the very same mediation of aesthetics, resulting in free-floating identity signifiers, an unstable grip on reality, and, in some cases, death. Part of the reason for the negative results of this aesthetisation lies in the superficiality of cultural acquisition. Ventura’s clients are not interested in cultural artefacts as a means of improving their intellectual and scientific status, as was the case in eighteenth-century Britain. The goal of social climbing is common to both, but the consumption engaged in by Ventura’s clients is merely decorative, a rhetoric of presentation that emphasizes visible semiotic codes, to paraphrase Gikandi (69). The end result, however, is the same in both cases: Angola’s elite class tries to dissociate the “profane commodity” of its wealth from a family tree that becomes an object of “aesthetic veneration” (Gikandi 17), with the expectation of calming the dissonance occasioned by means of wealth acquisition. The narrative of aesthetics becomes a way of justifying ill-gotten wealth while simultaneously denying the struggling masses any upward mobility. The



5 Mestiços (mixed race) and Europeans make up approximately 3% of Angola’s population of 18 million.

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equation of a noble or prestigious ancestry with wealth implies that one has to have the former to be worthy of the latter. In Agualusa’s Angola, slavery, colonial rule and the struggle for independence are all over. The country is finally at peace after the almost three-decade civil war that follows the declaration of independence. Notwithstanding, the resulting peace following the two wars is a very unstable one: landmines used during the two conflicts still litter the landscape and result in the loss of life and limb, not to mention the inhibition of agriculture.6 While the civil war was mostly about ethnicity and ideology, 7 the failure of the Bicesse Accords in 1992 stripped the patina of ideology and freedom from UNITA’s refusal to acknowledge electoral defeat.8 MPLA leaders, army generals and their partners in war enriched themselves through provision contracts, land grabs and illicit arms deals. Also true is the other side’s trade in illicit diamonds that was used to fund their campaign. The major political parties that currently compete in elections derive from these two groups, in a sense a continuation of the civil war tensions, this time under a democratic guise. The discovery of enormous oil potential by the colonial government in 1955 created instant wealth for the nation.9 It also permitted the creation of a new aristocracy made up of former Marxist politicians, military men and a new commercial elite in need of new genealogies to provide a veneer of

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The narrator ironically speculates that there may be more landmines than people in the country (10). Four thousand landmine fields cover the provinces of Huambo, Bié, Cuando Cubango and Malanje, and anti-vehicle mines deter passage on 70 per cent of Angolan roads (Reed 52). 7 The causes of Angola’s civil war are complex and originate in the war for independence. Jonas Savimbi, UNITA’s leader, was originally a member of Holden Roberto’s FNLA, the new name of the original Union of Peoples of Northern Angola. Patrick Chabal’s view of the civil war as a result of “anticolonial and nationalist competition” (4) refers to this infighting prior to independence. 8 UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) and the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola), the two main factions of the civil war, are currently the two major political parties, the former being the governing party after having won three elections since 1992. In broad terms, UNITA is seen as the representative of the majority Ovimbundu ethnicity, while MPLA is the vehicle of the Luanda Creole elite. 9 According to Kristin Reed, the petroleum reserves that had been discovered were the reason that the Salazar colonial government held on so long to Angola and also the source of funds for the civil war between 1993 and 2000, to the tune of five hundred million dollars each year (44).

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respectability and to justify their new status. 10 This is the past within which the individual identity of Angola’s citizens will be played out. It is also the context that will determine the overall identity of the nation. In this sense, the struggle for individual identity construction is a reflection of the nation’s desire to define itself in light of the violence and corruption of the past that linger into the present. Attempts by individual citizens to reinvent a past, ostensibly to justify or generate social mobility, are based on the acquisition of elegance and culture, a commodification of aesthetics made possible by the country’s oil wealth and fratricidal conflicts, along with the attendant violence. Félix Ventura, the seller of pasts referred to in the Portuguese title, invents family trees for his customers as a way of improving their social standing. His clients are businessmen, ministers, landowners, diamond smugglers and army generals—people whose futures are secure: But what these people lack is a good past, a distinguished ancestry, diplomas. In sum, a name that resonates with nobility and culture. He sells them a brand-new past. He draws up their family tree. He provides them with photographs of their grandparents and great-grandparents, gentlemen of elegant bearing and old-fashioned ladies. (16)

Most of Ventura’s clients are generally content to be linked, even if falsely, to a famous ancestor whose aura confers respectability on the newlyminted descendant. It is as if in post-civil-war Angola memories of the past are easily forgotten or so traumatic as to require drawing a curtain around them. In the collective amnesia that ensues, the past becomes a commodity and everyone who can afford the expense is free to pick and choose an ancestry, usually one preceding the violence of the independence and civil-war conflicts. Ventura’s clients—such as the Minister for Bread-making and Dairy Products—are content to be linked to a prestigious ancestor, requiring no participation in this legerdemain except for their pride in a distinguished lineage with pictures and sculptures to burnish these credentials. In this particular case, the Minister’s ancestry is creatively traced to Salvador Correia de Sá e



10 Kristin Reed reports that a court awarded $1,200 to Minister of Defence Kundy Paihama, one of five government and MPLA officials who brought defamation charges against Semanário Angolense editor Felisberto de Graça Campos for an article listing the fifty-nine richest Angolans. The Semanário Angolense article insinuated that General Paihama and other millionaires on the list had engaged in corruption—whether by using their positions to earn favours or by siphoning off public funds to augment low government salaries (55).

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Benevides, a Brazilian soldier who participated in the liberation of Angola from the Dutch. On learning of his new ancestor, the Minister becomes sufficiently agitated to want to reverse the naming of a public high school after Mutu Ya Kevela, an Angolan hero, to that of his invented ancestor: Damn! Whose stupid idea was it to change the name of the high school?! A man who expelled the Dutch colonists, an internationalist fighter of our brother country, an Afro-antecedent, who gave us one of the most important families in this country—that is to say, mine. No, old man, it won’t do. Justice must be restored. I want the high school to go back to being called Salvador Correia, and I’ll fight for it with all my strength. I’ll have a statue of my grandfather cast to put outside the entrance. A really big statue in bronze, on a block of white marble […] So I’m descended from Salvador Correia—caramba!—and I never knew it till now. Excellent. My wife will be ever so pleased. (110-11)

The narrator highlights the incongruity of the Minister’s selective amnesia by contrasting his real life story as a worker in Luanda’s colonial postal service with the past that he concocts to account for his wealth and self-exile: a drummer in a rock band called the Un-namables, more interested in women than in politics, he flees on the eve of the Portuguese Carnation Revolution after three of his band members are arrested. There he becomes wealthy by peddling remedies for the evil eye, the ills of the soul and success in love, to women who frequent his spiritual-healing clinic. His “amnesiac” recounting mentions his participation in a resistance cell as well as his disenchantment with post-independence fratricide, which lead to his voluntary exile. His wealth, he explains, is the result of founding an “alternative medicine” clinic, an aesthetic rendition of hawking love potions for deluded women. This doctoring of the past, combined with buying favours from the powerful, lands him a job in two years as Minister for Economic Transparency and Combatting Corruption, and subsequently his present position as Minister for Bread-making and Dairy Products. Measured against the Minister’s ethical shortcomings, the ironic discord created by the title of his first position also highlights two interesting points: the Minister’s ignorance of, and surprise at, the Brazilian identity of his fabricated ancestor and the readiness with which he suspends disbelief to embrace this fiction wholeheartedly. The Minister’s unfamiliarity with his own country’s history, while a legacy of the woefully deficient colonial education system, puts into context his preference for a foreign over a local hero. It underscores the continuing instability of Angolan identity, given its history of White settlement (Portuguese and Brazilian) and miscegenation. The Minister’s easy shift

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from reality to belief in fiction, while a pragmatic adaptation to the needs of the times, signals an unstable grip on reality, or a society where fiction competes with reality as acceptable commodities of self-identification. In either case, this commodification of the aesthetic points to a need to repress the past, turning this into a personal choice in narrating identity. But unlike that which separates forgery from inventing dreams, as claimed by Ventura, a selective ordering of the past is not innocent and troublefree: it has an impact on reality and the real world. While most of humanity strives to achieve a better future for its offspring, Ventura’s profession calls attention to two important aspects of post-conflict Angolan society: the ruling elite has arrived at its position and wealth through nefarious means and it seeks to draw a curtain on its shady past. 11 That the ruling elite is not worried about its future is an indication of the extent to which it has benefitted from the independence and civil-war periods. More importantly, Ventura’s profession is also an attempt at forgetting the very turbulent immediate past of the civil war as well as the more distant pre-colonial and revolutionary period. Littered through the text, though never highlighted, are the subtle cues of the past violence that continues into the present. Gouveia’s pictures of an old lunatic show him living in a sewer, or sleeping in the shade of a rusted army tank. These pictures also reveal “buildings pockmarked with bullet holes, showing their thin bones,” and “terribly thin boys, almost translucent,” playing soccer (97). The gecko-narrator uses two images to provide a telling condemnation of the pervasive poverty. The first is of boys who climb Ventura’s garden wall topped with jagged broken bottles to steal avocados in spite of the risk to their bodily integrity (10). In an ironic extension of this first image, the second projects the experience these boys acquire scaling the jagged edges of Ventura’s wall to become future sappers who will work to rid the Angolan landscape of the millions of mines still littering the land. These images pose a tension with Ventura’s clients’ concern with the past, suggesting a great social divide of people living with deprivation and the continued presence of the wars’ destruction while another class is more concerned with their past. As the story of Gouveia will reveal, the two sides in both independence and civilwar periods are not always clear-cut. A period of collusion and collaboration with the supposed enemy makes a mockery of nationalist

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Christine Messiant coins the term “savage” socialism to describe the transition to a liberalized economy in the late 1980s, when the state sanctioned the takeover of the informal market by its agents: “what was ‘savage’ was the degree of illegal enrichment made possible by arbitrary impunity on the part of the ruling elite” (97).

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and ideological credentials. The roles of the protagonists in these battles are filled with duplicity and treachery. The need for new and more respectable backgrounds is a direct indication of the turmoil and misdeeds of the immediate past, similar to eighteenth-century Britain’s struggles to come to terms with the sordid trade in human cargo. Slightly different from the Angolan scenario, however, is the fact that the forging of a British discourse of the culture of taste takes place simultaneously with the slave trade while the Angolan quest for new genealogies is posterior, an attempt to forget or deny the recent traumatic past. In this sense, creating a new past is an attempt at forging a new identity, a way of distancing oneself from one’s original past. Consequently, the new identities that Ventura creates are his way of distancing the individuals from the means of production of their new wealth and riches. This indirect criticism of the ruling elite is a pessimistic acceptance of the status quo, a far cry from the utopian ideals of former generations.12 The elite’s concern with the past signals unconcern for the present reality of the corruption, poverty and destruction that are the lot of the country’s majority. Ventura’s incursion into the past is, therefore, a reflection of the socio-cultural politics of present-day Angola. The incursion raises several issues related to the colonial period and the role played by Portugal and Brazil in the formulation of Luso-African identity within the colony and post-colony. Unlike other Portuguese colonies, the Creole population in the capital Luanda has played a significant role in politics and power. In Angola, there is the feeling of a special relationship with Portugal because of this heritage, resulting in the belief of a closer relationship to the former metropolis as well as preferential treatment by Portugal. The importance of this identity is alluded to in the search for ancestry located in this colonial relationship, as seen in the Minister’s pride in his fictitious connection with a former colonialist, Sá e Benavides. This pride is incongruent in a post-colonial situation, especially after the war of independence whose main objective was to rid the nation of these same influences. The fact that this particular Minister had spent the war years in Portugal where he made his fortune as a fortune teller which is literally absent in the struggle for a new national identity, signals a return to past affiliations in the present national consciousness, albeit in a

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Pepetela’s A Geração da Utopia is typically cited as representative of the ideals of an earlier generation of Angolan writers who now mourn the death throes of hope for a profound egalitarian change for their country (Brown 168). Some of the effects of this disillusionment are seen in the stylistic strategies such as postmodern historiographical metafiction, animistic realism, allegory, humour, irony, biting social satire and even detective fiction (Arenas 165).

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symbolic way. Creole identity with its inordinate share in power relations in Angola, while signalling an incomplete break with the metropolis, still plays a significant role in the construction of an Angolan identity. Symbolic of the ease with which characters in the text switch, discard or don new identities, the Minister’s story is a microcosm of the ethics and fluidity of identity of the new aristocracy emerging from the recent traumas of independence and civil-war struggles. The democratic process that ensues from these struggles represents a continuation of the previous array of forces, the only difference being its official sanctioning by a multiparty system of governance. Elections are a common feature of Angola’s new democracy, but have no guarantee of political accountability or integrity. The majority held by the MPLA in parliament ensures the passage of the President’s proposals, turning the institutional body into an ineffective and hollow organ. Agualusa’s text plays on the puppetry image by highlighting the uncertain identities of the Angolan President, whom one of the characters, the lunatic Edmundo Barata dos Reis, believes to be a double. Barata, before he was dismissed from the secret service and lost his reason, claims to have hired two doubles to stand in for the President in public ceremonies. Two of the doubles, he says, were used when the President only needed to be seen; the third was trained in the speech and mannerisms of the President and was a perfect double. His only flaw was that he was left-handed: “It’s like looking at the President in a mirror. That’s how I noticed” (146). Barata’s use of the mirror-image simile here is striking: not only does it refer to multiple images, but it also places in doubt the reality of the President’s existence. Put another way, is there a “real” President or are these just empty bodies (like parliament) manipulated by a distant puppeteer? Barata’s revelation so startles Ventura the seller of pasts that he writes the ex-agent off as crazy, like so many others in Luanda: Luanda is full of people who seem completely lucid but suddenly burst out speaking impossible languages, or crying for no apparent reason, or laughing, or cursing. Some do all these things at once. Some are convinced that they’re dead. There are others who really are dead, but no one’s had the guts to tell them. Some think they can fly. Others believe this so strongly that they really can. It’s a fairground of lunatics, this city–out there in those ruined streets, in those clusters or musseque houses all around town, there are pathologies that haven’t even been recorded. Don’t take anything they tell you too seriously. Actually, let me give you a piece of advice–don’t take anybody seriously. (147)

Ventura’s outburst is contradictory in the extreme as it distorts the very lines that are supposed to demarcate reality from fiction. If belief in the

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ability to fly actually produces flight, it becomes impossible to categorize reality as pathology, as Ventura states. But the broader point Ventura makes is quite relevant in the sense that a post-traumatic society is a living pathology; the main difference is having the wherewithal to purchase products that camouflage the condition, as in the case of Ventura’s clients. Later in the text, Ventura meets a man seeking his services, a good example of a man who is dead but does not accept this condition. He claims he woke up one day to find plastic surgery had been done to his face, and an envelope full of dollars thanking him for his services. His initial attempts to reclaim his old identity are met with incredulity by friends. Upon being rebuffed and called crazy by all, he eventually decides to accept his new identity and freedom. His request to Ventura is to create him an ordinary identity that does not call attention to himself, that is, to camouflage the violence of his stolen identity and of wealth obtained in an unorthodox manner. Casting further doubt on the line separating the two, Ventura confesses to his girlfriend Ângela his own invention of a double to help deal with the hard times he experienced as a young adult: the Ventura whom he asked to clean his house, cook, take care of plants and fetch water from a hole in the asphalt by the cemetery (151). Earlier in his courtship of Ângela, Ventura had claimed that a painting of Fredrick Douglass hanging in his living room was that of his great-grandfather, elaborating a history of his return to Angola from Brazil in the nineteenth century after making a fortune selling slaves, then buying a farm in Brazil after slavery ended. When Ângela calls him out on the painting, Ventura claims it is a case of professional distortion: “I create plots for a living. I fabricate so much, all day long, and so enthusiastically that sometimes I reach night-time so lost in the labyrinth of my own fantasies” (115-16). Unlike the example Gikandi proposes, Ventura’s creation of a double does not repress more than the duress of a hard life and involves no commodification of aesthetics. It is a way of dealing with the hardships of ordinary lives, a past that becomes ingrained in the normal creation of self-narrative. More to the point, it does not produce a new way of seeing himself nor does it change his social status. For all intents and purposes, Ventura is able to keep a clear demarcation between reality and fiction in his own life. The albino’s success at inventing pasts for his bourgeois clients suggests that the past is endlessly mutable; thereby undercutting the stable basis for identity it is thought to represent. This proposal is put to the test in the specific case of Pedro Gouveia (who is reinvented by Ventura as José Buchmann): the initial accomplishment of the venture creates a new identity, that is, it rewrites the past into a credible present. Ventura starts

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making up this new identity by procuring an identity card, a driver’s licence and a passport in the new name. He next creates fictional parents and narratives that explain their deaths, backing these up with appropriately-aged sepia pictures and newspaper articles. As the geckonarrator observes, Pedro Gouveia grows into his new identity, becoming a different person as the days go by, more in tune with his invented past. From the initial extraordinary nineteenth-century moustache and dark suits to soft Slavic accent, florid silk print shirts and sports shoes to the Luandan rhythm of “broad laugh and happy insolence of people native to this place” (59), this double metamorphosis seems diabolic or magical at least to the gecko: Ventura invents Buchmann who then invents himself (67). It seems the dead Buchmann is taking over the personality of the foreigner who asked for Ventura’s help. This new reality comes into conflict with the real past towards the end of the novel, when it is revealed that Gouveia is actually on a mission to find out and avenge the murder of his pregnant wife and the torture of his baby daughter. The reason for his assumption of a new identity is to facilitate his quest. He succeeds in finding Edmundo Barata dos Reis—ex-agent of State Security, the man who ordered the arrest and torture of his wife and who is now a homeless lunatic living an underground existence in the streets of Luanda—and the conflict appears to shatter the new identity he had assumed. For Ventura, there is a difference between forging and inventing dreams (17-18), evident in his initial protest when Buchmann requests the fabrication of a completely new identity (24). His work, he says, can be considered an advanced form of literature: “I think what I do is really an advanced kind of literature […] I create plots, I invent characters, but rather than keeping them trapped in a book I give them life, launching them out into reality” (68). Ventura’s reformulation of his profession comes about after an altercation between two members of parliament during a book launch of an Angolan diaspora writer “who had built up his whole career abroad, selling our national horrors to European readers.” Both members of parliament take issue with the writer’s representation of the country’s recent history, accusing him of ignorance or outright mendacity. The writer defends himself by saying “that the principal difference between a dictatorship and a democracy is that in the former there exists only one truth, the truth as imposed by power, while in free countries every man has the right to defend his own version of events. Truth […] is a superstition” (68). This anecdotal part of Agualusa’s novel belies its overall importance. Is Angola really a democracy? Are people really free? Agualusa’s understated critique of corruption here seems to signal resignation to the

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status quo, or at least an ironic acceptance of the disillusion from previous utopian ideals. No part of his novel can be termed an open denunciation of corruption and violence, though subtle cues are scattered in the text. As mentioned earlier, the violence of the two previous conflicts, the destruction and repression they bring about, coupled with the wholesale corruption and clientelism operated by the ruling elite, squarely challenge this notion. When journalists are jailed or murdered for investigating corruption in high places, and where only state television and state radio are allowed to broadcast nationally (Messiant 112), there is only one truth: the monopoly of the ruling government. This is the underbelly repressed by the aesthetic narrative and fuelled by the culture of consumption. In the absence of reliable facts, it attempts to reduce the right to one’s truth to the ability to pay for products. In a closely controlled climate of predation and coercion, the only freedom the individual has is to consume. Lacking the means to do so, the only recourse is to fiction, as per Ventura’s remarks on the pathologies exhibited by Luandans. Ventura’s creation of a new identity for Pedro Gouveia/Buchmann may be proof of the effect of the power of narrative to transform lives and people. Aestheticised narratives affect the present, as history in general is assumed to do. If one changes the past, the present is also changed. It is not as harmless as Ventura likes to think, in contrast to his objection to what he calls forgery. Fiction is real, and has real-life impact. In this sense, Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons is not that different in its analysis from Gikandi’s Slavery and the Culture of Taste. In their instrumentalisation of culture, the foregrounding of the sensuous over the rational, in both cases, leads to a profound subjectivity that destabilizes present and past.

Bibliography Agualusa, José Eduardo. 2006. O Vendedor de Passados. Trad. Daniel Hahn. The Book of Chameleons. New York: Simon & Schuster. Print. Arenas, Fernando. 2011. Lusophone Africa: Beyond Independence. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P. Print. Baumeister, Roy F. 1986. Identity: Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self. New York: Oxford U.P. Print. Brown, Christopher Leslie. 2006. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P. Print. Brown, Nicholas. 2005. Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U.P. Print. Chabal, Patrick, and Nuno Vidal, eds. 2008. Angola: The Weight of History. New York: Columbia U.P. Print.

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Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1994. “Percept, Affect, and Concept.” What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia U.P. Print. Gikandi, Simon. 2011. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton: Princeton U.P. Print. Messiant, Christine. “The Mutation of Hegemonic Domination.” In Angola: The Weight of History, edited by Patrick Chabal and Nuno Vidal, 93-123. Print. Reed, Kristin. 2009. Crude Existence: Environment and the Politics of Oil in Northern Angola. Berkeley: U. of California P. Print.

CHAPTER FIVE GALDÓS AND AFRICA: A SPANIARD SPEAKS FOR THE SUBALTERN MICHAEL UGARTE

Abstract This essay explores the connections between canonical nineteenth-century realist writer Benito Pérez Galdós and Africa. As a man raised in the Canary Islands, Galdós was, in many ways, African. Yet few scholars of modern peninsular literature have looked into this crucial issue with a great deal of attention. The essay discusses the attempt to represent the African (in this case Moroccan) subaltern voice in two novels that Galdós set during the Tetouan War of 1859: Aita Tettauen and Carlos VI en La Rápita. The essay presents Galdós’s texts from the perspective of ventriloquism. Galdós’s narrator often speaks for the Moroccans fighting against the Spaniards in this colonial war, but, in doing so, this canonical nineteenth-century author questions the very notion of Spanish identity. Both texts point and add to theories of the subaltern voice in post-colonial studies: particularly that of Gayatri Spivak in her famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Antes de que el mundo dejara de ser joven y antes de que la Historia fuese mayor de edad, se pudo advertir y comprobar la decadencia y ruina de todas las cosas humanas y su derivación lenta desde lo sublime a lo pequeño, desde lo bello a lo vulgar, cayendo las grandezas de hoy para que en su lugar grandezas nuevas se levanten, y desvaneciéndose los ideales más puros en la viciada atmósfera de la realidad. Decaen los imperios, se desmedran las razas, los fuertes se debilitan y la hermosura perece entre arrugas y canas. (Galdós, Aita Tettauen 97) [Before the world was no longer young and before History became elderly, it was possible to detect and confirm the ruin and decadence of all things human and their slow decomposition from the sublime to the small, from

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Aita Tettauen, in transcribed Arabic the “Tetoan War” of 1859-1860, is a novel in a series of Episodios Nacionales (National Episodes) by canonical Spanish author Benito Pérez Galdós, a man whose life (18431920) traverses the Spanish Empire’s definitive end circa 1898. In these opening sentences, Galdós’s typically sardonic third-person narrator declares what we all know as readers no matter where we are from or in what age we are living: empires, no matter how strong, will eventually fall as new ones emerge. Yet, given that the Tetouan War was by today’s standard as much a pathetic skirmish as an all-out war, the reader wonders just how “great” Spain’s greatness really was. Wars are wonderful happenings for novelists, and this particular one was no exception: it had several well-known Spanish writers to narrate it. Yet, unlike War and Peace and other epic war novels, Aita Tettauen (1904) and its sequel, Carlos VI en La Rápita (1905) relate the conflict with an ironic-picaresque tone that prefigures a modern sensibility. At first glance, the seemingly orientalist discourse of these two novels is crucial both to the understanding of the Spanish cultural sensibilities in the years heralding the nation’s definitive end-of-empire, as well as to the permutations and complications of orientalism itself. Yet at the same time, as I will argue in this essay, Galdós never makes clear his own perspective on the issue of the Moroccan War. Given the various levels of narration in these two novels, the reader must ask how and from whom we receive the discourse of these novels. Indeed, this is a question Galdós seems intent on asking. But not only is the perspective unclear, these novels add a particular feature to Galdós’s novelistic repertoire by offering a voice relatively unheard in Spanish culture: that of the African subaltern, in this case Moroccan. Galdós, in both of these overlapping novels, describes, explores and indirectly criticizes the Tetouan War by creating several curious characters from diverse backgrounds who participate in various aspects of the war. One of these is a Spanish renegade convert to Islam. In the entire third section of Aita Tettauen (nearly 100 pages), the Spanish Muslim renegade is the narrator. The question worth posing is whether Galdós is, indeed, allowing the subaltern to speak. Could it be the author? I am using the term “subaltern” as a counter-category to Spanish Christians, who, by definition, have an upper hand in their dealings with colonial Moroccans of the Islamic faith. Of course, Don Benito would never have said that his

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intention was to give voice to the subaltern. I believe, however, that these literary re-creations of an imperialist war at the very least manifest his desire to enter the mind of an Arab in conflict with Spanish imperialism. Moreover, the Muslim in question (who has both a Spanish alias and an Arab name), is subaltern in the broadest sense because he is on the receiving side of imperialism. But again, is he? My point is that, in the creation of a renegade from Spain, Galdós is playing with hybrid identities that foreground the muted speech of a subaltern. But before we delve further into those fascinating and, indeed, timely novels, we need to be clear about what and whom we are calling subaltern. For that purpose, I turn to recent, and not-so-recent, theory. Writing her 1988 seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Gayatri Spivak, the famous critical theorist and advocate for the subaltern, questions the assumptions of subaltern studies, represented by, among others, Ranajit Guha, who called for the re-thinking and re-writing of world culture from a “non-elitist” or non-colonialist point of view. Guha’s goal, as is the case of others’, was an attempt to discover, recover and expose the voices at the receiving end of colonialism. In a word, subaltern studies wanted to allow the subaltern to speak in his/her own voice. But Spivak brilliantly questioned the very attempt to do so in her essay and addressed herself directly to Guha by pointing out that to speak from the subject position of a colonized and/or subaltern entity is itself a questionable enterprise, if it is at all even possible. In both her 1988 essay and a subsequent revised version published in 1999, Spivak asserts: A curious methodological imperative is at work… a post-representational imperative hides an essentialist agenda [Foucault-Deleuze]. In subaltern studies, because of the violence of imperialist epistemic, social and disciplinary inscriptions [Said], a project understood in essentialist terms must traffic in a radical textual practice of differences.… Guha sees his definition of ‘the people’ within the master-slave dialectic—their text articulates the difficult task of rewriting its own conditions of impossibility as the condition of its possibility. (Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Morris 39 and 254)

Therein lies the contradiction of the study of the subaltern as those who espouse it articulate its aims. It rewrites the condition of impossibility by pretending possibility. As I read this famous essay by Spivak, and virtually all of her subsequent writing, it seems to me—pardon my simplification, but I find it necessary for my purposes here—that she is asking us if the subaltern has been deprived of his/her own thought and expression in the throes of colonialism and oppression. That is to say, if the subaltern has

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internalized his/her own inability to speak, how can that speech be represented? As many critics have pointed out, Spivak goes beyond this question. She also asserts that those who claim to speak for the subaltern are masking their own, perhaps, unwitting essentialist agenda. Essentialism is certainly not where we want to go, because essentialism got us to where we are right now.1 Following this history of critical thought on culture and language, a very healthy and, in my view, productive debate has emerged on those ideas. The issues surrounding the authenticity (admittedly a loaded word) of the voices of those we all really want to hear—those not in power, victims of colonialism, colonial subjects, Blacks, South Asians, women, marginal people, and many more—have become topics of debate in a variety of contexts, including fields such as Latin American and AfroHispanic literatures and cultures. Indeed, in Latin American Studies, “Subaltern Studies Groups” emerged in the nineties. The publication of a Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, edited by Ileana Rodríguez, underscored the interest in issues dealing with subalternity. To be sure, since Spivak’s 1988 publication, reflections on the issue have evolved in diverse and interesting ways. Spivak herself has revisited the issue, clarifying her concepts, modifying and elaborating on them particularly in light of all that has happened on the globe since 1988. Why should she not? I mention just two cosmic events since then—the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 (with everything that goes along with these happenings). However, very few in my field of modern peninsular literature (eighteenth century to the present), a field in which Don Benito reigns as a must-read—you had better read him if you want to pass your MA and/or PhD exams—have looked into the crucial issue of subalternity with a great deal of attention. Exceptions to this norm are those of us who study Equatorial Guinea or Spanish culture in today’s Arab world. Since there are growing numbers of us, it is imperative that we ask this question: how does the presence of the subaltern or the attempt to represent the subaltern manifest itself in the issues, authors and texts that we study, not only in Galdós but in others? First of all, I think it is at least arguable, if not patently clear, that our canonical nineteenth-century realist was African. This might sound blunt and overstated, but it is not a radical or even original statement: he was

 1

For a discussion of the concept of the subaltern in a post-colonial context from a variety of perspectives, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Rosalind C. Morris, Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea.

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born in the Islas Canarias, which are nowhere near Spain. They are in Africa. In recent years, there have been attempts in history and anthropology that try to re-think the history of Canarias from a perspective that privileges their African geography and culture. There are few Hispanists in the field of literature, with the notable exception of the late Senegalese Hispanist Amadou Ndoye, who deal with the literature and culture of Canarias in their African context.2 But Don Benito was aware of his own geography. While there has been precious little published about him or even by him, as far as we know, in exploring his self-perception as an African, we know through correspondence and a very seldommentioned short autobiography that his nostalgia for the islands where he spent the formative years of his life was acute. Galdós’s reluctance to talk about this nostalgia is telling. Is it possibly about the unwitting subaltern not speaking? Galdós does, however, speak about Africa—what is today Morocco— in the two national episode volumes that I mentioned earlier. In these two novels and elsewhere in his writing, we see an attempt, albeit unconscious, to explore the tensions between the colony and the imperial power, the slave and the master, the colonized subject and the colonizer, the one in charge and the one whose calling it is to answer and obey the one in charge: in short, the subaltern and his/her superior. We need not forget that, in spite of belonging to a different generation, Galdós did deploy these fartoo-simple contrasts. In the two lengthy first sections of Aita Tettauen, Galdós immerses his characters in the midst of the “national episode” of the “Guerra de Tetuán.” This is Galdós’s gesture toward Arabic (keep in mind that the title Aita Tettauen, in transcribed Arabic, means the War of Tetouan). This is the only “national episode” with a title in a language other than Spanish. At the outset, this begs the question: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” One can surmise, at least, a partial answer to that question: the subaltern clearly can speak in his/her language. But, then again, where does that language come from? What, however, becomes clear from a cursory reading of these two novels is that Galdós sets out to debunk the vainglorious Spanish enthusiasm for the war by parodying Pedro Alarcón’s Diario de un testigo, the author’s real memoir on the war. 3 Indeed, in the third section, our



2 See Amadou Ndoye’s pioneering book, Estudios sobre la literatura canaria del 70. 3 Alarcón’s lengthy “diary” could not be more different from Galdós’s novel in its political content. Essentially, Alarcón assumes the superiority of Spanish Catholic culture and justifies Spanish dominance in Morocco. His nationalist and orientalist

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Canarian/African novelist decides to re-tell many of the descriptions of the war in the previous sections from the perspective of someone of the Islamic faith. Yet again, who is this person? Who is this candidate for subalternity? To call him a subaltern in the classic definition might be a stretch: he is ethnically Spanish—but not only Spanish. He is of the wellto-do Ansúrez clan that has populated Galdós’s other national episodes. He is Gonzalo Ansúrez, son of Jerónimo. His father is an old codger who articulates in the first section a typically Spanish orientalist discourse that claims that Spaniards and Arabs are cultural allies: they love religious law and its connection to the State. They are also comfortable with multiple women as partners: “Qué es el moro más que un español mahometano?” (105) [“What is a Moor but a Spaniard of the Islamic faith?”]. But never did Jerónimo think that his son, Gonzalo, would actually become one of them, much less adopt a new name, Sidi El Hach Mohammed Ben Sur El Nasiry. The unwritten understanding, however, throughout the novel is that the Spaniards will always have the upper hand: it is their war. It is their indignation in the face of the threat of a loss of their hegemony in the area. Although the father of the renegade, don Jerónimo, never says so explicitly, he would never go as far as to say that Spaniards and Moors are equals. What his son has done, however, is to express that not only are they equals, but also that Muslims have a true understanding of the word of God (Allah). Interestingly, El Nasiry (aka Gonzalo) is a reliable narrator of the third section of the novel in his historical reasoning, despite the fact that many Spaniards think he is crazy, a not-altogether-inaccurate supposition, as Francisco Márquez Villanueva points out in his thorough and engaging analysis of Aita Tettauen and Carlos VI en La Rápita. 4 El Nasiry is a curiously levelheaded character despite his narrative function as a renegade who has rejected all things Spanish for understandable reasons. Indeed, in his words and actions, one detects the ways in which Galdós interrogates orientalist discourse within a turn-of-the-century context. Admittedly, one might say that the way Galdós structures his rendition of reality is orientalist: it is an unabashed imitation of how a person of the Islamic faith might speak. He resorts to mock clichés such as “las bendiciones de Allah” [“Allah’s blessings”], “confiado en la protección

 discourse is a constant throughout this work. It becomes the object of parody in Galdós. 4 Márquez Villanueva’s “Estudio Preliminar” to the novels perceptively states at one point that Galdós seems to be unwittingly aware of the discourse of “orientalism” as deconstructed by Edward Said in his well-known book, Orientalism.

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del Cielo” [“confident under Heaven’s protection”], and “los infieles ocupan su tiempo en ridículos preparativos” [“the infidels fill their time with ridiculous preparations”] (249). In essence, there is no free will (as an orientalist description of Islamic beliefs might assume); truth is written in the Koran and Allah’s wish will win no matter what. Indeed, Galdós’s own rendition of how an Arab, or a self-assumed Arab, might speak is orientalist. Moreover, if we take stock of this renegade Spanish Muslim’s speech, we see that much of what he says is a critique of his own culture’s military failure as he concludes that, in the long run, it is what Allah wished. Still, there is no denying that Galdós’s orientalism is self-conscious. The clincher to all this is that El Nasiry, in the fourth part, takes back much of what he has said in the third, since he was writing at the behest of his protector, El Zebdy, “en el gusto musulmán” [“in the Muslim taste”] (356). What we have, therefore, is the author creating a double-voiced Spaniard (both Christian and Muslim) who, in turn, is obliged to speak for someone else.5 One can argue that Galdós knew what he was doing. There is no pretence of offering the “real” picture of the Arab perspective on the Moroccan War. Márquez Villanueva’s discussion of Galdós’s determination to present the other side of the conflict is perhaps too celebratory. He designates the change in narrative voice in the third part of the novel as “el mayor acierto de Galdós”—Galdós’s greatest achievement. More important, however, is the way our canonical nineteenth-century realist problematizes reality itself by juxtaposing several subject positions: Alarcón’s and those of his nationalist/orientalist ilk, Santiuste’s and that of this curious renegade Muslim convert. But, does this Spanish Muslim renegade speak as a subaltern? The answer, I suspect, is absolutely not. His intention is certainly not to give voice to the voiceless. His speech is a contrivance. It is Galdós’s appropriation of what he thinks a Muslim would say. In spite of this assertion, it is fair to state that what Galdós does is to put this issue into question. Much of the same exploration of the Spanish Arab connection manifests itself in Carlos VI en La Rápita. Morocco as a place and a counter-voice fades as Galdós begins to concentrate on another event in Spanish history: an equally pathetic or, even more, abortive coup in which Carlos VI attempts to take power from Isabel II, the nemesis of the Carlists. Of interest in the context of Galdos’s assumed voices is the parallel he devises between the Tetouan War and this failed coup. Galdós, in his

 5

One is reminded of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in which several pages are dedicated to the speech of a Moor, victim of that historic wholesale expulsion.

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typically ironic and playful way, is debunking the “greatness” of the Spanish Empire by narrating the curious events and strategic details of these skirmishes that are anything but grandiose. Although, at first glance, this might appear obvious, it may not be that obvious after all: this act of debunking manifests itself through a coy attempt to allow the subaltern to speak. In Carlos VI en La Rápita—the sequel to Aita Tettauen—Galdós, on the one hand, offers dialogically what we are led to believe is an accurate historical assessment of that war. For example, when the seemingly pacifist narrator, Juan Santiuste, or Confusio, as his friends call him, exclaims that Spain has gained little by sending troops to secure its Moroccan possessions, El Nasiry, a Spanish renegade now a follower of Islam, answers that Spain has achieved its proposed goals. He says that Spain’s real intention in sending troops to Tetouan was not so much to gain or re-gain territory as it was to demonstrate its military (read imperial) power. On the other hand, however, to what extent are we readers to believe anything the renegade says, even when it sounds rational? There is much in these novels that harkens back to Said’s notion of orientalism, but I think those instances also demonstrate the question of the subaltern and its/his/her speech. Clearly, the Arab subaltern that Galdós has created speaks in a way that we can hardly call authentic. His creation even questions whether this Spanish renegade is indeed a subaltern; in fact, we might even be able to put him in the category of usurper of the subaltern’s discourse, much in the familiar rhetoric of a Montesquieu in Lettres Persiennes, José Caldalso in Cartas marruecas, Goytisolo’s Makbara, T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars and John Walker Lindh’s Focus on American Taliban. But I think there is a difference between Galdós and virtually all these others who become ventriloquists for the Arab subaltern’s voice. The difference is that, in Galdós, literally nothing is clear. At the end of the novels, we are not sure exactly who has spoken or for whom. In my reading of Spivak, the answer to her question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is yes, but only in the form of a question. The end result of both of these novels is just that: who has spoken? How do we read Spanish history? Who writes Spanish history and to what ends? Who has spoken for the victims? Is it possible to speak for the victims? These are real—not rhetorical—questions, and if indeed we propose to do so, to “give voice to the voiceless,” we need to ask Spivak’s question. To conclude, the subaltern remains, above all, a question.

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Bibliography Alarcón. Pedro. 1974. Diario de un testigo de la guerra de África, edited by Alberto Navarro González. Madrid: Ediciones del Centro. Print. Álvarez Chillida, Gonzalo. 2002. El antisemitismo en España: La imagen del judío. Madrid: Marcial Pons, Historia. Print. Beverley, John. 1994. Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory. Duke U.P. Print. Fernández Cifuentes, Luis. 2007. “Southern Exposure: Early Tourism and Spanish National Identity.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 13.2-3: 133-48. Print. Goytisolo, Juan. 1988. Makbara. Barcelona: Seiz Barral. Print. Hooper, Kirsty. 2006. “Reading Spain’s ‘African Vocation’: The Figure of the Moorish Priest in Three fin de siglo Novels (1890-1907).” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 40: 171-95. Print. Jubran, Carl. 2002. Spanish Internal Orientalism, Cultural Hybridity, and the Production of National Identity: 1877-1940. Diss., University of California San Diego. Print. Lawrence, T. E. 1991. Seven Pillars of Wisdom. New York: Knoph. Print. Linhard, Tabea. 2008. “In the Precarious Exilic Realm: Edward Said's Andalusian Journeys.” In Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid, edited by Mina Karavanta and Nina Morgan, 140-57. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Print. Márquez Villanueva, Francisco, ed. “Estudio preliminar.” Pérez Galdós, Aitta Tettauen: 7-94. Print. Martin-Márquez, Susan. 2008. Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity. Hew Haven: Yale U.P. Print. Mignolo, Walter. 2005. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, MA.: Blackwell. Print. Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat. 1949. Lettres persanes. Paris: Société de Belles Lettres. Print. Ndoye, Amadou. 2006. Estudios sobre la narrativa canaria del 70. Tenerife: Editorial Baile del Sol, Tenerife. Print. Pérez Galdós, Benito. 2004. Aita Tettauen, edited by Francisco Márquez Villanueva. Madrid: Akal Ediciones. Print. —. 1925. Carlos VI en La Rápita. Madrid: Casa Editorial Hernando. Print. —. 1984. Misericordia. Madrid: Austral. Print. Rodríguez, Iliana, ed. 2001. The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Duke U.P. Print.

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Said, Edward. “Andalusia’s Journey.” Travel + Leisure. Dec. 2002. Jan. 2011. Print. —. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Print. —. 1999. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage. Print. —. 1983. “Travelling Theory.” In The World, the Text, and the Critic, 226-47. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard U.P.: Print. Santiáñez, Nil. 2008. “De la tropa al tropo: Colonialismo, escritura de guerra y enunciación metafórica en Diario de un testigo de la guerra de África.” Hispanic Review 76.1: 71-93. Print. Schraibman, Joseph. 1987. “Pedro Antonio de Alarcón y Galdós: dos visiones de la guerra de África (1859-1860).” La Torre (Homenaje a Albert A. Sicroff) 1: 539-47. Print. Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Carey Nelson and Lawrence Grosberg. Urbana: U. of Illinois P. Print. —. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard U.P. Print. —. 2000. “A Moral Dilemma.” In What Happens to History, edited by Howard Marchitello. London: Routledge. Print. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty and Rosalind C. Morris, eds. 2010. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia U.P. Print. Tsuchiya, Akiko. 1988. “History as Language in the First Series of the Episodios Nacionales: The Literary Creation of Gabriel de Araceli.” Anales Galdosianos 23: 11-25. Print. Urey, Diane. 1989. The Novel Histories of Galdós. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U.P. Print.

CHAPTER SIX THE DANGEROUS LIAISONS OF SPAIN AND AFRICA: HYBRIDITY AND IMMIGRATION IN CONTEMPORARY SPANISH CINEMA BERNARDO ANTONIO GONZÁLEZ

Abstract Montxo Armendáriz’s Las cartas de Alou (1990), Llorenç Soler’s Said (1998) and Chus Gutiérrez’s Retorno a Hansala (2008) are linked by a striking similarity of theme, style and technique. These similarities suggest the existence of an underlying paradigm or national discourse concerning the representation of immigration in Spain today. The transcultural romantic liaison that is central to this paradigm reflects, allegorically, a common ideological approach to the question of identity formation within modern multicultural societies.

Armendáriz’s Prototype Las cartas de Alou (1990), arguably the first major Spanish film centred on the theme of immigration, opens with close-ups of men descending into the small patera that will taxi them clandestinely across the treacherous Straits of Gibraltar to Spain. The intimacy of the close-ups that shift in rapid succession, the use of a hand-held camera plus the reduced visibility (the scene occurs in the dark of night) visually reinforce the force of the waves, the peril of the crossing, and the emotional impact of the experience as lived by the immigrants. The quick-paced interchange of images, voices and languages—Spanish, Moroccan Arabic and Senegalese—contributes further to our sense of chaos and expectation

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that is tempered by Alou’s first “carta” (letter), a voiceover narration that orders the experience while explaining both his motives for emigrating and the basis for his mother’s objections: “None of your other brothers will have your name or voice.” The voiceover ends as the first rays of the sun begin to shed some clarity on Alou, as he emerges from his silhouette, and as he forays into a new day in the Promised Land. For Spanish viewers, even without the final credits, the geographic coordinates of the journey to and fro that Montxo Armendáriz plots out for his protagonist over the course of a 100-minute full-length feature are patently clear, but perhaps less so is the deeper symbolism embedded in his circular experience. Thus, after his initial stint collecting squash in the greenhouses of Andalucía, Alou proceeds north through Madrid and on to Barcelona, in search of his compatriot Mulai, and from Barcelona to the farmlands of Lleida, in search of the fruits of personal fulfillment, of the ratification of his “voice and name”—of himself, in short—through, as hinted throughout, the experience of family. Roads, rails, trains, streets, the feet that tread and the face and eyes that observe and absorb are flaunted as the visual motifs of Alou’s destiny-oriented experience. Lleida’s pristine orchards in Spain’s northeast mark Alou’s deepest penetration into the interior reaches of what might be termed—in keeping with the society—customs and attitudes such as they are represented—the traditional, deep, or pure Spain, particularly in contrast with the images of the cosmopolitan Barcelona portrayed earlier. More to the point, Lleida’s pear orchards mark the spot where what is purely local or national is defended, where the foreign seed is repelled, where the potential for a blending of races that is suggested along Alou’s route is resisted, nullified. The immigrant henceforth begins to retrace his steps, by returning first to Barcelona, at Carmen’s father’s behest, and finally to Senegal, when he is arrested and deported. The final image of Alou defying the law by returning to Spain in the hope of finding Carmen fails to break the hermetic seal of exclusion that is configured by his travels. Rather, it suggests the future of a revolving door, the unending circle experienced by so many in their experiences at so many crossings.1 Motifs abound throughout that either engender or eroticize the circle’s dynamic in such a way as to inflect it with the interracial implications suggested above. Alou’s progress north is punctuated at strategic intervals by his increasingly significant encounters with Spanish women: from the casual interchange with the well-intentioned female farmworkers in El



1 Isolina Ballesteros (233-34) also discusses these patterns of circularity in her analysis of this film.

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Ejido (Almería), to his nocturnal interactions in Madrid’s discotheques with women who sexually objectify Alou, to his arrival in Barcelona, where he is met by Mulai’s Spanish wife, Rosa. The many allusions, both verbal and visual, to the experience of a future constructed around a biracial family—his curiosity over the experiences of other immigrants; the recurring image of Alou holding Rosa and Mulai’s baby girl— contextualize Alou’s heart-felt love affair with the bartender’s daughter in the rural town where Alou works in the orchards. They point to the underlying fact that Alou’s is a journey based on a multifaceted desire that, on the one hand, has to do with personal fulfillment, as mentioned, while, on the other, it points allegorically to the potential for redefining the social fabric of the nation. Taken in and of itself, the story that Montxo Armendáriz weaves in Las cartas de Alou would seem more or less anecdotal were it not for the fact that other Spanish film artists have subsequently reworked the very paradigms outlined in this brief introduction in accordance with their personal ethics and aesthetics. Llorenç Soler and Chus Gutiérrez are singularly representative in this regard, not only for the full-length feature films, the former’s Said (1998) and the latter’s Retorno a Hansala (2008), in which they develop Armendáriz’s paradigms in new and suggestive ways, but for the conclusions that emerge from a contextualized and comparative analysis of these works. It should be noted in this regard that these film directors are equally at home in both documentary and fiction genres, Soler having produced various educational social documentaries for Catalan television and Gutierrez for public television in Madrid. As we shall see, the documentary thrust of their filmography, in terms of both style and content, represents a fundamental frame of reference for interpreting their film portrayals of the African immigrant in Spain.

Llorenç Soler (Valencia, 1936) and Chus Gutiérrez (Granada, 1962), in Context Soler has garnered a certain public reputation, at least in the Levante region (eastern Spain), for his documentary shots, which concern historical, political or ecological issues of general public interest. His Los orígenes del catalanismo político (1980), La mancomunidad de Cataluña (1980), Tierra entre tierra y mar (1982) and El tren de Sarrià: 125 anys d’historia (1863-1988) (1988) were all filmed for and transmitted by Catalan public television. Public health shots such as Falta y especulación de la sangre (1978) in support of the Red Cross blood drive, although hardly significant in any artistic sense, serve to underscore the public service element in

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Soler’s profile, an element that blends in suggestive ways with his interest, as a documentary film artist, in giving testimony to the lives and contributions of singularly important individuals—men, it bears noting— who have in some way suffered a painfully marginalizing experience: Walter Benjamin in Soler’s L’ultima frontera (1992), the Catalan photographer and holocaust survivor (Mauthausen) Francisco Boix in Francisco Boix, un fotógrafo en el invierno (2000), the exiled Valencian Republican writer in Max Aub: Un escritor en su laberinto (2002) and the Valencian essayist, poet and nationalist Joan Fuster in Ser Joan Fuster (2009). This impulse to document the human and, in these cases, individualized sense of marginality parallels his focus on the complexities of a shared or collective marginality in El viaje inverso (2007), a film that projects the unique convergences and resulting tensions of emigrant interacting with immigrant, native with foreign, and old with young, in the symbolically significant province of Soria, the medieval cradle of what many take to be authentic or pure Spanishness. The testimonial impulse that runs throughout Soler’s film production is central to the various headings under which Gutiérrez’s films can be categorized. Like Soler, Gutiérrez has received strong public endorsements for her work, not only within the national sphere—many of her movies are supported by Spanish national television in Madrid—but also from international organizations. In Las siete alcantarillas, the segment she created for the UNESCO-sponsored En el Mundo a Cada Rato (2004), Gutiérrez employs the eyes, voices and bodies of children to document abandonment, violence and repression among those living in misery and squalor on the fringes of Córdoba, Argentina. The harshness of the unknown world she explores and of the images she brings back to the general public reflects a certain bravery and adventurousness that underpin much of her film production, much of which deals with diverse types of marginality: marginalized sectors of society, marginalized social practices, marginalized moments and spaces in the modern urban jungle and marginalized zones—private, unconventional or taboo practices and desires—within the complex jungle of human psychology. Porros on the roof (1984) and Sneakers of Fire (1985) deal with drug culture; Tropicana (1986) and Sexo oral (1994) deal with sexual behaviour that may seem transgressive. ¡Hay motivos! (2004; she contributed the segment on adolescents), Mi primer amanecer (2010; segment) and Me gustaría estar enamorada... a veces me siento muy sola (2010) treat youth (adolescent) nightlife within the framework of the modern city. In contrast to Soler, whose individualized portraits tend to be men, Gutiérrez’s realistic portrayals of individuals, whether testimonial or fictionalized, underscore

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the plight of women, almost always struggling with the social and material challenges of modern urban life, often by night: as in Insomnio (1997); Lunch Time (2005; short); Sublet (1991); and El calentito (2005). Her highly regarded and much studied Poniente (2002) represents an important incursion into the theme of immigration, as experienced, in this case, by Spanish farm owners in the south (Daddesio, Berger). Her more recent collaboration with three other women directors, in Ellas son... África (2010) offers a compelling example of how she has crossed borders in her films in order to project foreign perspectives. In short, this documentary on how women are driving progress throughout Africa today captures several elements that are basic to our understanding of Chus Gutiérrez generally: her interest in collaborative projects; her focus on communities that may experience marginalization due to issues of gender, race, ethnicity or nationality; her partnership with public institutions (Ellas was produced with the support of Spanish national television); and, by extension, her acute awareness of the didactic role that film can play in public life. Most of these films qualify as documentaries, and some do not, but they all share a desire to give real or realistic testimony to less trodden zones, social or psychological, of the contemporary world. Although, again, a mere detail within a rich and complex oeuvre, El diario de Manuel (2009), a short public health documentary on the topic of ankylosing spondylitis, confirms the spirit of public service that is as fundamental to Gutiérrez’s profile as it is to Soler’s. One might conclude from this overview that the two artists in question are driven by the mutual desire to mainstream what is unjustly or inappropriately sidelined owing to generalized attitudes and corresponding standardized codes of conduct. What stands out, in this regard, is Soler’s and Gutiérrez’s shared insistence on working within the public sphere— they are blessed, of course, with the institutional endorsement of their efforts—where, presumably, they might maximize their influence over social values, and by the natural, most often seamless, blending of the fictional and the real in their personal film style. Soler has reflected on the problematic status of truth and representation in film in his essays (Los hilos: 19-21), which, in and of themselves, constitute further proof of this artist’s didactic impulse. His essays (Así se crean, Los hilos secretos, and Historia crítica) take the appearance of personal (artistic) testimonies, manuals for aspiring film artists and pedagogical introductions to the theory, praxis and history of Spanish cinema. These categories merge, in short, in a generalized reflection on the sense of “discovery” that Soler seeks to instill in the viewer through the techniques of “immediacy” that Manuel Barrios Lucena summarizes in his “Prólogo” to Soler’s and

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Romaguera’s Historia (19-18). Through a natural and seemingly spontaneous film “gaze” (“mirada”) that Soler creates with his camera, a “gaze” that seems unmediated, as if born at the moment of our viewing, spectators are enticed towards a new awareness of the social order that they (we) inhabit and towards a deeper understanding, one would hope, of our role within that order. It goes without saying that the documentary style or personal techniques applied by Soler and Gutierrez in their filmediting go hand in hand with their profound sense of an ideological commitment to issues of social justice and political equality. In fact, the socio-political commitment that emerges from this overview is crucial for our understanding of Soler’s and Gutiérrez’s treatment of the immigrant in Said and Retorno a Hansala respectively, the two movies that are central to this essay. As we shall see, their ideological response to the topic can be related in large part to the elements of style and technique by which they problematize, within the framework of these ostensibly fictitious full-length feature films, a conventional understanding of how fact relates to fiction conceptually and in terms of film genres (documentaries versus feature films). They achieve this, moreover, during a period of burgeoning interest in the theme of immigration among Spanish cultural practitioners, an obvious reminder of the essential interconnectedness of social reality and artistic creativity and of our need to interpret art within its historical and cultural context. In Spain’s case, this context is characterized by the sudden and radical conversion of a nation of emigrants into a land of immigrants, a tendency that gathers steam precisely around the time when Armendáriz premiered Las cartas de Alou. This trend has since been widely discussed in relation to cultural production, generally speaking (Barbadillo Griñán, and Kreienbrink), and for its impact on cinema in particular (Andrés-Suárez, Ballesteros, Damerau, López Cotín, Nair, and Van Liew). It bears noting that the trend has also been celebrated with important high-profile public exhibits and events organized by those institutions, most notably Madrid’s Círculo de Bellas Artes (De la España que emigra) and Barcelona’s Centre de Cultura Contemporàia (Ciutat i immigració), that are widely perceived, by virtue of the activities they sponsor, as sharing Soler’s and Gutiérrez’s ideological commitment to justice and equality.

Soler’s and Gutiérrez’s Gypsy Within this framework, it is telling that Soler and Gutiérrez should, generally speaking, both apply the paradigms outlined here to their treatment not only of the immigrant but of the gypsy as well, historically

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Spain’s quintessential other, the former in Lola vende ca (2000), and the latter in Alma gitana (1996), both tales of failed romance focusing on the gitana, and both centred on the issue of transcultural understanding between gypsies and payos (non-gypsies). The fact that the drama in Alma gitana pivots on a transcultural romantic attraction—Lucía’s relationship with the payo Antonio results in nothing but conflict, with her community and within herself, that in the end remains unresolved and the affection persists as Lucía departs with her family for Seville, to think about things—makes Alma gitana an especially interesting harbinger of Retorno a Hansala. As we shall see, Retorno also shuttles back and forth across ethnic, national and sentimental boundaries, and its open-ended plot is of allegorical proportions. In Lola vende ca, Soler internalizes the conflict within the confines of the individual female’s conscience, giving the young woman a protagonism that she is denied in many of his other films and that is the hallmark of Gutiérrez’s cinema. He complicates his story, nevertheless, by framing Lola’s attraction to her fellow gypsy, Juan, as a transcultural struggle on a different plane. To do so, he adopts the metacinematographic convention of the narrative frame rooted in our reality: segments intercalated throughout the movie in which the actress, Cristina Brando, speaks directly to the camera, in a neutral space, about the challenges she faced as a paya residing for roughly two months in one of Barcelona’s gypsy communities, La Mina, in order to learn to “become Lola.” Shades of hybridity are superimposed one upon another as if a palimpsest, since Cristina’s Lola, herself struggling with social codes— “escrúpulos” (scruples) and “habladurías” (gossiping)—that complicate her goal of an education within her traditional community, is unaware of the fact that she is, in truth, an “arrecogía” (an adopted half-breed). Brando’s heart-felt and moving final monologue offers a poignant synthesis of the experience, such as she lived in real life. Presented with the utmost spontaneity, her monologue takes us, her addressees, into two parallel conflict zones simultaneously, one being that interstitial zone of psycho-social conflict formed where individuals confront their communities, and the other corresponding to the overlap that art and reality share in films of this type and that, when it becomes so uncanny, can surprise or shock us toward new insights: Cuando acabé el rodaje y dejé a Lola tenía mucho miedo, porque mientras estaba con Lola y sentía cierta simbiosis con ella, no entendía o tenía dudas sobre cómo iba a ser mi reincorporación a ser paya, a tener todo un abanico lleno de posibilidades infinitas para hacer lo que quisiera y como pudiese, ¿no?, pero poder escoger la capacidad de decidir como persona lo que iba a hacer con mi vida. Y me daba mucho vértigo...

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Both Lola vende ca and Alma gitana cohere around an ongoing and highly nuanced discussion, involving diverse points of view, of how cultural identity and individual psychology—especially in the form of desire—are affected or conditioned by social codes and expectations. In both movies the experience of dance—flamenco, specifically—is showcased as the ritualized performance of cultural identity and expression, as something that links individuals and their communities inextricably, and it forms the thematic and artistic centrepiece around which discussions of cultural identity and social integration are organized. To be sure, it could be said that Soler’s and Gutiérrez’s cinemas adhere generally to this pattern. To one degree or another, their films mostly reference or represent individuals seeking fulfillment as they struggle to define themselves vis-à-vis an other within a challenging, alienating or foreign environment. The locus of drama in these films corresponds, conceptually, to an interpersonal contact zone, where relational meanings are most intensely lived, and where personal profiles are moulded against one another. When the interpersonal relations involve a gypsy and a payo, as in Alma and Lola, or a Spaniard and an African as in Alou, Said and Retorno a Hansala, that is, when the interstitial space becomes interculturalized, the issues brought to bear in the negotiations as well as the implications of those negotiations acquire a much greater magnitude of meaning, needless to say. In that sense, Cristina’s final reflections on her attempts to assimilate in Lola vende ca may offer useful lessons—a public service, a didactic moment—regarding how to confront the challenges posed by today’s world generally and by Spanish society in particular, as our environment is characterized by a growing number of peoples of disparate origins coexisting in increasingly tight quarters. In this context, Soler suggests, hybridity is a predisposition or frame of mind. It can be a matrix for understanding the world and interacting socially and, as such, it can be our most effective tool for achieving social change. In fact, Cristina seems to suggest that the remaking of the social fabric commences necessarily in the minds of individuals who are at least willing to recognize, if not appropriate, different points of view, especially on themselves, individually and collectively. To the extent that Soler and

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Gutiérrez have dramatized such ideologies in their films, they stand out as unique within the field of directors concerned with the figure of the immigrant. Through the lens of their film production, focused in Said and Retorno a Hansala on Spanish-African liaisons hanging in a precarious balance, they seem to suggest that conditions have recently become especially ripe in Spain for a long-overdue and concerted reflection on the issue of national identity as it relates to alterity, and for the development of a cinematographic discourse that will serve to represent collective experiences while perhaps shaping corresponding social attitudes in useful and effective ways.

Llorenç Soler’s Said and Chus Gutiérrez’s Retorno a Hansala: Parables of Hybridity Both Said and Retorno a Hansala open with an obvious nod to Armendáriz: shots highlighting the immigrant’s passage across the Straits of Gibraltar, an immediate visual indication of Gutiérrez’s and Soler’s intention to enter the fray of a preordained discourse on this theme. Soler’s nocturnal silhouettes in blue-black overtones and hand-held close-ups of faces, hands and feet as the men descend onto the Spanish shore are immediate reminders of Alou, whereas the police helicopter and the musical score represent important variations on the theme. The drone of the helicopter’s propellers, the conversation between the officers flying above and on the ground and the blinding spotlight shining down from the sky foreshadow the systems of power and surveillance commonly represented as hovering, literally or figuratively, in films on this topic. In Said, those systems hover with special force. They bracket the movie insofar as it culminates with the trial in which the protagonist compromises his legal status by testifying against the skinheads who killed his friend, and with the revelation that he and his Moroccan friends are the victims of secretive and violent anti-immigrant collusions linking lawyers, the police and common thugs. The “Soleá del Estrecho” in which the cantaor José Giménez sings of the plight of the anonymous immigrant, “sin nombre y apellido,” converts the Flamenco score into a poignant link between the North African immigrant and the Spanish gypsy: “voy sin nombre y apellío buscando la salvación. . . . Playa del Algarrobico donde llega la patera, cada roca es una tumba, cada noche es un misterio” [I go about looking for salvation without a first or last name… At Algarrobico beach where the dinghy arrives, every rock is a tomb, every night a mystery.] The song signals their common search for salvation (“la

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salvación”), a shared struggle for personal fulfillment in the face of imposing odds and a mutual sense of loneliness (“soleá”) or alienation. Gutiérrez, by contrast, captures the experience of the passage in her opening sequence through the prism of death. She does so by projecting onto her audience the perspective and experience, not the image, of the capsized immigrant who fails to make it to shore. We see with him the crisp profile of the distant Iberian shore sparkling ironically under a pristine morning sky as the camera teeters with the waves, rising and falling above and below the surface of the sea. His gasps, accompanied by eerie, new-age music, resolve slowly to the silence of the depths as the camera sinks and the contours of the light shimmering on the surface blur and recede, as we recede, with the swimmer, to the surreal underwater graveyard of unfulfilled hopes and aspirations. The abrupt cut to the image of Gibraltar’s famed Rock, towering fixedly in the dawn over the morning mist and over a fleet of ships, heralds the circular unfolding of a plot in which love, death, and place will be inextricably intertwined. That the site of the peñón should prove so crucial for this equation, within the paradigm of immigration as adopted by Gutiérrez, is suggested again in the subsequent scene in which Leila, a Moroccan, walks home under the steady gaze of the Rock, her image interspersed with shots of the police recovering bodies along the shore and of Martín, the mortician, as he is awoken by a telephone call from the police. The story circles back to this location in the movie’s final idyllic interlude, with the glimmering panorama of the straits forming the backdrop to Martín’s proposal of a future with Leila. The “imaginary geography” that Edward Said identifies as basic to orientalist discourse is glossed by Leila’s acknowledgement, the script’s final words, that across the water “se ve África” [“one can see Africa”.] If it is true that “imaginary geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away” (Said: 55), the taxonomic force of Leila’s reminder of that geographic and historical distance is stunning, given its framework: a moving interlude of romantic promise, of fulfillment through love in the intercultural contact zone, of new hybridities for an emerging world, on both the personal and global planes. In short, “Africa” and the hybridities it promises “se ven”; they can be envisioned as possibilities, through a trans-Mediterranean way of thinking. The future that Martín proposes to Leila is thus circumscribed by the geography of a love allegory linking the native and the immigrant on one level, and Spain and Africa on another, an allegory centred on Martín’s “vocation” that, as Leila quips, is a bit “strange” but that gains new

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meaning for the undertaker, thanks to his odyssey to repatriate Leila’s brother’s cadaver. Different visual clues strewn along their literal and figurative path back to Hansala suggest something of an ironic undermining of the conventional, Western treatments of this material. To be sure, portrayals of first-world love relationships crashing along roads intended to lead to self-fulfillment in the Asian or African hinterland, in such works as E. M. Forster/David Lean’s A Passage to India and Paul Bowles/Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky, to name just two prime examples, seem to be reflected in the most perilous stage of Martín’s and Leila’s journey south. A nighttime assault and carjacking nearly upend Martín’s and Leila’s project and leaves them marooned in the middle of the most inhospitable of terrains, but they are resolved when they recover their vehicle along with what is most dear to each: the cash Martín has stowed and the coffin Leila desperately needs to take home. The iconization of this scene by the media—the artistic ground-level shot included often with reviews of the travellers huddled together, awakening the following morning under a blazing desert sun—reflects, with no doubt, the prefabricated paradigms of understanding commonly brought to bear on movies of this type; or, more broadly, the databank of “words and images”—Edward Said’s discourse—developed concertedly over time in all forms of European cultural production for understanding—for Orientalizing—the Orient.2 The fact that Leila and Martín achieve, if not fulfillment, then the promise of it, in their journey towards or through death suggests not only her unravelling of the Western Orientalist paradigm in Retorno a Hansala but her desire to position herself squarely within the paradigms of a uniquely national discourse, whose distinctiveness derives in large measure from the centrality of the Muslim death rite such as it is portrayed in the three movies under discussion. It is a striking element of cohesion that each of these Spanish film allegorists should interrupt their movie’s diegetic flow with an interlude on the theme of death: scenes of a funeral—Gutiérrez includes a silent and extended close-up on the imam’s pre-burial ablutions—in which the near absence of dialogue and elements of verisimilitude—spontaneity, immediacy, and intimacy—lend the episode a meditative overtone and documentary quality. It is equally significant that, in each case, this interlude should be crucial for the development of deep and meaningful interpersonal bonds. For both Armendáriz and Soler, the Muslim funerary

 2

“The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also . . . one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other” (Said 1; emphasis mine); “The Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West” (Said 5; emphasis mine).

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rite serves to solidify bonds that develop among immigrants in tandem with their evolving awareness of a shared alterity in the face of a hostile environment. The most cursory reading of these films suggests that intimacy is treated broadly as an interlocking spatial and social concept, in an anthropological sense, for the immigrant community. Their filming of the funeral exploits this topic with startling—perhaps unorthodox— boldness, taking the Spanish/non-Muslim viewers into the private domain of the sacred rite, and into the domain of the most intimate brotherhood, introducing them to cultural perspectives and experiences that would normally be inaccessible to a foreign audience, and doing this, most importantly, in creative ways. In Las cartas de Alou the funeral derives its significance in part from issues of sequence. Armendáriz’s funeral is climactic, preceded as it is by Alou’s mounting sense of rejection that culminates, just before the funeral, in Carmen’s father’s ultimatum that Alou should forget the man’s daughter and abandon the orchards. This ultimatum constitutes an unofficial version of Alou’s official expulsion occurring soon after the funeral, when he is arrested in Barcelona and deported. Through the soundtrack, Armendáriz emphasizes the private-public duality of grieving, and the channelling of personal sorrow through collective ritual, by transforming Alou’s cries into a sound bridge. His sobbing begins in his Barcelona apartment, where he finds his friend dead by asphyxiation from a butane heater, and fades out only after the camera cuts to the subsequent burial scene in the Montjuic cemetery. As we move from the apartment to the cemetery, Alou’s lament mixes with the plaintive chants “Allah, akbar” that rise above the hills of Barcelona, a mixture that evokes with special audible and visual force the unique intertwining of the personal and collective dimension of identity formation as that formation unfolds within the culture of immigration, in a foreign and hostile environment. To be sure, sequencing plays a significant role in Llorenç Soler’s treatment of the theme of death and of brotherhood as well. As in Alou, the story of the immigrant’s misfortune culminates in death in tandem with deportation, since, as a result of Ahmet’s death, Said opts to testify in court, as mentioned, and thereby exposes his illegal status. It is a calculated decision on Said’s part, one that seems motivated by a growing and, ultimately, irrepressible resentment and anger toward the injustices and disgrace that immigrants are forced to endure: by a desire to put an end to these ignominies, even at the expense—the death—of his dreams of assimilation, possibly through marriage. His deportation, in a sense, is the death to which he resigns himself, hybridity being, to an extent and as Cristina Brando reminds us in Lola vende ca, a matter of one’s personal

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will or state of mind. The fact that Soler enmeshes the death and funeral scene within a complicated network of official and unofficial systems of surveillance that interact with each other produces an equally complex network of thematic correlations. Said’s friend, Ahmet, is killed while providing undercover protection to Said’s Spanish girlfriend, Ana, and while Said’s well-intentioned lawyer, Elena, seeks official protection for Said through legal channels. Ahmet is killed by skins working as undercover agents in collusion with the police and with the apparent connivance of inspector Vázquez. As we move from encounters between Said and Ana, Said and Elena, Elena and Vázquez, and Said and Ahmet— that is, between licit and illicit systems of surveillance hovering over and wielded by citizens and immigrants alike—the pace quickens (scenes become increasingly shorter). We feel driven forwards, as if by a vertiginous force, toward a stabbing that was intended for Ana, as punishment for her involvement with Africans, but killed Ahmet instead. In the trial scenes that follow, Said’s decision to break his supposedly protective silence and testify against the culprits caps the slow process of his understanding exactly how the world he has wanted to inhabit is configured. We discover, in the end, just how much his will—and ours—is configured by its worldly context. If death is thus ensconced in the alienating network of authority that the innocent victim gradually comes to perceive and apprehend, the funeral rites take us into the conscience where the immigrant retreats in search of the true meaning of life and of his/her sense of identity vis-à-vis community, where s/he gains the strength to confront his/her circumstances through the communitas 3 s/he experiences and shares through symbolic action. For Said, the funeral scene becomes his moment of individuation and it thereby stands in stark opposition, for the fulfillment it connotes, to everything that surrounds it, in terms of the film editing and the urban context in which the funeral occurs. Soler conveys this meaning initially within the symbolic intimacy of the small apartment, where the men have gathered to pay their last respects to Ahmet. His cut from the crime scene to the apartment begins with a close-up of Fatima’s framed photograph, dedicated to Ahmet “con todo mi amor” (“with all my love”), enveloped, as if sensually, by the smell of nearby incense and by the imam’s prayers, a bitter reminder of what meaning such liaisons of the heart may hold for our search for self-fulfillment when those liaisons

 3

Richard Schechner, who borrows the term from Victor Turner, refers to the “leveling” of all differences through an “ecstasy that so often characterizes performing” (128). See Turner, 45 ff.

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develop within a nurturing social environment. The camerawork leads us through this symbolic interior space, as it cuts in a slow and studied way to Ahmet’s body, to the shroud, and finally to the group as a unit. The rhythm, pace and path of the camera suggest the suspension of time that is common in symbolic actions on which that communitas is based. These meanings are reinforced by the oppositional strategies that Soler applies as the mourners carry the coffin out into public space and proceed slowly through the narrow streets of Barcelona’s Raval neighbourhood towards the cemetery. The camera now transitions back and forth at a clipped pace between the faces of the mourners (Fatima included) and images of local residents gazing incomprehensibly from their balconies above. The interlocking dichotomies of foreign-native, private-public and internalexternal are framed by a seemingly antagonistic opposition of young versus old, one that captures the sociological reality of African immigrants settling throughout Spain in inner-city neighbourhoods inhabited by an aging native population. In short, emphasis, in Soler, lies in this sequence on the marriage of urbanism and sociology. It lies, that is, on a degree of realism that infuses the most symbolic sequence in the film with a profoundly documentary frame of reference. Within the group of filmmakers under consideration in this essay, Gutiérrez stands apart in various ways for her treatment of this common theme. To begin with, she is the only director who transcends borders with her camera both culturally and geographically, in an attempt to capture the image of the self and, presumably, the nation, through the prism of the “other’s” eye. One need not infer personal testimony from her film techniques alone. She has provided verbal testimony to the events and the people who inspired her to pursue the Hansala project in 2008 and to tell this story using its “verdaderos protagonistas” [“true protagonists”], the people of Hansala, just as she had done in travelling to Argentina, to film Las siete alcantarillas in 2004, or as she would do later, in 2010, to film her segment, “Namibia – Las que viven en la niebla,” as part of the UNESCO-sponsored Ellas... son África project, both of which are bona fide documentaries. As indicated, the paradigm of reverse migration that she thereby uses to configure her plot, a sort of parable of her own personal experience of discovery and solidarity as a Spanish director in Africa, closes finally around the promise of a future built on Martín’s “unusual” vocation as an undertaker and on his new-found commitment to helping poor Moroccan families, in partnership with Leila, by finding a feasible means for repatriating the bodies of ill-fated immigrants. Death is the pretext in this film—hence the transcultural liaison is its outcome— and the funeral interlude that in Alou is short and private and that in Said

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is viewed ultimately by diffident neighbours is fully integrated in Hansala into the Spaniard’s spectrum of consciousness as a key facet of his psychological development, a transformative stage on his road to personal fulfillment and in his rapprochement with the other. The unpredictable events and forking roads that lead Martín towards the place—the journey from Spain to Hansala is a story unto itself, an episodic string of twists and turns of various dimensions that confuse Martín—give a certain labyrinthine and therefore richly symbolic texture and mythical coherence to the movie. The same can be said about Leila's request that she and Martín tidy up in preparation for their silent descent along the tortuous dirt road that takes them beyond the range of Martín's cellphone reception. It is a descent into Hansala, an unexplored hinterland, a barely perceptible community that upholds the value of shared common experiences. Upon their arrival, the facial close-ups of Martín glancing awkwardly, pleadingly, toward Leila as men kiss and welcome him in Berber carry this perspective forward into the heart of the symbolic event. The close-ups of Martín and his corresponding sense of alienation are set off, through film editing, against the intercalated photographic perspectives of individuals and of a community who study and identify Martín, individually (closeups) and collectively (panning shots), as the outsider. His sense of alienation is also projected in stark contrast to Leila’s sense of fulfillment, exhibited moments earlier during their descent, as she leans out of the vehicle to absorb the sights and smells of a landscape that defines her. That Martín should seek to anchor himself through eye contact with Leila, at, what is, a moment of profound disorientation for him and of plenitude for her, converts their arrival in Hansala into a significant stage in a gradual rapprochement that is built, as we eventually come to understand, on the potential for a hybrid way of thinking. To the extent that death rituals are a central feature of the discursive paradigm linking Armendáriz, Soler and Gutiérrez, the latter’s treatment of this material stands out for its lengthiness and for the extraordinary precision and deference with which she narrates the highly codified ties that link individual and community in traditional societies, the very reality that Martín slowly comes to apprehend throughout the movie and that seems to draw him toward Africa, ideologically and sentimentally. Dialogue subsides; the social interactions and customs related to the funeral rite take on a reality of their own, seemingly independent of any authorial authority. The mother prays over her son’s coffin as it is retrieved from the van, the community united behind her. Men bear the coffin to the mosque, the women following behind. The imam leads the mourners in prayer before the cortege carries Rashid through the arid hills

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and past the cultivated fields of Hansala to his final burial place. All of this concludes with a close-up collage of faces, shovels and dirt, of mourners and the imam joined in a final prayer, and of the coffin being lowered into the ground. The hand-held camera that is used throughout, in conjunction with the filming of local residents in their native setting, infuses our vision of what is a profoundly symbolic moment, once again, with a certain crudeness and spontaneity, the hallmarks of the documentary or testimonial framework that Gutiérrez brings to bear on her story. It is a powerful framework, indeed, for the allegorical parable of transnational romantic liaisons that is embedded therein. As the movie progresses, the fusion of all that seems realistically spontaneous yet artistically contrived intensifies, thanks primarily to those visibly painful realities that are used strategically to shape the narrative. The clothing of unidentified Africans found dead on Spain’s southern shores is crucial in this regard. In the short term, Martín and Leila decide to frequent the open markets of surrounding towns, displaying the clothes brought from Spain in the hope of helping Moroccan families to identify and retrieve their loved ones. Throughout the movie, the portrayal of shirts and pants divested of their bodies—a reminder of the symbolic “hombre deshabitado” [“disinhabited man”] put forth by the surrealist Rafael Alberti—becomes a powerful visual motif: of absence, loss and love. Martín’s tearful encounter with a man in the open market of Beni-Mellal—because of Spanish custom laws, Martín must reluctantly retrieve the shirt that is now the tearful father’s only material connection with his lost son—is certainly the most moving episode in the progressive development of this theme. In the end, the empty shirts of death capture with unparalleled precision the quest for fulfillment through love that is central to all three movies and that comes to fruition, in Retorno a Hansala, around the paradoxical interplay of images and motifs, and around the reaffirmation of life and love through the rituals of death. Fluttering in Gibraltar’s intense winds, the “disinhabited” clothing seems to signal the untold perils and potentials of such strait-spanning liaisons, built, as they are, on a peculiar interaction of absence and presence and situated in the empirical context of social interactions as much as in the mind.



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Bibliography Alma gitana. 1996. Dir. Chus Gutiérrez. Perf. Amara Carmona, Pedro Alonso, Peret. Alta Films. Film. Alted Vigil, Alicia, Alumeda Asenjo and María José Aguilar, eds. 2006. De la España que emigra a la España que acoge. Madrid: Gráficas Monterreina. Exhibit catalogue. Andrés-Suárez, Irene, Marco Kunz and Inés D´Ors. 2002. La inmigración en la literatura española contemporánea. Madrid: Verbum. Print. Ballesteros, Isolina. 1999. “Exilio económico: Inmigración, xenofobia y racismo en el cine español (Las cartas de Alou (1990) de Montxo Armendáriz y Bwana (1996) de Imanol Uribe).” La nueva literatura hispánica 3: 217-54. Print. Barbadillo Griñán, Patricia. 1997. Extranjería, racismo y xenofobia en la España contemporánea. La evolución de los setenta a los noventa. Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas–Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores. Print. Berger, Verena. 2007. “Los movimientos migratorios y el miedo al otro en Poniente (Chus Gutiérrez, 2002).” In Miradas glocales: cine español en el cambio del milenio, edited by Burkhard Pohl and Jörg Türshmann, 185-97. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt: Vervuert. Print. Daddesio, Thomas C. 2009. “Poniente and the Questioning of Spanish National Identity.” Cincinnati Romance Review 28: 53-71. Print. Damerau, Camila. 2007. “‘Contamíname... Mézclate conmigo.’ Límites y transgresiones en Alma gitana (Chus Gutiérrez, 1995) y Flores de otro mundo (Iciar Bollaín, 1999).” In Miradas glocales: cine español en el cambio del milenio, edited by Burkhard Pohl and Jörg Türshmann, 167-83. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt: Vervuert. Print. Delgado, Manuel, ed. 1997. Ciutat i immigració. Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània. Print. Gutiérrez, Chus. “Notas de la directora Chus Gutiérrez.” Estamosrodando. Web. . Accessed 30 Sept. 2013. Kreienbrink, Axel. 2009. “De aspecto desatendido a asunto primordial. La lucha por el tratamiento adecuado de la inmigración en España.” In Migración y exilio españoles en el siglo XX, edited by Luis M. Calvo Salgado, Itzíar López Guil, Vera Ziswiler and Cristina Albizu Yeregui. Madrid: Iberoamericana–Frankfurt: Vervuert. Print. Lola venda ca. 2006. Dir. Llorenç Soler. Productor Oriol Porta. Film. López Cotín, Olga. 2007. “Desde la mirada oscura: geografías fílmicas de la inmigración en España.” Memoria colonial e inmigración: La

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negritud en la España posfranquista, 143-56. Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra. Print. Nair, Parvati. 1995. “Between Being and Becoming: An Ethnographic Examination of Border Crossings in Alma gitana (Chus Gutierrez, 1995).” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 5.2: 173-88. Print. Retorno a Hansala. 2008. Dir. Chus Gutiérrez. Perf. Farah Hamed, José Luis García Pérez. Maestranza Films, Muac Films. Film. Romaguera i Ramió, Joaquim and Llorenç Soler de los Mártires. 2006. Historia crítica y documentada del cine independiente en España. 1955-1975. Barcelona: Laeteres. Print. Said. 1998. Dir. Llorenç Soler. Perf. Naoufal Lhafi, Núria Prims. Centre Promotor de la Imatge. Film. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Print. Schechner, Richard. 1988. Performance Theory. London: Routledge. Print. Soler, Llorenç. 1999. Así se crean documentales para cine y televisión: la metodología de trabajo que permite realizar documentales y reportajes para cine y televisión. Consejos prácticos sobre guión, iluminación, montaje, sonorización y postproducción. Barcelona: Edición CIMS. Print. —. 2002. Los hilos secretos de mis documentales. Barcelona: Edición CIMS. Print. Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U.P. Print. Van Liew, Maria. 2008. “Immigration Films: Communicating Conventions of (In)visibility in Contemporary Spain.” In Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre, edited by Jay Beck and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega, 259-78. Manchester: Manchester U.P. Print.

CONTRIBUTORS

Tina Escaja is Professor of Spanish at the University of Vermont. She has published widely on gender and contemporary literature from Latin America and Spain. Her research includes women, technology and representation at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century and their connections with the current millennium. A writer and scholar, Escaja has authored and edited over ten volumes of works that include essays, poetry, theater and fiction. Her interest in experimental and multimedia works, including hypertext, have led to publications, exhibitions and collaboration with artists from a variety of media. Bernardo Antonio González is Professor of Spanish at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He has published extensively on 19th- and 20thCentury novelists and poets, including Emilia Pardo Bazán and Rafael Alberti. He is author of Parábolas de identidad: Realidad interior y estrategias narrativas en tres novelistas de postguerra. González has also published essays on Spanish theatre of the 20th and 21st centuries. His essays in this field are on a variety of playwrights including Fernando Fernán Gómez, Fernando Arrabal, Lauro Olmo, José María Rodríguez Méndez, Juan Mayorga and Antonio Martínez Ballesteros. He is currently working on a book project devoted to Cipriano de Rivas Cherif’s writings and initiatives in support of a Republican national theatre. Arthur Hughes is Associate Professor of Spanish at Ohio University, where he teaches courses in contemporary Peninsular Spanish narrative and culture. Professor Hughes’s scholarly interests focus on gay and lesbian Spanish literature, on African writers in English and Portuguese and on Brazilian, Spanish and African film. Hughes is author of several articles on the novels of Spanish writers Terenci Moix and Juan Marsé, on Lusophone African writers Eduardo Agualusa and Mia Couto, on Brazilian film director Jorge Furtado and on Spanish director David Trueba.

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Samuel E. Mate-Kodjo is Associate Professor of Spanish at Central College in Pella, Iowa, where he has been teaching as a generalist since 1995. With Spain’s post-war novel as his central field of research, MateKodjo also has interest in post-colonialism as intellectual practice. His current research focus is the Afro-Hispanic novel and how it expresses the Black experience in the Americas. Michael Ugarte is Professor of Spanish literature and culture at the University of Missouri-Columbia, which houses the Afro-Romance Institute of which he is a member. He has written extensively on modern Peninsular literature and culture and is currently exploring cultural and historical relations between Africa and Spain. His latest book is Africans in Europe: The Culture of Exile and Emigration from Equatorial Guinea to Spain (University of Illinois Press, 2010). Uchenna P. Vasser is Associate Professor of Spanish at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina. Her research focuses on Latin American literature, with particular emphasis on a comparative study of commonalities among Cuban, Colombian and West African literatures. Her latest article, “The Double Bind: Women and the Environment in Chambacú, Black Slum and A Saint is Born in Chimá by Manuel Zapata Olivella,” which was published in the Journal of the African Literature Association (JALA), studies women and the environment within the context of Afro-Colombian literature.